7 Revenue Sharing to Sustain Open Textbooks: OpenStax

Context and History: The Burden of High Textbook Costs on Students

College costs consist of several components that accumulate to a total that can be a barrier for many people. Typically, people know those costs in advance so they plan for them and set expectations accordingly. However, similar to the “hidden” curricula on campuses – unwritten rules and practices that aren’t always clear until one encounters them – there are also hidden or unexpected costs. And, as many headlines, studies, and data indicate, textbook costs have been a major concern. Some headlines from major media outlets circa 2010:

• America’s Biggest Rip-offs: College Textbooks $900 A Year! (CNN Money, 2010)
• Lawmakers Target High Costs of College Textbooks in Plan to Make Education More Affordable (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 2010)
• Cost of Textbooks Must Be Disclosed (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2010)
• Textbook Rentals No Cure for Rising College Costs (Associated Press, 2010)
• Getting Around College Textbook Sticker Shock (New York Times, 2011)

Textbook prices had always outpaced inflation, but starting in the mid-2000s, the annual price increases for mainstream, introductory-level textbooks rose to unprecedented levels. Many students were paying $200-250+ for a new book packaged with the required homework system, additional study materials, classroom devices, and other products. Simultaneously, publishers began accelerating the pace of revisions in order to eliminate the viability of used books in the market. Aggregate annual textbook prices were often in the $800 to $1200 range, often paid out of pocket and not covered by many financial aid programs. In some places, the cost of books was actually higher than the cost of tuition.

While textbook costs on their own were not the most substantial barrier to education, they were a tremendous and often unplanned drain on resources. Studies showed that students increasingly had to forgo other expenses – including food – or increase debt in order to pay for textbooks. Other students indicated that they decided to forgo the books, lowering the chances of success in the class and sometimes reducing their sense of belonging in the higher educational environment.

A Solution Emerges

Seeing the growing challenges regarding textbook costs, some educators attempted to provide relief through their own contributions. In many course areas, individual professors wrote textbooks and posted them online at low or no cost. More robust institutional efforts, such as MIT’s OpenCourseware, soon followed. Organizations and consortia applied the growing mindset favouring open-source for educational offerings. Awareness of open educational resources very slowly became an emerging promise in the increasingly expensive landscape.

At Rice University, electrical engineering professor Richard G. Baraniuk went further. He decided to publish his textbook openly and at no cost. And beyond the book, he created a platform – Connexions – where any educator could post material for others to use. Supported by generous funders such as the Hewlett Foundation, Connexions became the locus of fully configured courses, online textbooks, archival material, and specialized enrichment offerings. Other online repositories as well as individual course pages referred to material hosted on Connexions, and instructors and students gained access to consistently formatted, relatively accessible teaching and learning resources.

A major step forward, Connexions joined similar repositories such as MERLOT and OER Commons to make sharing and finding OER easier for faculty, librarians, and institutions. But despite their innovation and promise, these repositories did not arrest the rise of textbook prices and the barrier that those prices posed. More and more introductory textbooks crossed the $200 threshold and several went over $300. Even when used books came into play, the outright cost for all student textbooks plus online resources in STEM courses could easily be over $1000 per year – costs that were out-of-pocket, after taxes, and unmitigated by many forms of financial aid.

The Connexions team assessed the landscape and the decision making of instructors and institutions. Why did faculty, knowing and often acknowledging (and even protesting) the cost burden, still choose commercial texts? The reasons were relatively straightforward:

• Alignment with Courses: Faculty required books that were closely aligned to the topics and sequences of mainstream courses. In some cases, acceptance of community college credits by institutions offering 4-year programs was (and sometimes still is) based in part on the textbook used in the community college course. This confined community college faculty to using only the mainstream commercial books despite their high cost.
• Reputable Sources: Faculty required books that they could trust, based not only on the reputation or experience of the author(s), but through validation by peer reviewers and other adopters. Most commercial textbooks had lists of dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of reviewers who had provided feedback. Open educational resources, for the most part, had few, if any, reviewers.
• Current, Familiar, and Robust: Faculty required books that would be sustained and maintained – that were updated over time – and would be reliably available for years. Often at the front lines in assisting students in their efforts and studies, faculty preferred – if not required – books that looked and felt familiar, with similar formatting and designs to the commercial texts they were used to. In many courses, faculty needed far more than just the books; they needed key instructor resources as well as homework/practice, lab, and other course technologies and support.

