More community college professors are replacing expensive commercial textbooks with no-cost open educational resources (OER) to help make college more affordable for their students. With students having no financial reason to delay or forgo textbook purchases, many instructors also expect OER adoption will lead to improvements in academic outcomes because all students have free and open access to the textbook. In their 2019 article, Grimaldi et al. have termed this idea the access hypothesis. Although a very plausible theory, why have most researchers found that OER adoption has no significant influence on student learning outcomes? This study examined OER textbook usage by English composition students at one community college and found a simple answer to this question: access to an OER textbook will not affect academic outcomes if students are not using the textbook. Based on these findings, open pedagogy offers community college educators a promising implication for practice and future study.