Stratospheric Ozone - An Electronic Textbook is from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Branch. As it is produced by a US government department, is in the public domain.
September 6th, 2007
Here are two interesting open textbooks with practical instructions about communications technologies:
August 22nd, 2007
Here are a couple of textbooks in the public domain, made available by the U.S. Geological Survey:
August 6th, 2007
Michael Creel at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona wrote Econometrics in 2005. The book and its source are available under either the a General Public License (GPL), or under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license (CC-BY-SA).
July 25th, 2007
John Charles Van Dyke’s A Text-Book of the History of Painting was originally published in 1909, meaning that it has now passed into the public domain in many jurisdictions. It is available from Project Gutenberg under the Project Gutenberg License, which is not fully open as it restricts commercial use. However, if all mentions of Project Gutenberg are removed, along with the header, footer and license, then what remains is in the public domain - and is therefore open.
The book is rich with images and though parts of its commentary seem dated, it would be interesting to hear the opinion of someone who is knowledgeable about the subject!
July 17th, 2007
Here are a few from the Philosophy department at Lander University:
July 6th, 2007
One from Mike Gasser, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Indiana University:
July 3rd, 2007
These are both from Tony R. Kuphaldt, industrial electronics instructor at Bellingham Technical College, Washington:
- Lessons In Electric Circuits. A series of textbooks about electricity and electronics. Available under a Design Science License (DSL).
- Socratic Electronics. A large number of question and answer sheets about electronics. Available under a Creative Commons - Attribution license (BY)
June 26th, 2007
Here they are…
June 24th, 2007
I’ve just been looking through a couple of quite large listings of maths textbooks: Textbooks in Mathematics by Alex Stefanov at the ICTP (mirrored at geocities), and Online Mathematics Textbooks by George Cain who is retired from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Both bring together a wide variety of material from various academics, researchers and enthusiasts.
Some of the textbooks listed are explicitly open, but many are made available for non-commercial purposes or don’t have any licensing information.
Here are a few of the open ones:
The American Mathematical Society makes quite a few textbooks available on their Books Online page, but these do not seem to be open.
Many lecture notes by David Santos are available on Open Math Text under the discontinued Open Publication License which is not fully open as it restricts commercial re-use.
There are also many maths textbooks under Creative Commons Non-Commercial and/or No Derivatives licenses - such as Shlomo Sternberg’s books, Dan Sloughter’s calculus texts or Victor Shoup’s A Computational Introduction to Number Theory and Algebra.
This looks to suggest that:
- It is worth chasing up textbook authors to ask them to clarify whether or not their work is open, and to suggest using an explicitly open license if it is. (See Dead knowledge: why being explicit about openness matters for more on this.)
- It should be made clear that not all Creative Commons licenses are open. (As was commented on in iCommons 2007: Retrospective Reflections.)
June 23rd, 2007
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