OpenStax CNX, formerly called Connexions, is a global repository of educational content provided by volunteers. The open source platform is provided and maintained by

OpenStax OpenStax (formerly OpenStax College) is a nonprofit educational technology initiative based at Rice University. Since 2012, OpenStax has created peer-reviewed, openly-licensed textbooks, which are available in free digital formats and for a low c ...

, which is based at

Rice University William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranke ...

. The collection is available free of charge, can be remixed and edited, and is available for download in various digital formats. Founded as Connexions in 1999 by

Richard Baraniuk Richard G. Baraniuk is the C. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University and the Founder and Director of the open education initiative OpenStax (formerly called Connexions). Academic biography Dr. Baraniuk ...

, OpenStax CNX is based on the philosophy that scholarly and educational content can and should be shared, re-used and recombined, interconnected and continually enriched. As such, it was one of the first

Open Educational Resources Open educational resources (OER) are Instructional materials, teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and Free license, licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" descri ...

(OER) initiatives along with projects such as

MIT OpenCourseWare MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to publish all of the educational materials from its Post-secondary education, undergraduate- and Quaternary education, graduate-level courses online ...

and the

Public Library of Science PLOS (for Public Library of Science; PLoS until 2012 ) is a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals in science, technology, and medicine and other scientific literature, under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and launc ...

. The materials in Connexions are available under a

CC BY A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

license, which means that content can be used, adapted, and remixed, as long as attribution is provided.Kelty, C. M. (2008). Two bits. Duke University Press.

Subject matter

OpenStax CNX contains educational materials at all levels—from children to college students to professionals—organized in small modules (pages) that can be connected into larger collections (books). Material is authored by people from all walks of life. Much content is created by university professors, but the collection also contains very popular music content created by a part-time music teacher. OpenStax CNX material is translated into many languages, aided by the open-content licensing.

Copyright

To ensure the legal reusability of content, OpenStax CNX requires authors to license materials they publish under the

Attribution License (presently, version 4.0). Under this license, the author retains the right to be credited (attributed) wherever the content is reused. The author grants others the right to copy, distribute, and display the work, and to derive works based on it, as long as the author is credited.

Features of OpenStax CNX

*OpenStax CNX has content from all over the world in a growing variety of languages, not just materials from one specific school or university. It also collects materials to support education in K-12, community college, university, continuing education, and industrial training settings. *OpenStax CNX is globally accessible to anyone to not only read and use the materials, but also take them, customize them, and contribute them back to the repository or not. *OpenStax CNX is a grassroots organized from the bottom up rather than from the top down like many other open education projects. Everyone is free to join and take on a leadership role.

Technical details

Three key factors enable the collaborative environment in OpenStax CNX: *Copyright licenses that preserve attribution but permit sharing:

"attribution" licenses *Semantic markup of documents using

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

(extensible markup language) so they can be searched for and combined. The markup language used is called "CNXML". *Workspaces that facilitate collaboration by providing shared space, the ability to version materials and derive content from existing modules.

Funding

The Connexions project was started in 1999 and initially supported by individuals and

. That support has been substantially supplemented by grants from the

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, commonly known as the Hewlett Foundation, is a private foundation, established by Hewlett-Packard cofounder William Redington Hewlett and his wife Flora Lamson Hewlett in 1966. The Hewlett Foundation aw ...

Notes

External links

{{Commons category, CNX Textbooks
OpenStax CNX
homepage, cnx.org

Founder Richard Baraniuk discussing Connexions in February 2006 American educational websites Rice University Open educational resources