Commercial textbooks fulfilled the above needs. They provided familiar tables of contents, large lists of peer reviewers, continual revisions, and expansive ancillary packages. Even smaller, specialized publishers met those requirements when targeting large introductory courses, which posed a problem for most OER authors and organizations: the extremely high cost to create textbooks addressing these demands. The technology and sales/marketing expenditures only added to the cost.

The barriers to entry were high, but they were finite and well-defined. It stood to reason that an offering that met these requirements could achieve parity and gain adoption by faculty if offered at a low cost. This would lower costs for students and potentially disrupt the consolidated and high-priced textbook market.

While Connexions hadn’t overcome the high costs of textbooks, the platform was well-known and had a solid reputation. So, when Baraniuk and colleagues proposed a change, supporters listened. Connexions evolved into OpenStax, a publisher of high-quality, expertly offered, peer reviewed, course aligned textbooks, published under an open license in multiple formats and with supporting ancillary materials.

OpenStax undertook a process to both deliver on the requirements and clearly demonstrate that delivery:

• To align to course coverage and sequences, OpenStax analyzed course syllabi, benchmarked competing textbooks, and conducted surveys and interviews with hundreds of faculty.
• To achieve quality and trust, OpenStax developed and employed a rigorous, 25-step editorial process with extensive review by faculty from diverse schools, identities, experience levels, research backgrounds, and interest areas.
• To foster continuous improvement, OpenStax implemented a methodical – and highly transparent – errata/suggestion and updating process to incorporate user feedback and maintain currency and accuracy.

Finally, OpenStax conveyed all these efforts and outcomes to faculty through robust marketing and outreach, straightforward attribution of contributors and reviewers, and promotional presence in each discipline.

While faculty were at first skeptical, the quality of the OpenStax books coupled with their ease of use and accessibility quickly overcame objections. The general consensus was that even if the OpenStax text was not a professor’s favorite text, the quality and reliability were more than adequate. And the price – at zero dollars for digital versions – made it an easy choice.

OpenStax chose its first publications carefully – publishing in Physics, Biology, Anatomy and Physiology, with Statistics and Economics soon following. Each of these courses had very high enrollments as well as very high textbook prices. The OpenStax offerings had an immediate impact. For example, the Physics textbook gained adoption – displacing commercial textbooks – in over one hundred courses only one semester after its publication. By the time OpenStax was developing a text for General Chemistry – another highly enrolled and high-textbook-cost course – there was pent-up market demand and frequent requests for pre-publication versions.

A hundred adoptions quickly turned into a thousand. By 2016, five books had turned into fifteen. Instructors and students in courses supported by OpenStax had a genuine choice in their materials – a choice between spending hundreds of dollars or spending far less.

Organization, Governance, and Team Makeup

OpenStax is a division of William Marsh Rice University, a private university located in Houston, Texas. Rice is a 501(c)(3) organization, a US government designation reserved for organizations with an exclusive focus on science, education, charity and similar missions. Founded in 1912, the university is a relatively small institution and is considered one of the premier research institutions in the world and continually ranks among the top universities in the United States.

Rice’s reputation has had a positive impact on the acceptance and growth of OpenStax. While most college faculty center their textbook decisions on the quality, authorship, and organization of each individual textbook, open educational resources are often unfamiliar and may not have the inherent quality assumptions of traditional commercial publishers. Association with such a prestigious university helped convey quality, particularly as the organization’s founder, Professor Richard Baraniuk, and other leaders gave talks and took part in panels and conference presentations.

Currently, OpenStax has a full-time staff of approximately 60 people. Core teams and groups include software engineering, content production, editorial, customer support, educational research, user experience, finance, fundraising, marketing and community relations, and partnerships. For time-limited tasks or those requiring specific expertise (such as art rendering, video development, or XML production), OpenStax works with individual contractors or instructional design and content development companies.

Legal and Ethical Considerations

While there are no formal regulating bodies for higher education course materials, OpenStax must meet the needs of its users by compliance with several standards and best practices. From its founding, chief among these has been OpenStax’s dedication to accessibility.

The Americans With Disabilities Act determines that US institutions, governments, and organizations that provide services and offerings can be successfully accessed and used by those with disabilities. The writers of the 1990 law could not anticipate every technology or environment, but the agencies responsible for enforcing the ADA assess and select criteria and standards according to the resources used. For digital information and educational materials, the US aligns with the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which have several levels of compliance and are updated regularly. As of 2026, the US Department of Justice will require educational institutions’ websites and resources (including educational materials like OpenStax) to align with WCAG AA.

Digital educational material accessibility involves ensuring that a resource and/or platform can be used successfully by all people. OpenStax, from its founding, prioritized this principle as a key aspect of its processes and partnerships. Doing so involves close collaboration between OpenStax platform developers, editors, illustrators, production professionals, and other collaborators who work to ensure that OpenStax offerings are navigable on a range of devices and software – from laptops to phones to screen readers – and that everyone can benefit from content and learning experiences. To go beyond compliance, OpenStax engages closely with users, advocates and experts, and undertakes software and process updates as needed to address evolving needs.

OpenStax accessibility practices focus on its core delivery platform – the online eBook and its teaching and learning environment, Assignable – and include the following:

• ensuring keyboard navigation, compatibility with screen readers and other text-to-speech offerings, and similar practices;
• creating art and illustrations that meet color-contrast requirements to ensure they can be interpreted by people with color-vision deficiency (a.k.a. colour-blindness);
• using a machine-readable math language (MathML) so that mathematical expressions and equations are accurately read by assistive devices;
• using text-based organizing elements, such as tables, rather than illustrations to present detailed information, and testing those tables for navigability;
• providing effective alternative text for images, which is a nuanced and multi-faceted process; and
• ensuring that user-controlled or interactive experiences, such as note-taking, highlighting, assessments, and multimedia, include all of the above considerations and can be used on a range of digital devices.

To support both the individuals, and especially the institutional adopters, of its materials, OpenStax partners with accessibility leader Level Access to provide expert, third-party reviews and consultations on its practices and offerings. OpenStax provides an Accessibility Compliance Report, often referred to as a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, which is a standardized document widely used by institutions to assess and accept accessibility compliance. OpenStax regularly shares its accessibility methods and developments in webinars, blog posts, and other forums, and has an extensive accessibility statement on its site.

With the input of its users and institutions, as well as Level Access and other entities, OpenStax continues to evolve as new practices and solutions are presented. Accessibility is not static, and requires continual work, engagement, and communication.

Open for Innovation and Improvement

OpenStax committed to publishing under an open license, which maintains values established with Connexions. With very few exceptions, the textbooks are published with Creative Commons Attribution licenses (CC BY). (The exceptions are published as CC BY-NC-SA and are typically licensed that way due to requirements of source or component material.) Combined with OpenStax’s variety of formats and willingness to share source material, the licensing drove significant reuse, adaptation, and customization.

OpenStax needed the support of another key constituency: authors and contributors. OpenStax authors were willing to completely assign the rights to their work. This arrangement allows freedom in licensing and distribution by OpenStax, as well as flexibility by users and customizers to remix and republish the works. Authors must always be attributed, but no one needs to seek permission or negotiate terms of use. The willingness of highly-regarded, experienced faculty authors to support open education was a key gateway to success. From there, the community took the offerings and ran with them.

BCcampus was among the most prominent partners in such adaptations. OpenStax’s Statistics and Economics offerings were revised for Canadian courses. Changes included updating the contexts and examples to ensure relevance for a Canadian audience, as well as replacing certain data sets and legal and governmental material to reflect the Canadian economy and policies.

Dozens of other provincial and state programs supported adoption and/or adaptation programs, including Affordable Learning Georgia, eCampus Ontario, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, and many others. In some cases, large-scale projects were done in concert with OpenStax, such as University of Connecticut’s reorganization of OpenStax Chemistry into an Atoms-First version, and Texas A&M’s overhaul of the Biology art program. As of 2022, OpenStax estimated that over 1,000 adaptations had been created based on its work, along with thousands of other study materials, ancillaries, interactive experiences, teaching guides, H5P activities, YouTube channels, and other enrichment materials that have been created to support teaching and learning with OpenStax texts.

What’s the Catch? The Financial Model and the Emergence of the Ecosystem

While OpenStax has achieved widespread adoption, it has certainly endured its share of skepticism. How could such a model work? And for how long? This question is asked not only by instructors considering the books, but by finance officers, system administrators, and potential OpenStax funders.

OpenStax’s core textbook and ancillary development is funded almost entirely by generous donations from philanthropic organizations, including the Hewlett Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Arnold Foundation, Koch Foundation, Kazanjian Foundation, and several others. Government grants have also played a significant role. These investments have provided the necessary capital to compensate authors and onboard experienced editors, develop and render art, ensure accessibility, and create a robust publishing platform.

Sustainability was a substantial concern. Philanthropic organizations could offer continuing support, but doing so would reduce the funding available to publish new books. It became clear that, in order to have a lasting impact, OpenStax would have to undertake maintenance processes similar to those of mainstream publishers. These sustainability requirements included:

• hosting the textbooks in a reliable manner, aligning to industry standards regarding uptime, browser compatibility, and device usability;
• offering customer support in the form of representatives responding to phone/email/chat, help articles, and answers to common questions;
• updating the books to keep them current with new knowledge, events, and data;
• responding to suggestions and corrections from faculty;
• adjusting to continually improved and more rigorous accessibility standards; and
• responding to changes in language, depictions and culture to ensure the books were inclusive, sensitive, and representative.

This was no small task. OpenStax would need a continuing stream of income, corresponding to growth and usage. And the solution needed to be very market-aligned in order to be effective.

As mentioned earlier, instructors and students rely heavily on technology offerings to teach and learn in their courses. For example, faculty assign homework and practice using an array of product offerings. They also incorporate labs, classroom response functionality, discussion forums, and other experiential and group learning methods. These tactics are typically employed in digital systems that, as stated earlier, can bring their own substantial expenses.

In 2012, when OpenStax launched, the major online homework systems included WebAssign, WileyPlus, Sapling Learning, ExpertTA, Pearson MyLab/Mastering, and several others. Instead of avoiding these commercial entities, which themselves were fulfilling a concrete need among users, OpenStax engaged them. OpenStax developed a royalty-type model in which the homework provider could use the OpenStax materials – including the copyright-protected solutions – if the commercial company provided a relatively small mission support fee based on its sales revenue. The partner program offered a pathway for established players to maintain sales in a changing market. It also allowed startups and smaller entrants to provide online learning solutions without substantial capital investment to create their own robust, high-quality content.

While the breadth of partners varied by course, the approach made clear sense to faculty, especially in disciplines focused on homework, practice, labs, and so on. In this case, students would still need to pay a fee to use the systems, but the cost was far lower than they would have to pay if using a commercial text, as illustrated in the table below.

The ecosystem wasn’t only about financial stability. It also involved mutually beneficial co-marketing. As a small nonprofit publisher, OpenStax could not afford a large sales force. But through its ecosystem partners, OpenStax gained marketers, sales representatives and technical specialists. At any one time, dozens or hundreds of sales reps were promoting OpenStax materials in their messaging and presentations. Those reps likely prioritized their own companies’ offerings in those encounters, but OpenStax saw a tremendous benefit and network effect.

Ecosystem partners, likewise, received a significant marketing boost. OpenStax offered its allies website presence, lead sharing, messaging, and collaborative event marketing. Among the most impactful offerings were co-hosted webinars, in which the OpenStax team and the technology partner jointly describe the features and benefits of the offering, take questions, and acquire leads for follow-ups. Taking that vision further, OpenStax has hosted several educational technology-focused regional conferences; sessions include general topics such as improved teaching methods and technology selection, as well as partner-focused overviews.

An Ecosystem becomes a Community, an Experiment Becomes a Standard

The ecosystem model described above functions in large part because it addresses each party’s needs and offers reasonable tradeoffs to every constituent: no textbook or homework system is perfect; prices could always be lower; the approach doesn’t work in every course. But this structure has created viable points of entry for a wide array of educational technology providers – from Fortune 500 companies to an entrepreneurial teacher who wants to turn their successful approach into a business. And the ecosystem has offered, in many people’s eyes, far more choice and pricing flexibility in a textbook/technology market once dominated by a tight cluster of very similar, high-priced providers.

Beyond OpenStax’s own efforts, the education and open community have built on these approaches in unique and impactful ways. Dozens of annual conferences, workshops, professional learning/development programs, fellowships, and advocacy programs are created and driven by state/province and institutions. These may focus on deeper incorporation of open resources such as OpenStax’s books, or the creation/adaptation of entirely new offerings for courses. Some community members are even driving the improvement and usage of completely free technology offerings. All of these outputs have a level of tradeoff, but instructors and institutions can make choices as an evolution of their existing open practices and use various types of open offerings in the environments and situations where they make the most sense. Open pedagogy – in which students more directly participate in their own course material development, has also grown as the overall OER community has flourished.

Looking Toward the Future

OpenStax has achieved success with extensive involvement and support from funders, governments, institutions, supporters, advocates, and adopters. That support remains strong as the educational arena changes. Higher education institutions are undergoing transitions in terms of enrollment, public perception and government support. Workforce requirements and employment prospects are also undergoing shifts. And students’ needs and habits, as well as their approaches to learning and their overall education are constantly evolving.

OpenStax and other OER providers and advocates must respond to these shifts in order to remain sustainable. There is no prescription for how to adjust, and definitive predictions about the future of education and OER are likely to be inaccurate. OpenStax continues to seek guidance and partnership from key users, advisors, companies, and constituents to inform its decision making, strategies, and tactics in order to improve education as much as possible.

By partnering with a wide array of people and organizations in the educational sphere, the publisher continues to sustain success and solutions at the individual course level and for institutions as a whole.

OpenStax team members are engaging institutions at all levels and divisions – leadership, faculty, students, teaching excellence, tutoring, accessibility, continuing education, distance learning, and academic technology – to ensure that OpenStax’s offerings remain relevant and valuable within evolving and completely new educational contexts. The organization has expanded and deepened its technology partnership programs to allow for far greater flexibility in the nature of the relationships. A visit to the OpenStax technology partners page in 2025 shows an array of categories from start-up to long-term partners. Furthermore, relationships with other types of companies will bring more enriching experiences to teachers and learners. For example, in 2024, OpenStax was an early partner on a specific type of Google Gemini search, in which the user could isolate the results to OpenStax’s high-quality, peer-reviewed content, thereby addressing concerns about sourcing and accuracy of AI-generated responses. Similarly, 2025 saw Microsoft’s launch of its CoPilot+ PC education app with OpenStax as one of four launch partners (others included NASA and Minecraft).

OpenStax is enhancing its offerings by expanding its focus from a largely content-driven experience to that of an engaging teaching and learning environment. OpenStax launched Assignable, a learning platform designed to make usage of high-quality OER more powerful, convenient, and evidence based. Instructors and course designers can use Assignable to incorporate activities, assessments, interactive elements, videos, readings, and even third-party offerings into their regular teaching and grading workflow.

OpenStax is also dedicated to understanding – and helping others understand – the most effective methods and the actual needs of learners. OpenStax is the lead on SafeInsights, an education research hub that will safely connect digital learning platforms and educational institutions to learn about learning. SafeInsights brings together a world-class team, including a community of researchers, engineers, educators and students from diverse backgrounds, from 80 collaborating institutions and partners, including large-scale digital learning platforms that currently serve tens of millions of US learners. The infrastructure will enable rigorous research on education outcomes within the teaching and learning workflow. SafeInsights’s unique security and privacy components, such as secure data enclaves, protects student identifying information while enabling rapid large-scale research under institutional guidelines and incorporates data from wide audiences.

OpenStax has impacted tens of millions of students due to a highly dedicated team, generous funders, visionary partners, expert authors and reviewers, and a powerful community of instructors, librarians, administrators, and other educators. The organization continues its efforts to improve teaching and learning and fulfill its mission to make an amazing education accessible to all.