The Challenge of Open Access Textbooks | Institution as e-textbook publisher

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-05-10

Summary:

"UCL Press is eager to develop its textbook publishing programme, to address the current situation and in order to fulfill one of its 2034 strategic goals to be a global leader in the integration of research and education, underpinning an inspirational student experience. The authors of the two textbooks produced by UCL Press in the Jisc Institution as E-Textbook Publisher programme, Key Concepts in Public Archaeology and Textbook of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, were both committed to open access from the outset, and they could see the benefits of the key texts for their courses being made available freely to their students and to a wider global audience. In addition to the obvious cost-savings for UCL’s students, and the advantages for the academics teaching the courses who can make tailored education material freely available to their students, the other key benefit includes the dissemination of UCL’s teaching to other courses worldwide, which has a positive reputational impact and could even help recruit students by making UCL’s courses better known. UCL Press will be making a new call for textbook proposals in May and we are planning to offer a fee of £1500 to up to 10 authors. While this amount is small in comparison with the potential earnings an author might receive from a commercial publisher, we hope that it will provide a little extra incentive for those authors who are perhaps already interested in exploring more innovative and fair ways of providing textbooks.

Clearly it is going to take a major shift to overturn the current model entirely since textbook publishing is big business, requiring significant investment and generating significant profits. However, there are clear signs of change and innovative approaches underway. OpenStax, developed by Rice University in the US, is an innovative open access textbook platform, published in the form of ‘pages’ that can be compiled into different collections and components. SUNY Open Textbooks, developed by the State University of New York Libraries, launched in 2012 and has published 18 textbooks with several more forthcoming. This is very much a community project and while it offers publishing services for authors, and editorial support, it does not appear to offer remuneration, relying instead on educators who want to provide an alternative model for the greater good."

Link:

https://etextbook.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2017/05/09/the-challenge-of-open-access-textbooks/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.books

Date tagged:

05/10/2017, 22:51

Date published:

05/10/2017, 18:51