New legislation that could potentially save students money on textbooks and other materials was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in October.

Student leaders of the California State Student Association (CSSA), the California State University Academic Senate and the Chancellor’s Office worked together on Assembly Bill 798: College Textbook Affordability Act.

The act grants CSU campuses and faculty greater access to free open educational resources (OER) and enables faculty to create OER for students.

OER includes openly licensed textbooks, materials, videos and other tools of knowledge that are freely accessible.

Taylor Herren, president of CSSA, a student board of directors with representatives from the 23 CSU campuses, said that the CSSA was directly involved in the process of the legislation and developing the language for the bill.

Herren said that it was difficult to lobby for legislation that would infuse more money in the CSU system, but that textbook affordability was an area that can have a significant impact on students in a positive way.

Herren said textbook affordability could make great strides in regulating the industry and helping to create a more innovative and reactive industry for the student body.

Now that the bill has been passed, Herren said the most important thing now is to share the information to campuses and faculty.

Herren said that memos will be sent out to all the CSU campuses and she will also talk with the board of trustees which includes all of the CSU presidents.

“There is always a learning curve with new legislation and faculty already do a lot, but there are incentives that will appeal to faculty,” Herren said.

The bill establishes a fund to financially support programs for faculty to modify its curriculum to include OER.

“That’s the point of this bill,” Herren said. “It provides an additional grant to a program or to a course.”

Herren said not only students, but administrators, chairs and provosts on campus who have the power should be advocating and disseminating OER information.

“People aren’t buying their textbooks or people are using their rent money to buy their textbooks,” Herren said. “So whatever CSSA can do to help support students and ensure that that is prevented, we are really eager to do.”

Steven Filling, chairman of the CSU Academic Senate, said the senate has supported the bill since its early conception and had been actively involved in making sure the bill accomplished its goal of saving money for students.

“We most certainly want to make sure our students get the best materials available, but we also realize our students live on pretty tight budgets,” Filling said. “There are things that we could use in addition to textbook — perhaps sometimes in substitution for textbooks — that students can access online.”

He said that the OER materials are under a creative concept license, and thus professors can use the materials, but also rearrange them as they see fit for the flow of their lectures.

Filling said that campuses can apply for a grant of up to $50,000 to provide support for faculty as they search for OER for their students and support for technology services.

Students should always try to find solutions, even if they have to think outside of the box, Filing said.

“I think it’s a marvelous example of our students thinking hard about issues,” Filling said. ­“Sometimes they can’t prevent fee increases, but what they can do is reduce the total cost by saying, ‘OK, let’s find an alternative to expensive books.’”

Vang Vang, an instructional technology librarian in the Henry Madden Library, said that the bill complements the CSU’s Affordable Learning Solution initiative (AL$) that was for ­the past five years.

AL$ promoted cost-effective alternatives such as e-books, book rentals and reserves from the library and OER.

Vang said the library had purchased a lot of openly licensed materials, including textbooks and academic journals.

Fresno State had already begun getting the word out to faculty about AL$, and the bill would help to accelerate the process and provide money to possibly set up workshops for faculty to learn about OER, Vang said.

“Even though the money is here to incentivize the faculty. In the long run, it helps the students because the faculty are now making the changes in their classes,” Vang said.

Each participating CSU campus must plan a strategy for adopting OER prior to applying for the grant, she added.

Fresno State’s AL$ committee wrote a resolution in support of ­adopting OER that was taken to the senate at Fresno State so that it could apply for the grant and get the faculty started, Vang said.

She said that the resolution was approved by the senate and so the committee will begin working on a plan in the summer to submit for the grant application.

Vang added that she hopes faculty will be ready to use OER by spring 2016, and that there were already some efforts to ease faculty into using OER.

President Joseph Castro and Provost Lynnette Zelezny are very supportive of the bill and AL$, Vang said.

“The support from the bottom up was great, but support from the top down will really get everything moving,” she added. “I am really optimistic about it. It gives us more breathing room and more funding to get faculty educated about open-source and about how to save their students money.”