The transition from high school to college can be tough, especially when it comes to writing. Most first year college students are required to take introductory classes on writing, where they purchase mandatory writing textbooks at exorbitant prices, only to crack ’em open once before delegating them to dusty corners of dorm rooms.

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing is a new initiative that aims to offer an alternative to this situation. From their about page:

“Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing is a new book series containing peer-reviewed collections of essays–all composed by teachers for students–with each volume freely available for download under a Creative Commons license. The Writing Spaces’ mission is to build a library of quality open access texts for the writing classroom as an alternative to costly textbooks.

Because the essays are Creative Commons licensed, PDF electronic versions of each series edition and each individual essay can be downloaded from this website. Teachers can freely share these texts with other teachers or prepare printed course packs without need for copyright clearance. For those who would like professionally printed copies for their classes, printed versions of each series edition will be available for purchase through Parlor Press.”

Furthermore, Writing Spaces puts each essay through a peer-review process, and all authors retain copyright for their vetted work via whichever Creative Commons license they choose. Though the default license is CC BY-NC-ND, authors can choose to publish their essay via a license better suited to educational needs, such as CC BY, which allows the necessary permissions to fully share a work online via revision, remix, and redistribution. Read more and submit a proposal! The deadline is April 10, 2009, and accepted proposals will be fleshed out (by you) into full essays to be published in January of next year.