Last week’s LA Times reported on vigilante open-source textbook publishing. Economist R. Preston McAfee was so fed up with “idiotic books that are starting to break $200″ that he turned down $100K for his textbook and decided to let it go Free.

“I’m a right-wing economist, so they can’t call me a communist,” he is quoted as saying.

If there’s a limitation with Prof. McAfee’s approach, it’s that he seems to be doing it in a vacuum. The article mentions Connexions in an aside, which is more than just an e-publishing tool but, like eLangdell, an entire platform for exchanging teaching materials.

More discussion of this effort on Slashdot.

Looks like someone in the publishing industry’s PR machine has been hard at work peddling this story:

Textbooks, free and illegal, online: Use of pirated works hurting publishers

I’m sure that piracy is cutting into sales, but as is typical, the story lacks any quantitative data substantiating its overall alarmist tone.

As far as eLangdell is concerned, this passage is particularly telling:

Some instructors avoid textbooks altogether, while still making use of the Web. “I have over the last five years or so stopped the practice of assigning textbooks,” said Vincent Rocchio, an assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University in Boston. “Instead, I publish a group of essays electronically on my course website.”

Rocchio said “the outrageous cost of textbooks” makes it cheaper for him to purchase electronic publishing rights and pass the lower costs on to the students.

(Cross posted at Law School Innovation)

Harvard Law School’s faculty unanimously last week to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available
online for free. The school’s announcement, issued today, notes that Harvard is the first law schol to make this commitment to open access. (Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences had also voted unanimously for open access in February.)

Joe asked what new innovations we might expect with the appointment of John Palfrey to Harvard’s newly created position of Associate Dean of Library and Information Resources. Here is what he had to say about this new development:

This exciting development is something in which the whole Harvard Law School community can take great pride… The acceptance of open
access ensures that our faculty’s world-class scholarship is accessible
today and into the future. I look forward to the work of implementing
this commitment.

Law schools, quite unlike almost every other academic institution in the United States, occupy an enviable position because we almost all have retained full rights and permissions to our own scholarship. For all the grumbling faculty occasionally evince about student- rather than peer-edited journals, this has also proven a tremendous advantage for schools, as there are no contracts and rights to negotiate with third-party publishers. Thus legal scholarship has the potential to leap forward by large bounds with policies like Harvard’s in place.

(Cross posted at Law School Innovation) Harvard Law School’s faculty unanimously last week to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free. The school’s announcement, issued today, notes that Harvard is the first law schol to make this commitment to open access. (Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences had also voted unanimously for open access [...]