Zero Cost Course Resources Initiative Guide (Open Educational Resources (OER) / BU Library eResources)

Creative Commons USA, the Rebus Community, and the Open Textbook Network (OTN) have worked together to create an Adaptable Open Educational Resources (OER) Publishing Agreement. This document is a starting point for higher education institutions that are looking to contract with their faculty to create OER. It was developed in a way that makes it easy for institutions to edit to meet their own campus intellectual property policy requirements.

This guide is for faculty authors, librarians, project managers and others who are involved in the production of open textbooks in higher education and K-12. Content includes a checklist for getting started, publishing program case studies, textbook organization and elements, writing resources and an overview of useful tools.

A practical reference about how to customize — or adapt — an open textbook so that it better fits your needs in the classroom and elsewhere. This guide defines the term adaptation and discusses reasons for revising a book, why this is possible with an open textbook, and the challenges involved.

A reference for individuals or groups wanting to write and self-publish an open textbook. This guide provides details on the preparation, planning, writing, publication, and maintenance of an open textbook.

1. Should you publish? Presented by John Warren (George Washington University)
2. How should you publish? Presented by Kevin Hawkins (University of North Texas Libraries)
3. Implementing a publishing program. Presented by Inba Kehoe (University of Victoria Libraries)

Compiled by the Rebus Community. A handbook for faculty interested in practicing open pedagogy by involving students in the making of open textbooks, ancillary materials, or other Open Educational Resources.

A suite of synchronous and asynchronous professional development offerings for librarians that are open and free under a CC-BY license for anyone to offer or adapt. This dynamic, extensible, multimedia curriculum is intended to empower librarians to meet local demands to launch and/or enhance scholarly publishing activities.

This is a five-step guide for faculty, and those who support faculty, who want to modify an open textbook. Step-by-step instructions for importing and editing common open textbook file and platform types are included.

Complete course in how to write an open textbook. Includes information about open licenses, universal design and accessibility, structuring a textbook with consistent instructional design elements, modifying an existing open textbook, and much more.

Details how to do most of the things you can do with Pressbooks

A living repository of collective knowledge, written to equip all those who want to publish open textbooks with the resources they need. Representing two years of collaboration, innumerable conversations and exchanges, and a wide range of collective knowledge and experience, the Guide is a book-in-progress and will evolve and grow over time.

Professional development package for OER creators and project managers

Pressbooks Public Self-publishing Platform. Create, edit, format, and generate print-ready and eBook formats for your book—all for free.

A combination of workflow and technology that allows publishers to move from manuscript to print or electronic book with ease. It is based in Word, which means that writing and editing happens in one place, so there is no importing or copying and pasting into a final published product.

Implemented in March 2017, this new initiative is intended to advance the wide dissemination of scholarship by humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty members by publishing open-access digital editions of peer-reviewed and professionally edited monographs.

An open source R package that structures book writing and workflow. Those who want to create statistics and programming textbooks may find it a useful fit.

Use free book creation tools or professional services to create quality books

DSpace is the software of choice for academic, non-profit, and commercial organizations building open digital repositories. It is free and easy to install "out of the box" and completely customizable to fit the needs of any organization.
DSpace preserves and enables easy and open access to all types of digital content including text, images, moving images, mpegs and data sets. And with an ever-growing community of developers, committed to continuously expanding and improving the software, each DSpace installation benefits from the next.

An open-source platform to create and host books. It can output your content as a website or as an ebook (PDF, ePub or Mobi). Hosting is free if the book is open.

Knowledge Unlatched (KU) offers free access to scholarly content for every reader across the world. Their online platform provides libraries worldwide with a central place to support Open Access models from leading publishing houses and new OA initiatives.

A document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. It is most often used for medium-to-large technical or scientific documents but it can be used for almost any form of publishing.

The Lever Press arises out of an initiative of the Oberlin Group to study how the libraries of liberal arts colleges could offer a new and compelling alternative to authors of scholarly works for a way of publishing their work.

A cooperative approach to scholarly publishing in the social sciences

Self publishing site that also allows one to print books for a low cost

University of California Press’ new Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as their traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.

Intuitive, collaborative, open-source platform for scholarly publishing

Helps one build Open Educational Resources, lesson plans, and courses and then publish them, to the benefit of educators and learners everywhere.

Their platform guides open textbook projects through the publishing workflow and makes it easy to find, recruit, and organize collaborators. You can find a project you can help, or start one of your own.

This program is managed by the Open Education Network. Member institutions are are provided with training that will assist them with the publishing of new, openly licensed textbooks. The goal: Grow open textbook publishing expertise in higher education institutions, and increase the availability of free, open textbooks for use by instructors and students across the world.

Recorded sessions about publishing topics

A professional development package that equips faculty, librarians, administrators, and managers with the tools they need to make great open textbooks. Join a cohort of faculty members, program leads, and other open textbook creators for a twelve-session course + regular support calls* with OER professionals.

In 2018 the MIT Press secured a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation to conduct a landscape analysis of open source publishing systems, suggest sustainability models that can be adopted to ensure that these systems fully support research communication and provide durable alternatives to complex and costly proprietary services. John Maxwell at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver conducted the environmental scan and compiled this report.

WebAIM's mission is to expand the potential of the web for people with disabilities by providing the knowledge, technical skills, tools, organizational leadership strategies, and vision that empower organizations to make their own content accessible to people with disabilities.

ISBN.org by Bowker is the agency in the U.S. that is designated to assign ISBNs for the publishers and self-publishers in the U.S.