Portland State University Library is pleased to announce the publication of our newest open textbook, Inferring and Explaining, by Jeffery L. Johnson.
Inferring and Explaining is a book in practical epistemology. It examines the notion of evidence and assumes that good evidence is the essence of rational thinking. Evidence is the cornerstone of the natural, social, and behavioral sciences. But it is equally central to almost all academic pursuits and, perhaps most importantly, to the basic need to live an intelligent and reflective life.
This is the 20th open textbook published through the PDXOpen Publishing Initiative Grant Program. These twenty textbooks have been downloaded more than 121,000 times in countries all over the world. These open access, openly licensed, digital textbooks are free to students at Portland State and to people around the world.
Portland State University is a founding member of the Open Textbook Network Publishing Cooperative. This is the first Co-op publication to be released. The Co-op is a community of people working together to grow open textbook publishing expertise in higher education, and increase the availability of free, open textbooks for use by instructors and students across the world. For more information: https://z.umn.edu/about-co-op
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Just when you’ve found the perfect article for your paper, you hit it: the paywall. Academic publishing is big business. More than $25 billion a year flows into for-profit academic publishers like Elsevier, some of whom have profit margins of 35%, bigger than Apple, Facebook, and Google. The documentary Paywall: The Business of Scholarship explores the high dollars in this industry and the possible solution of open access publishing. 