Below, Sara Frank Bristow invites you to join “Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics & Beyond”. Sara is a co-organizer of the course and a member of WikiProject Open. Both projects are part of the School of Open.

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The School of Open will offer its popular “Writing Wikipedia Articles” course (WIKISOO) starting 25 February, 2014. This free introductory online course, now in its fourth incarnation, runs for six weeks. Enrollment is open to all.

WIKISOO students learn about the values and culture that have driven hundreds of thousands of volunteers to build Wikipedia. Through their work in the course, they join an effort that has generated millions of free articles in hundreds of languages since 2001.The course covers the technical skills needed to edit articles, and also offers practical insights into the site’s collaborative norms and social dynamics. Students graduate with a sophisticated understanding of how to use Wikipedia both as a reader and as an active participant.

The course focuses on articles about openness in education: open educational resources (OER), MOOCs, Creative Commons licenses and more. Students will forge connections with WikiProject Open, a community of volunteers focused on this topic area. Upon successful completion, students earn the WIKISOO Burba Badge.

The course is sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the University of Mississippi. Course instructors are:

• Pete Forsyth, Wikipedia trainer & consultant (Wiki Strategies)
• Sara Frank Bristow, OER and online education researcher (Salient Research)
• Dr. Robert Cummings, Associate Professor (University of Mississippi)

Course registration is now open!

• More course information: http://enwp.org/WP:WIKISOO
• Enroll: http://enwp.org/WP:WIKISOO/NOW

The U.S. PIRG Education Fund released a report this week called, “Fixing the Broken Textbook Market: How Students Respond to High Textbook Costs and Demand Alternatives.” The report features responses to a survey administered to over 2,000 students across 163 college campuses in the U.S. in regards to the rising cost of textbooks and how it affects student usage and academic performance. The report has been making the rounds in major news outlets and is highlighted in a letter to Congress by Senators Durbin and Franken as a push for the Affordable College Textbook Act. It is available for anyone to read online under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, but here are the tl;dr highlights:

What the survey results say

• 65% of students choose not to buy a college textbook because it’s too expensive
• 94% report that they suffer academically because of this choice
• 48% say they altered which classes they took based on textbook costs, either taking fewer classes or different classes
• Senator Durbin wholeheartedly agrees: “According to the students surveyed in this report, the rising cost of textbooks not only adds to the overall financial burden of attending college, it can also have a measurably negative impact on their academic performance and student outcomes.”
• 82% of students say they would do significantly better in a course if the textbook were free online and a hard copy was optional!
• Case studies at both Houston Community College and Virginia State University suggest that classes using open textbooks have higher grades and better course completion rates

Textbook industry facts

(as reported by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund and the Student PIRGs)

• College textbook prices have increased by 82% in the past ten years, aka 3x the rate of inflation
• Though alternatives to the new print edition textbooks exist, the costs of these alternatives (such as rental programs, used book markets and e-textbooks) are still dictated by publishers who re-issue editions every few years
• Ethan Sendack at U.S. PIRG says: “[Students] can’t shop around and find the most affordable option, meaning there’s no consumer control on the market.”
• On average students spend $1,200 a year on textbooks which = 14% of tuition at a four-year, public college; 39% of tuition at community college

Open textbook facts

• Open textbooks are written by faculty and peer-reviewed like traditional textbooks
• Open textbooks are free to access, use, download to electronic devices, and affordable to print — all thanks to the open content licenses on them that legally allows these uses
• U.S. PIRG estimates that open textbooks could save each student ~$100 per course they take

Find out for yourself

Links to the press release, full report, and news coverage below.

• Press release: http://uspirg.org/news/usp/survey-shows-students-opting-out-buying-high-cost-textbooks
• Full report: http://uspirg.org/reports/usp/fixing-broken-textbook-market
• SPARC’s blog post: http://www.sparc.arl.org/blog/survey-says-textbook-costs-threat-student-success
• US News & World Report: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/01/28/report-high-textbook-prices-have-college-students-struggling
• NBC Today show: http://www.today.com/money/college-textbook-costs-more-outrageous-ever-2D11999533
• The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/open-textbooks-could-help-students-financially-and-academically-researchers-say/49839

What you can do

Support the Affordable College Textbook Act which would establish open textbook pilot programs at colleges and universities across the country! Learn more at http://www.sparc.arl.org/advocacy/national/act and read Senators Durbin and Franken’s Dear Colleague letter to Congress at http://www.sparc.arl.org/sites/default/files/S.%201704%20Dear%20Colleague.pdf.

