[Coral-List] Free OUP textbook on Conservation Biology

Tyler Ritchie tyler.ritchie at gmail.com
Sat Jan 29 17:50:41 EST 2011


Hello all,

While it is clear that this book is provided as an open-access pdf
legitimately (see below); I am doubtful of Oxford University Press (OUP)
providing this book gratis in support of the International Year for
Biodiversity. There is no link anywhere on the OUP site regarding an
open-access pdf of this book (frustratingly, there appears to be no digital
edition available from OUP at all).

Instead, it is more likely the authors' stated reasons of free-access (a
need to educate developing nations in conservation biology) are the true
motivation.

I also wanted to include a link to the Amazon S3 bucket owners website [1]
(which may or may not be related to the authors). Additionally, in an effort
to reduce mongabay.com's bandwidth bill I'm also including a link to a
cached version of the file:

http://s3.amazonaws.com.nyud.net/mongabay/conservation-biology-for-all/Conservation-Biology-for-All.pdf

Dr. Navjot Sodhi's faculty page [2] links to another copy of the book on the
university servers.

And finally, an excerpt from the book (any typos are likely from the pdf to
text transcription):

....


> There is also now a pressing need to educate the next generation of
> conservation biologists in developing countries, so that hopefully they are
> in a better position to protect their natural resources. With this book, we
> intend to provide cutting-edge but basic conservation science to developing
> as well as developed country inhabitants. The contents of this book are
> freely available on the web.


> Since our main aim is to make up-to-date conservation knowledge widely
> available, we have invited many of the top names in conservation biology to
> write on specific topics. Overall, this book represents a project that the
> conservation community has deemed worthy of support by donations of time and
> effort. None of the authors, including ourselves, will gain financially from
> this project.

 ...


[1] http://www.mongabay.com/conservation-biology-for-all.html
[2] http://www.dbs.nus.edu.sg/staff/sodhi.htm

Thanks,

Tyler



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