1 About the Book

Concepts of Biology—1st Canadian Edition has been adapted by Charles Molnar and Jane Gair from the OpenStax College textbook, Concepts of Biology. For information about what was changed in this adaptation, refer to the copyright statement at the bottom of the home page. This adaptation is a part of the B.C. Open Textbook project.

The B.C. Open Textbook Project began in 2012 with the goal of making postsecondary education in British Columbia more accessible by reducing student cost through the use of openly licensed textbooks. The BC Open Textbook Project is administered by BCcampus and funded by the British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education.

Open textbooks are open educational resources (OER); they are instructional resources created and shared in ways so that more people have access to them. This is a different model than traditionally copyrighted materials. OER are defined as teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others (Hewlett Foundation). Our open textbooks are openly licensed using a Creative Commons license, and are offered in various e-book formats free of charge, or as printed books that are available at cost.  For more information about this project, please contact opentext@bccampus.ca. If you are an instructor who is using this book for a course, please let us know.