Yesterday, Representatives Hinojosa and Miller introduced the Affordable College Textbook Act. The text mirrors that of the Senate bill introduced last week by Senators Durbin and Franken (see CC-USA’s statement on the Senate bill here).
The Affordable College Textbook Act would provide funding for the creation of textbooks, which would be made available to the public under open licenses, allowing students and educators to “access, reproduce, publicly perform, publicly display, adapt, distribute, and otherwise use the work and adaptations of the work for any purpose, conditioned only on the requirement that attribution be given to authors as designated.”
Creative Commons USA Director Michael Carroll issued the following statement:
By introducing a companion bill, Representatives Hinojosa and Miller have made an important statement about how to reduce cost and increase access to high quality textbooks in higher education. Investing in open textbooks is a policy that deserves bipartisan support. Support for this bill is support for student success.
For more information on the Affordable College Textbook Act, see this page by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
Creative Commons (CC) is a nonprofit organization that designs user-friendly copyright licenses which provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work. Its license are used by authors, artists, and other creators worldwide. Creative Commons U.S.A. is a volunteer affiliate housed American University Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP), which works on CC related issues specific to the United States, including state efforts to expand the use of Open Educational Resources. It will also work on matters related to the interaction of the CC license suite with doctrines in US law, such as fair use.