Day/Time/Room
May 15, 2024 | 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. | Heritage Gallery
Title: From Grantor to Reluctant Publisher: Adding Publishing to an Open Education Program
Presenters:
- Jessica Kirschner (she/her), Digital Publishing Coordinator, VIVA
- Stephanie Westcott (she/her/hers), Open and Sustainable Learning Coordinator, VIVA
Description: This presentation will introduce the restructuring and growth of the OER arm of VIVA, Virginia’s Academic Library Consortium, to include publishing. When our established OER grant program was awarded increased funding, we realized that we could not meet the demands of a larger program without increased capacity. With this issue in mind, VIVA decided to restructure our program to provide support for what seemed to be the biggest hurdle for awarded faculty in producing a high-quality final product: publishing services. Previously, VIVA did not engage in publishing efforts, so this required that we build the program from the ground up, with new staff, workflows, policies, and a new vendor partner to support certain services, such as copyediting and print-on-demand.
We invite attendees to join us on our journey of developing a new publishing program from the ground up while working within an existing program’s structure and goals. We will review how we developed key policies and workflows, built relationships with the new vendor, and engaged with the first of these new services. We will also share how the partnership and our new role as OER publisher are going so far and how we continue to iterate with program outcomes and faculty needs in mind.
Title: PALSave Textbook Creation Grant Program: A Practical Open Textbook Publishing Case Study
Presenters:
- Amanda Hurford, PALNI
- Sylvia Yang, Music Librarian and Coordinator of the Music and Performing Arts Library, DePauw University
Description: PALNI’s PALSave Textbook Creation Grant Program started in 2020 as part of a larger, grant-funded consortial affordable learning program. To date, five peer-reviewed textbooks have been completed, with ten more in various stages of development, spanning multiple disciplines and institutions. This presentation will examine the process of developing, executing, evaluating, and marketing the program. The project team has shared its resources under a CC-BY license, including the call for proposals, application, agreements, schedules, peer review guide, rubric, and more, in the desire to serve as a practical, replicable model for other projects. The session will also explore the personnel involved in the project, including the team of project managers working across institutional boundaries to support authors during their writing journeys. Consortial collaboration is a key component of the PALSave Textbook Creation Grant Program, but the session will be of interest to anyone interested in developing OER textbooks.
Title: Defining Expectations and Programmatic Support for Creating OER
Presenters:
- Ariana Santiago (she/her), Head of Open Education Services, University of Houston
- Kate McNally Carter (she/her), Open Educational Resources Librarian, University of Houston
Description: Academic libraries are increasingly playing active roles in supporting the creation, authorship, and publication of open educational resources (OER), often in the form of open textbooks, and including various types of learning materials. At the University of Houston Libraries, our OER initiative began with an emphasis on encouraging OER adoption to address textbook affordability concerns and quickly saw interest from instructors in developing their own customized learning materials. Over time we continually developed our ability to support OER creation, though experienced challenges due to our initially ill-defined expectations for published OER and limited capacity to provide robust support.
In this session, we will describe our process for developing and using a “Quality Checklist for Creating OER,” with an emphasis on how the checklist serves as a resource for OER authors throughout the process of creating their material, and an internal tool for us in reviewing and finalizing the publication of their work. The checklist provides criteria and additional resources in the following categories: open licensing, attributions and citations, accessibility, and publication. Using the new checklist has led to improvements in defining and clearly communicating expectations to OER authors, supporting their work within our available capacity, and clarifying processes for publishing completed works. We will share lessons learned from our experience supporting OER creation and encourage attendees to consider how similar documentation or approaches can be applied in their programs.