Day/Time/Room
May 15, 2024 | 10:15 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. | Heritage Gallery


Title: Author Name Removed at Request of Original Publisher”: an OER Adventure

Presenters:

  • Nancy Sims, any pronouns, Director, Copyright & Scholarly Communication, University of Minnesota Libraries
  • Shane Nackerud (he/him) Director, Affordable Learning and Open Education (ALOE), University of Minnesota Libraries

Description: The University of Minnesota Libraries updated and republished numerous open textbooks starting about a decade ago. The publisher of those books changed their business model, and stopped offering their own copies with open licenses. Although the original open license remained valid, specific elements of the older Creative Commons license they used did enable them to require removal of all attribution on the books. As the books aged, we considered updating them, but decided against it based on this complex history of interaction. In this brief session, we will share more details of this history, our decision-making about these books, and we will discuss open licensing and OER sustainability in general.


Title: Rights Reversion to OER: Four Stories from the Field

Presenter: Anita Walz, Assistant Director of Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian, Virginia Tech

Description: Rights-reversion is a powerful tool for broadening access to books which are still-in-demand but paywalled or out-of-print. Converting these works to Open Educational Resources (OER) broadens their availability and meets reader and instructional needs while utilizing workflows and services most library publishers already have in place. This presentation presents stories of four different rights-reverted works, project rationale, processes, lessons learned, and current outcomes. Due to existing “good customer” relationships with commercial publishers, Library Publishers may have more leverage than we realize to release valuable content more openly. Titles to be discussed are all textbooks used for instruction and include: Veterinary Epidemiology, Construction Contracting 2nd edition, Radio Systems Engineering, and Composite Construction: Design for Buildings.