This guest blog post was written by Lucy Montgomery, deputy director of Knowledge Unlatched.

Knowledge Unlatched is inviting university libraries to join the pilot of a new approach to achieving open access for specialist scholarly books.

Specialist books in the Humanities and Social Sciences, or monographs, sell for between $50 and $200. Monograph publishing is in danger of extinction. The average monograph now sells just 200-400 copies. In spite of eye-watering prices, monograph publishers are struggling to cover their costs and many are subsidized. There has to be a better way!

Knowledge Unlatched is helping publishers, libraries and authors to secure the future of specialist scholarly books by engaging with the possibilities of open access. By working together, libraries have an opportunity to create incentives for the open access publication of high quality, peer-reviewed books, providing publishers with room to innovate and ensuring that the knowledge contained in books is made available for free to anyone with an internet connection.

Here’s how it works: KU is helping libraries to pool their funds to pay publishers to make a book available under a Creative Commons NonCommercial license as soon as it is published. Publishers remain free to sell other formats.

KU is running a proof of concept pilot, inviting libraries to sign up to support a package of 28 new titles from 13 well-known scholarly publishers. If at least 200 libraries pledge their support for the package by February 28, 2014, all of the books will be made available as fully downloadable PDFs under CC BY-NC or BY-NC-ND. If more than 200 participate, then the cost per library will drop.

If the pilot is successful, KU plans to begin scaling up later this year: offering libraries more selection options including subject specific packages. It eventually aims to make individual titles available so libraries can select individual books that they would like to support.

See www.knowledgeunlatched.org for more information. If you are a library sign up now. The closing date for the pilot is the 28th of February and every pledge counts!

If you are not a library but care about scholarly books, tell your librarian about Knowledge Unlatched.

We are excited to announce the launch of the official translation process for the 4.0 license suite. As most of you know, CC made a significant push to make this latest version of the licenses as internationally robust as possible. The result is a set of licenses we hope will be used around the world. As part of that effort, we plan to publish official translations of the licenses in as many languages as possible, so that people around the world can read the legal code in their own languages. We will need the help of our affiliate network and the larger CC community to accomplish this goal.

We have prepared a formal translation process to help us achieve such an ambitious undertaking. The process requires coordination across jurisdictions, as the goal is to create a single translation of any given language wherever possible. Communication and teamwork will be critical, as will attention to detail. (As with all CC official legal code, once published, it will be permanently locked per CC’s long-standing commitment not to change the legal code once published for adoption.)

The CC regional coordinators will be leading the translation teams and helping to organize the effort across jurisdictions. CC Legal will oversee each translation project to help ensure the official translations have the same legal meaning and effect as the original. To aid the effort, we have created several guides designed to help translators complete the project. There is a translation guide, which will be continually updated with new tips and guidelines as we learn more throughout this process, a guide to building the other five licenses in the suite once the first license is translated, and a worksheet to help translators and CC Legal stay on the same page.

If you would like to get involved in this important internationalization effort, please contact a CC regional coordinator.

This morning, auto manufacturer Honda released 3D data for the exterior designs of several of its concept models under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial (BY-NC) license. From the press release:

With the data downloaded from the website “Honda 3D Design Archives,” Honda’s concept models can easily be replicated by a household 3D printer, which is becoming more popular in recent years. By offering data of its concept models, which embody the spirit of “Honda Design,” Honda offers opportunity to enjoy a simulated experience of Honda’s “art of manufacturing.”

You can view the designs on the new Honda 3D site or download them in STL. Since the designs are licensed under BY-NC, anyone can share, modify, and remix them noncommercially. Now that these designs are in the wild, it will be cool to see who mods them in unexpected and creative ways.

Related: CC and the 3D Printing Community