Does Academia Need a Wake Up Call on Wikibooks?
canopic jug writes:
In regards to open access, the London School of Economics and Political Science has an article asking the question, does academia need a wake up call on Wikibooks? The various Wikibooks are non-fiction works and cover a range of topics. They are all licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License which fits well within the Open Access movement in general.
Wikibooks receives nearly half a billion page views annually, but has hardly featured in academic debates on open access. Caroline Ball argues that by working with the platform to create open educational resources academics have much to gain.
Journal articles and monographs have dominated debates around open access. The infrastructure, campaigns, and funding models central to OA advocacy tend to revolve around these traditional formats. But in doing so, are we overlooking a platform that has been quietly producing free, editable, collaboratively written textbooks for over two decades?
I'm talking about Wikibooks: the Wikimedia project launched in 2003 to create and share open educational resources in the form of textbooks and instructional manuals. Like Wikipedia, Wikibooks is built by volunteers around the world. All content is freely licensed (CC BY-SA) and editable by anyone. It is, effectively, an OA book publishing platform hiding in plain sight.
The Wikibooks project is maintained under the parent organization the Wikimedia Foundation, the same parent as for Wikipedia.
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