Bayanihan Books
A couple of weeks back, Creative Commons blogged about the Bayanihan Book Project. The project, based in the Philllipines, aims to help increase the quality and availability of high school textbooks through crowdsourcing and liberal licensing:
We will write textbooks in the open where contents are made available on the Internet from initial outline to final manuscript. This would allow every teacher, parent, student, professional, DepEd official, virtually anyone, to review the textbooks even before they get published.
We will release the textbooks under a license that would permit everyone to use and publish the textbooks without paying royalty to anyone. Thus, saving the government of content development costs and allowing more publishers to fulfill the demands of public (and even private) schools.
They’ve currently got two books - Mathematics - Grade 1 and Next Generation Health Governance - which are both being developed on wikis. Its great to hear that they’ve been developing the books with close attention to national standards and institutional requirements.
They are clearly keen to allow publishers to print and sell the books,
Since the materials from the Bayanihan Books are royalty free, there is no need for publishers to pay the authors. […] Furthermore, the Bayanihan Books are licensed using Creative Commons that explicitly allows the use of these materials by any publishers. Therefore, more publishers bidding for the government contract results to more competition and avoids the monopoly of a few big name publishers. […]
However, the only Creative Commons license I’ve been able to find on the site is a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Philippines License. It would be great if they considered switching to an Attribution, or Attribution-Sharealike license so that the books would be fully open.
It seems as though this is something they’ve already been thinking about:
(Note to self: I need to verify with Atty. Guerrero if printing the textbook constitutes a commercial use and what provisions should be added in our license.)
Anyhow - it looks like an interesting and valuable initiative!
Add comment February 19th, 2008
