Steven A. Greenlaw was recently honored when OpenStaxCollege, an affiliate of Rice University in Houston, named a conference room after him. OpenStax is the preeminent publisher of free, open source textbooks for introductory college courses. They currently have introductory texts in Physics, Biology, Anatomy & Physiology, Chemistry, Statistics, Precalculus, U.S. History, Psychology and Economics. By the end of 2015, they expect to have 25 books.
Greenlaw was one of their first authors. He recently conducted a statistical analysis comparing the use of OpenStax’ economics text against the commercial text, and found there to be no statistical difference in student learning in his course. If you teach one of these introductory courses, you might want to save your students money and consider adopting an OpenStax or other open text.