The new “Open Textbooks” database hopes to get more facility to use affordable textbooks by helping them find good textbooks. The project has been public for three weeks, and currently has 87 book reviews.

These numbers should grow, as 11 Minnesota faculty members have offered to review books, and other Big Ten universities have talked about getting involved.

These kinds of independent catalogs are vital. Without the commercial incentives that drive commercial publishing, open textbooks are hampered by:

• Hard to find – With no profits to earn, open textbooks generally don’t invest in marketing. Nicolle Allen, textbook advocate for the Student Public Interest Research Group, said, “There are some sites that list reviews of open textbooks but I think this one is significant because it’s actually developed by a Big Ten, well-respected university.” Allen directs the research group’s Make Textbooks Affordable Project.
• No quality control – With no gatekeeper, there’s no barrier to entry and no commercial motivation to maintain the reputation of a publishing brand, employing editors and copyeditors.
• Unpredictable quality – With no sales royalties, authors must be internally motivated, and may not take the time to create superb publications.
• Minimal or no ancillary materials – The $4 billion commercial textbook industry often creates study plans, exams, and course-management software. Surveys show that instructors prize those materials above all else, said publishing industry analyst Al Greco of Fordham University.

Open textbooks are complete textbooks released under a Creative Commons, or similar, license. Instructors can customize open textbooks to fit their course needs by remixing, editing, and adding their own content. Students can access free digital versions or purchase low-cost print copies of open textbooks.

Despite being free, open access textbooks have been slow to catch on, said David Ernst, who directs the new U. Minn. project at the academic and information technology  department. Ernst said, “The open textbooks are out there… and they’re scattered.” Moreover, it’s hard for professors to assess the books because “they don’t know what is quality when they do find them.” By building up a peer-reviewed collection of textbooks, available to instructors anywhere, Minnesota officials hope to provide some of the same quality control that historically has come from publishers of traditional textbooks. University of Minnesota has the 11th highest enrollment of higher-ed institution in the U.S., with over 52k students.

“I became convinced this last year that we’re kind of at a tipping point right now,” Ernst said to InsideHigerEd. “It’s a thing that is going to be around and it’s only growing right now.

In an effort to motivate professors, University of Minnesota faculty will be paid $500 to write a review of an open textbook, and will also earn the same amount to adopt such a book in class. Faculty from other institutions are also welcomed to write requests, but are not compensated.

Currently, the majority of reviewed books are from Flat World Knowledge, a commercial publisher of free and open college textbooks.

It’s unclear whether solving the findability problem will improve adoption. “While we’re told price is very important, it’s always fourth,” said Greco to MPR. “As of today, open access textbooks have very little traction in the business.”

The catalog includes texts from Rice University, which launched a series of peer-reviewed open access books earlier this year.

Other open textbooks initiatives have struggled. For example, the California set up an academic standards review for open textbooks, in an effort to cut back their K-12 textbook expenses, which were $350M in 2008. More recently, a California state senator sought $25M in state funds to create new open access textbooks.

Ben Crowell is an open textbook author, says the K-12 market is even harder to convert to open access. “Textbook selection in K-12 education in the US tends to be extremely bureaucratic and top-down, and it’s virtually impossible to change that overnight, as Schwarzenegger tried to do [in California]. It’s completely different from higher education, where the assumption is that professors can choose whatever text they like as a matter of academic freedom. My experience is with writing free physics textbooks. They’re written for college students, but have also been adopted by a bunch of high schools. However, almost all of the high school adoptions have been from private schools, mainly Catholic schools.” Crowell teaches physics at Fullerton College, a community college in southern California, and runs Assayer, a catalog of free books.

The open U. M. Textbook Catalog accepts books that are:

• Openly Licensed. Acceptable licenses include Creative Commons Attribution, Attribution-Share Alike and Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike or similar. Some books may fall under a No-Derivatives license if the publisher offers an adequate customization program.
• Complete. Only complete books, similar to traditional textbooks currently on the market, are included. Materials such as lecture notes, online courses, or drafts, are provided only as supplements to textbooks listed in the catalog.
• Suitable for Adoption Outside the Author’s Institution.
• Available in Print. Because most students still prefer print textbooks to digital, all textbooks include a print option, generally for $40 or less. In some cases, textbooks without a print-on-demand option may be included if they are sufficiently easy and inexpensive to print locally.

See the Open Academics textbook catalog, from the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) at University of Minnesota. Go to site >>

Meanwhile, there are other important threads affecting the industry, such as Apple’s iBooks Author software, which is raising the profile and production quality of online texts, and will create a marketplace for finding and reviewing e-texts.

Open access journals are now commonplace. As of last lear, nearly 10% of scholarly articles were published in open access journals. There are now currently over 7500 open access journals, according to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which indexes freely available, peer-reviewed journals that don’t have an embargo period (see criteria). 

