Open Licensing Awareness Initiative/Open Text Book

= Open Text Book OLAI =

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OLAI stands for 'Open Licensing Awareness Initiative'. The idea of the Open Text Book OLAI is to contact existing textbook authors to see if they are aware of the various open licensing options available and to help them select and apply an appropriate license if they are interested.

Material and resources
For explanations and definitions of the concepts 'open' and 'free', see the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) and the Definition of Free Cultural Works.

See also the Definition of Open Access Publication from the Bethesda statement.

Lists of open licenses are available at the OKD licenses page and at the Freedom Defined licenses page.

An email might look like this:

Dear [name of author],

I recently discovered [title of book] while looking through [listing] and I think it is a great resource. I was wondering whether you had considered the possibility of making your work available under an open license [1]?

Works available under an open license are free for others to re-use and re-distribute as well as to access. If you licensed your work under an open license, then others could modify and build on the work you have done, as well as circulate copies to others.

There are a range of open licenses available to choose from - with each specifying what can and cannot be done with the work it applies to. For example, with a Creative Commons Attribution license [2] anyone can re-use and re-distribute your work, as long as they give you credit if they do so. A full list of open licenses is available at:

http://www.opendefinition.org/licenses

Regards,

[your name]

[1] See for http://www.opendefinition.org for a definition of open knowledge, which includes content and data.

[2] See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Lists of existing online textbooks
See open textbook lists.

People to contact
Please add ideas for people to contact here, in the form:

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If you contact someone from the list, please remove them from this list and add their name to the 'People that have been contacted list' below.

People that have been contacted
Please keep track of any correspondence with textbook authors here. Please add records in the form:

Author: Title(s): URL: Contacted by: Comments:

Please date any comments you add, so it is clear to others what was last said by whom.