What is SIPX?
SIPX is a tool that works in concert with library holdings and Blackboard to make course content selection easier for faculty and cost-saving for students. Library materials can be assigned at no cost to students; open access, open educational resources, as well as public domain materials, are also available as free course reading materials via SIPX. Finally, the tool also enables faculty to require individual articles and book sections (chapters or page ranges) that the student must pay for. SIPX, in partnership with publishers, charges per page, so students will only need to pay for the specific required reading.
The video above gives a brief overview of SIPX. The documents below provide additional orientation for faculty:
What's in SIPX?
The vast majority of library electronic subscriptions are available to be used as free course readings. Assign an article from one of 30,000 full-text journals or a chapter from our 150,000 unlimited-user ebooks. SIPX does not support the use of ebooks with licenses that limit the number of users (there are a small number of these in the library collection). With these few exceptions, if the library provides electronic access, you can upload it to Blackboard.
Public domain material is widely available in SIPX. Anything in this category can be used without seeking permission or paying a fee. A large proportion of such material is older literature that has seen its copyright expire, or that was never released under copyright; this includes many important literary, philosophical, and scientific works. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides a handy introduction to the public domain.
Open educational resources (OER) are course materials released under a Creative Commons license, intended for free reuse and adaptation. OER can include anything from lecture notes to shorter self-contained publications and even peer-reviewed textbooks. SIPX contains some OER, for example the introductory level OpenStax textbooks released by Rice University.
Deciding on Electronic Content
Guide Author
Helpful Links
SIPX Homepage and SIPX Higher Education Portal
Note: Some of the training materials are for an earlier version of SIPX with different search functionality.
Introduction to Open Access (SPARC)
Introduction to the Public Domain (Stanford)