Sponsors (4)
The bill aims to cut students' textbook costs and expand accessible, shareable open educational resources—improving affordability and teaching tools—but does so by creating new federal spending and substantial administrative and maintenance burdens for institutions, with potential uneven benefits and publisher pushback.
Students (and parents) will likely pay less out-of-pocket for course materials because the bill expands and incentivizes open educational resources, open textbooks, and greater price transparency.
Lower textbook costs and wider availability of digital OER can reduce financial barriers to completing college, potentially improving access, retention, and equity for learners from low-income backgrounds.
Students with disabilities will gain better access to course materials because newly created resources must conform to accessibility requirements (Section 508) where feasible and the bill emphasizes accessibility.
Colleges, faculty, and staff will face substantial short-term and ongoing administrative burdens and costs to create, vet, adapt, host, update, and report on OER and related materials.
Taxpayers and the federal budget may bear higher costs because the bill authorizes federally funded grants and appropriations 'as necessary' to expand OER use.
Smaller or resource-poor institutions may struggle to compete for grants and to absorb adaptation costs, risking uneven adoption and perpetuating inequities between well-resourced and under-resourced colleges.
Based on analysis of 6 sections of legislative text.
Authorizes competitive grants to expand open textbook use, expands course-material disclosure and publisher data transparency, encourages OER use, and orders a GAO study on textbook costs.
Introduced February 26, 2025 by Richard Joseph Durbin · Last progress February 26, 2025
Creates a federal competitive grant program to expand use of open textbooks at colleges and universities, strengthens course-material disclosure requirements for institutions and publishers, and directs a Government Accountability Office report on textbook costs and OER use within three years. The bill sets application and quality standards for grant projects, requires institutions to disclose ISBN/price/OER status and publisher student-data-use summaries for digital materials, encourages faculty to consider OER consistent with academic freedom, and requires accessibility and assessment plans for funded materials.