Hands-On-Physics
Project Information:
COPYRIGHT
Why We Claim Copyright
One important goal for all our projects is to have our material widely used.
There is nothing worse that having NSF money result in materials that sit
gathering dust on shelves. We hope that Hands On Physics will be broadly
adopted and continually improved by the physics teaching community.
In the past, the conventional wisdom has been that wide distribution is
guaranteed by a publisher. The publisher invests in a curriculum, improving
its look, adding artwork, and advertising it. New users need to be convinced
one at a time in sales booths, at conventions, and through complementary
mailings. Then the original book needs to be upgraded with later editions.
All this takes time and money that comes from publishers' investments. Publishers
will not touch material unless it has a copyright that will protect their
investment. The last thing they want is to find non-copyrighted material
floating around, undermining their investment. So, we put the copyright
on all our material and allow teachers to use these early drafts for field
tests.
It may be that the Web will change all this. We may find that free electronic
distribution is a more powerful dissemination strategy. The biggest question
concerns how the material will be maintained and improved over time once
the grant runs out; the equivalent of new editions. We will provide "hooks"
where users can add links to additional material. If you and other users
add hooks to these materials, they can evolve and grow. Still, it is not
clear how any sense of unity and uniformity of treatment could be continued
this way. If we can solve these problems, we will probably abandon copyright
altogether and simply make HOP freely available on the net.
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