Yesterday, we went live with an open access textbook project--Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. This is a new book series which will contain peer-reviewed collections of essays--all composed by teachers for students--with each volume freely available for download under a Creative Commons license. Our mission is to build a library of quality open access texts for the writing classroom as an alternative to costly textbooks. The first volume (or two) will focus on first year composition; with later volumes, we hope to have special collections for the writing in the disciplines, professional writing, creative writing, and other classrooms.

Writing Spaces is a good bit different from Wikibooks because of our essay format and, I also believe, a better fit for academics who need clear evidence of contribution and peer review to receive credit for their work in tenure and promotion reviews. As a consequence, this is a model which might also work well for other disciplines.

So for all you Kairosnews readers who have been strong open access and open source advocates, we hope you'll join with us in making this project a success by submitting a proposal for an essay for our first volume. Please check out our CFP.