Guiding principles
The Textbook Project is A2KF's open-access publishing platform for academic textbooks. A2KF does not charge readers, teachers, students, or authors: the model is 100% free of cost.
It begins from a practical problem: good textbooks are often too expensive, locked behind institutional access, unavailable in the reader's language or region, or obtained through informal and sometimes unlawful channels because no adequate lawful route exists.
The project responds by publishing peer-reviewed textbooks without paywalls, chapter by chapter, with open licences and curated translations.
By removing commercial and predatory intermediaries from the basic act of textbook access, the project lets authors keep intellectual control while giving their work a clearer public purpose. Many textbook authors receive little or no meaningful financial return from conventional publishing; here the return is scholarly use and teaching value, and service to the community.
The platform is therefore not only a website for books. It is a working example of what access to knowledge requires when price, language, region, and lawful distribution are treated as scholarly problems, not afterthoughts.
Project principles
- Free of cost
- A2KF does not charge readers, teachers, students, or authors. Readers should not need a subscription, institutional login, or illegal download to consult a required textbook.
- Academic rigour
- Open access is a distribution principle, not a relaxation of standards. Texts remain peer-reviewed, legally precise, and attentive to historical and political context.
- Readability
- Complexity should be explained rather than hidden. The books are written for students and independent readers without flattening the discipline.
- Multilingualism and local context
- Access is incomplete when it exists only in one language or assumes one jurisdictional setting. Each version may account for regional examples, country-specific literature, and the legal vocabulary of its own educational context.
- Revision
- Online publication allows errors to be corrected and updated without waiting for a new print edition.
- Author control
- Authors should not lose the public value of their work to intermediaries whose main contribution is exclusion. The project preserves authorship while making the work useful to the community.