NEW BRUNSWICK -- The six-week clerkship for third year psychiatry students at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School usually comes with extra cost: About $150 in textbooks, according to the university.

But Rutgers thinks it can soon slash that price tag and the cost of dozens of other textbooks so low that the new course materials will cost less than a student's lunch.

"Instead of $150 worth of textbooks, we can reduce the cost to under $5," said Petros Levounis, professor and chair of the Department of Psychiatry.

The university is in the midst of a pilot program aimed at saving thousands of students a collective $1.6 million in textbooks per year. Faculty and students are working together to replace textbooks for 32 classes with low-cost or no-cost alternatives.

"Not only will these 32 projects save students... but they also show the high level of investment by our faculty in the open and affordable education movement at Rutgers," said Lily Todorinova, the university librarian who specializes in improving textbooks and other resources for students.

The cost of textbooks has long been a complaint at Rutgers and other colleges across the state, especially as tuition and fees continue to rise. Nationally, students at four-year public colleges spend nearly $1,300 a year on textbooks and supplies, according to The College Board, prompting colleges across the country to begin shifting to lower cost alternatives.

Similar to traditional textbooks, the replacements at Rutgers will be peer-reviewed. However, they are published under copyright licenses that reduce the cost or printing or let students read and download them for free, according to the university.

The initiative, ordered by President Robert Barchi after students campaigned for it, is called the Open and Affordable Textbook Project. It will impact courses ranging from Introduction to Psychology at Rutgers-Camden to Shakespeare at Rutgers-Newark. The university awarded $32,000 in grants to get the project started.

For Levounis, that means working with students to develop case studies and multiple choice questions based on real world experience with psychiatric patients.

Those submissions will be reviewed by residents and attending physicians for accuracy and quality offered for peer review and eventually be collected in a selfpublished book that costs future students less than $5.

In addition to cost savings, the process should benefit both current and future students academically, Levounis said.

"The student authors learn more because they are actively involved, rather than passively reading books or going to lectures," Levounis said. "And the presentation of information from medical student to medical student is a unique strength of this project."

Rutgers hopes the initiative is just the beginning of a larger shift to more affordable textbooks, said Krisellen Maloney, vice president for information services.

"We look forward to finding additional opportunities to lower textbook costs without sacrificing the rigorous academic standards our students expect of their classroom experience and education at Rutgers," she said.

Adam Clark may be reached at adam_clark@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on twitter at @realAdamClark. Find NJ.com on Facebook.