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The California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP) was founded in 2000 by Sanford Forte, a former college textbook publishing executive. COSTP was a not-for-profit, collaborative, public/private undertaking originally created to address the high cost, content range, and consistent shortages of K-12
textbook
A textbook is a book containing a comprehensive compilation of content in a branch of study with the intention of explaining it. Textbooks are produced to meet the needs of educators, usually at educational institutions. Schoolbooks are textbook ...
s in
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
. COSTP's mandate later expanded to include undergraduate and graduate university instructional materials, covering the entire K-20 range.
The plan
COSTP's main goals were as follows:
*Leveraging free, already-existing, and widely available educational content in the
public domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...
*Better leveraging the substantial
curriculum
In education, a curriculum (; : curricula or curriculums) is broadly defined as the totality of student experiences that occur in the educational process. The term often refers specifically to a planned sequence of instruction, or to a view ...
-based intellectual capital of California's best K-12 teachers
*Better leveraging the substantial intellectual capital of American college and university instructors to enable open-licensed content for their institutions.
*Using innovative
copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...
tools to secure new and dormant K-12 textbook content that would not otherwise be made available.
*Substantially reducing the cost of textbooks for K-20 students and sponsoring institutions.
*Complete elimination of the then-current US$400M+
line item
The line-item veto, also called the partial veto, is a special form of veto, veto power that authorizes a chief executive to reject particular provisions of a bill enacted by a legislature without vetoing the entire bill. Many countries have dif ...
for California's K-12 textbooks
*Significant increase in the range of content afforded to California's K-12 textbooks
*Permanent end to California's textbook shortages
*Creation of fully portable content holdings
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...
that scales with classroom technologies as they are introduced.
The cost of textbooks had risen steadily over the years preceding COSTP's founding. Critics contended that publishing companies artificially increased prices and essentially shut out competing efforts to liberate academic content from traditional copyright control. On COSTP's inception, the State of California was spending more than US$ 400M annually for K-12 textbooks, yet textbook shortages were not uncommon. Cost and access were becoming serious issues—projected to get worse as enrollments to K-12 institutions were projected to dramatically increase over the next decade.
COSTP employed the advantages of open-sourced content and innovative
licensing
A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit).
A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...
tools in an effort to inspire significantly reduced K-12 textbook costs—with the hope of eventually turning K-12 curriculum and textbook construction from a
cost
In production, research, retail, and accounting, a cost is the value of money that has been used up to produce something or deliver a service, and hence is not available for use anymore. In business, the cost may be one of acquisition, in whic ...
into a
revenue
In accounting, revenue is the total amount of income generated by the sale of goods and services related to the primary operations of the business.
Commercial revenue may also be referred to as sales or as turnover. Some companies receive reven ...
generator for the State of California. Open sourced, distributed content was intended to be made available
gratis
Gratis may refer to:
* Free, meaning without charge. See Gratis versus libre
* Gratis, Ohio, a village in Preble County, US
* Gratis Township, Preble County, Ohio, US
See also
* Free (disambiguation)
{{disambiguation ...
by deploying innovative copyright tools provided by organizations like Creative Commons, its partners, and other organizations. COSTP made important contributions to the many organizations that followed in its wake, as the "Open Educational Content" movement took hold over the next 10-15 years.
It is important to note that COSTP's mandate was not to replace
printed
Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The e ...
textbooks, but simply make them less expensive to produce and distribute, thus creating many additional efficiencies in the K-12 academic content sector.
COSTP eventually graduated into a consulting role for many new entries to the Open Educational Resource (OER) sector, assisting many institutions with business modeling and analysis of textbook and online education markets, worldwide.
See also
*
Free High School Science Texts The Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) organization is a South African non-profit project, which creates open textbooks on scientific subjects. Textbooks are edited to follow the government's syllabus, and published under a Creative Commons li ...
-
South Africa
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...
*
Open educational resources
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and ...