From: Wilhelmina Randtke <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:57:44 -0600

Maybe a constructive awareness-raising thing to do would be to lay out
alternatives to prospective authors selling rights for a song to
Apollo Global Management.

In academic law land, where I currently reside, the open text book
initiative is eLangdell ( http://elangdell.cali.org/ ).  CALI, a
consortium, accepts proposals for textbooks from professors at member
law schools.  The professor gets a payment from CALI and assigns the
copyright of the textbook to CALI.  Then CALI makes these available
through that website under either BY-NC-SA or BY-SA Creative Commons
licenses (that CALI will do this is part of the initial agreement with
the author, see
http://elangdell.cali.org/content/write-elangdell-casebook-or-chapter
).

What is going on with open textbooks in other fields?

-Wilhelmina Randtke


On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 4:14 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Heather Morrison <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2012 12:38:39 -0800
>
> Although this is textbooks rather than scholarly works, this is an
> important development that scholars, educators, and university
> administrators need to be aware of.
>
> McGraw Hill, one of the world's top textbook publishers, was just sold
> for $2.5 billion to Apollo Global Management, according to Inside
> Higher Ed.  Debra Borchardt, in The Street, describes Apollo Global
> Management as a private equity firm that "gives Wall Street a bad
> name. And that's saying something".
> http://www.thestreet.com/story/11730510/1/the-dimming-lights-of-apollo-global.html
>
> From Inside Higher Ed:  "Waterhouse said that the company would
> continue to expand in digital education, and that - as a private
> company - "we won't need to worry about short-term focus and
> pressures".
> http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/11/27/mcgraw-hill-education-sold-25-billion#
>
> Comment: a Wall Street bad apple expanding into higher education is
> something we should be watching - and take note of the long term
> focus. A company like this might well go into open education in the
> short term, planning to reap big profits from their $2.5 billion
> investment in the long term.
>
> Faculty and teachers: DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR WORK FOR COMMERCIAL
> RIGHTS. If you are using CC licenses, use Noncommercial.
>
> Discussion welcome.
>
> Heather G. Morrison, PhD
> Simon Fraser University School of Communication
> The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/