Fighting high costs with open content

Read the interesting article here about economist, Preston MacAfee, who is fighting the good fight against the rising costs of for-profit publishers that are milking the university system for all its worth. As MacAfee states, “The large for-profit publishers are gouging the academic community for as much as the market will bear. ” MacAfee and Ted Bergstrom have compiled a ‘hit list’ survey which lists various publishers and grades them as very expensive, or very cheap according to statistical information compiled on costs per article, page and citation.

MacAfee goes a step further and has released an economic textbook under Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence, for free download from his website. MacAfee says of his lecturing peer community’s approach to open content:

The publishers are vulnerable to an open source project: rather than criticize the text, we will be better off picking and choosing from a free set of materials. Many of us write our own notes for the course anyway and just assign a book to give the students an alternate approach. How much nicer if in addition that “for further reading” book is free.