The AMS for the last few years has had a valuable project called AMS Open Math Notes, a site to gather and make available course notes for math classes, documents of the sort that people sometimes make available on their websites. This provides a great place to go to look for worthwhile notes of this kind (many of them are of very high quality), as well as ensuring their availability for the future. They have an advisory board that evaluates whether submitted notes are suitable.
A couple months ago I submitted the course notes I wrote up this past semester for my Fourier Analysis class, and I’m pleased that they were accepted and are now available here at the AMS site (and will remain also available from my website).
The idea of the AMS Open Math Notes is cool, but it is unfortunately very much not “Notes” or “Open”.
It is not “Open” in the sense that their reCAPTCHA (the thing that’s checking to see whether you’re a robot) doesn’t work. It isn’t “Notes” either because, for one particular entry (and maybe for more, haven’t checked) you get a message “This book is now available for purchase at the AMS Bookstore.” and no access to a pdf!
Swol,
I haven’t had any trouble with their reCAPTCHA thing, or run into an example of something they had shifted to a book they publish and sell. It is worth noting that their traditional business model for how to finance the AMS is to get a lot of their revenue from selling books and journal subscriptions, so unless they come up with a new revenue source they’re not likely to give that up.
I’m not sure who the target market is for this initiative, I am guessing it’s fellow lecturers that can borrow and enhance. As a self-study student, these kinds of notes are not very helpful without problem sets and solutions (I don’t mind paying a little bit for the solutions and that could be a source of revenue for the AMS/Author).