Here’s a current breakdown of which fields currently have open access journals:

The above graph is based on DOAJ’s data on the number of journals from last month. Also, we can see which fields tend to have more or fewer articles per journal. Here’s a graph of the total number of journals, and articles/year:

The above data is from the EC-funded Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP), as of winter 2009-10.

Open access journals span many subjects, and are based in a surprising range of countries.

Some related online scholarly publications, e.g., some conference proceedings, partially fit the spirit of open access because they don’t have an ISSN or a formal peer-review process. Also, there are related models which are variations of open access, such as “hybrid” open access where only selected articles are free to the public, and “delayed” open access which becomes free after a fee-only embargo period.

Key facts

For a view of how open access journals are used in academia and research, the SOAP project surveyed over 40k published scholars, and released their findings in Fall 2010. Findings:

• The number of open access articles published in “full” or “hybrid” open access journals was around 120,000 in 2009, some 8-10% of the estimated yearly global scientific output. Journals offering a “hybrid” open access option had a take-up of around 2%.
• Open access journals in several disciplines (including Life Sciences, Medicine, and Earth Sciences) are of outstanding quality, and have Impact Factors in the top 1-2% of their disciplines.
• Scientists who published in open access journals say they did so because of the free availability of the content to readers and the quality of the journal, as well as the speed of publication and, in some cases, the fact that no fee had to be paid directly by the author.
• The main barriers encountered by 5000 scientists who would like to publish in open access journals but did not manage to do so are funding — some open access journals require a fee to publish — (for 39% of them) and the lack of journals of sufficient quality in their field (for 30%).

For more comprehensive background on the foundation and history of open access, see Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview. And also Stevan Harnad’s Open Access Archivangelism blog.

There is also evidence that open access boosts citations. Last month, Donovan (U Kentucky) and Watson (U Georgia) looked at citation patterns in law journals and found that publishing in open access journals led to a 50% higher chance of being cited in subsequent papers.

Digital humanities uses computers as part of research in arts and humanities. Computers are useless in isolation; they need software written to do interesting analyses. Some processing can be done using simple text processing tools to sort and count words. More complex research requires new tools (new computer programs) to be created. The study looked at the people who create those new tools.  One key finding was that creating new software does little to help researcher’s careers.

The study examines responses from 54 individuals who work in the field. The survey was conducted in Spring 2008. The report was coauthored by Susan Schreibman, director of the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin, Ireland, and Ann Hanlon, the digital projects librarian at Marquette University.

The report says that while nearly all respondents consider their work on making tools to be a scholarly activity, “the range of responses to this question made it clear that many departments and institutions do not.” For the 2/3 of developers who don’t report career benefits, the authors note, “many respondents indicated that tool development led to more traditional scholarly outputs: conference papers and articles in journals (both peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed). If the tool development itself was not rewarded, then these secondary products were.” The digital humanities field has “considerable work to do in making tool development an activity that is rewarded on par with more traditional scholarly outputs: articles, monographs, and conference presentations.”

Without institutional support, developers look inward. This graph shows how developers measure their success:

The authors say the survey is representative, “Many of the tools developed by practitioners in the digital humanities community are represented in the survey. These include tools with ‘brand’ names many might recognize: Hyperpo, Image Markup Tool, Ivanhoe, Collex, Justa, nora, Monk, Tact, TactWeb, Tamarind, Tapor, Taporware, teiPublisher, TokenX, Versioning Machine, and Zotero.”

The report says that “tool developers, by and large, derived both personal satisfaction and professional recognition from their work. Sometimes this recognition translated into academic rewards such as promotion and tenure. But more frequently respondents wrote about the intellectual insights derived from their work, the new methodologies developed, deeper insights into their area of study and developing new models, and analytical methods.”

Digital humanities is a new twist on a centuries-old profession. Roberto Busa, a founder in digital humanities, wrote in 2008 (in a book co-edited by Schreibman), “Humanities computing is precisely the automation of every possible analysis of human expression (therefore it exquisitely a “humanistic” activity), in the widest sense of the word, from music to theater, from design and painting to phonetics, but whose nucleus remains the discourse of written texts.” Father Busa is an Italian Jesuit priest and early pioneer in the usage of computers for linguistic and literary analysis.

The authors conclude:

Meanwhile, other forms of digital humanities tools are being created by major software companies. In December 2010, Google released the ‘Books Ngram Viewer‘ for charting a timeline with the frequency of occurrence of various words. Here’s a chart of the frequency of the phrases “Digital Humanities,” “Roberto Busa,” and “Susan Schreibman” from 1950 to 2008 in books that Google has indexed:

Want more cool graphs? Here’s “10 Fascinating Word Graphs, From 200 Years of Google Books” in a blog post by Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb.