Title

Open Neuroscience Initiative

Authors

Austin Lim, DePaul UniversityFollow

Files

Description

The Open Neuroscience Initiative is a free-to-use textbook

This project began as a means to overcoming the financial burden that face undergraduate neuroscience students when buying textbooks. By compiling and writing a completely free-to-access textbook that covers the foundations of a typical college introduction to neuroscience course, students would have one less obstacle to overcome in their educational career, allowing them to focus their valuable time and attention on learning rather than finances. To make this project a reality, I began with a humble tweet in May 2019 that managed to gain a tiny bit of traction among the neuroscience Twitter-sphere. A handful of retweets and comments later, several experts who shared my ideology for open educational resources contacted me directly, looking for ways to be involved in the project. Ultimately, almost half of the contributing authors or content expert editors were recruited through Twitter, while the other half were personal connections I had made through my time as a neuroscientist. My choice to distribute this text freely over the internet was deliberate. We have been living in a digital era where most (if not all) of us have completely unfettered access to the entirety of the world’s knowledge using a desktop, laptop, or cell phone. Why shouldn’t a formal neuroscience education be any different? My hope for this project is to share my passion of neuroscience with the world. Additionally, widespread adoption of open educational resources like this means increased access and decreased inequity across the realm of higher education, opening the doors for a more inclusive and diverse future.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Publication Date

2021

City

Chicago, Illinois

Keywords

brain, neurosciences, developmental psychology, neurophysiology

Disciplines

Anatomy | Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology | Body Regions | Cell and Developmental Biology | Cellular and Molecular Physiology | Developmental Neuroscience | Medical Education | Medical Neurobiology | Medicine and Health Sciences | Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience | Nervous System | Nervous System Diseases | Neurology | Neuroscience and Neurobiology | Neurosciences | Other Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology | Other Life Sciences | Other Neuroscience and Neurobiology | Other Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health | Other Physiology | Physiology | Sense Organs | Systems and Integrative Physiology | Systems Neuroscience

Comments

First edition, 2021

Recommended Citation

Lim, Austin, "Open Neuroscience Initiative" (2021). College of Science and Health Full Text Publications. 2.
https://via.library.depaul.edu/cshtextbooks/2