Our Mission

Axolotl Academic Publishing Company is dedicated to educating people about the living world around them, and making that education as affordable as possible.  Therefore, we are writing textbooks in the biological sciences that combine three important principles: adaptability to courses currently using various other textbooks, minimal cost barrier to learning, and ease of understanding.

With a consistent editorial voice, and a writing style closer to a teaching lecture than a reference book, these textbooks are developed for quick reading as well as ease of understanding.  While created to offer an alternative to expensive textbooks in the classroom, these books are also suitable for self-study.

Even when our text is not the official course textbook, by thorough coverage of the most commonly taught ideas, its unofficial use in lieu of more expensive “official” textbooks is facilitated. Furthermore, the texts are organized to be useful at multiple course levels:  basic information needed by a student in an introductory course is not lost in the details needed by a student taking a more advanced course on the same topic, but all of the information is readily available for students in both courses.

Our single textbook could potentially serve multiple courses without being too unwieldy for intro courses or too simplistic for advanced courses.  The familiarity of the book to a student using it a second time is an advantage for both the student and the teacher, as the teacher can expect faster reading and comprehension of the book material, and may opt to use her class time delving more deeply into current research ideas or other teaching activities.

Supplementary materials available to both teachers and students are slide presentations, review questions, and email access to the author.

The primary distribution method of the textbook is the downloading of individual chapters as universally readable electronic files in Portable Document Format (PDF).  This facilitates frequent updates, and particularly for the most advanced users of the textbook, recently published research can be incorporated quickly.  We are currently exploring the feasibility of offering other e-book formats such as ePub an amazon’s Kindle format.

Textbooks are published under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa license, and may be redistributed to anyone if and only if free of charge and unaltered.  Slide presentations are published under a CC by-nc-sa license and may be customized by the user.

The ultimate goal of Axolotl Academic Publishing Company is to lower the barriers to quality science education by cutting the cost of textbooks to students and to school systems.  We firmly believe that a populace that is better informed about the way the living world around them works is a populace that can make better decisions about everything from individual health choices to global environmental policy, and much more in between.

By admin in Axolotl on February 26, 2012