The Library has joined the CAUL Open Educational Resources Collective. This will provide a shared open textbook publishing platform for participating institutions.

It will facilitate independent publishing by authors; collaborative, cross-institutional publishing; and build communities and capacity across institutions to support open textbook publishing. 

Benefits

• publish up to two open textbooks on the shared Pressbooks platform per year
• access to training, guides and templates
• access to communities of practice – for library staff, and academic authors
• opportunity for academic authors to apply for DIY Textbook Author Grants.

Watch the video below for an overview of the collective model.

• View detailed information about the Collective model

Interested in open textbooks? Like support to publish an open textbook in your discipline? Or to write a chapter in one?

The Caul Open Educational Resources Collective is now up and running for Te Herenga Waka, to support academics in creating and publishing their own open textbooks. The Collective provides:

• access to training, guides and templates
• access to two communities of practice - one for library staff, and one for academic authors
• the opportunity for academic authors at their institution to apply for DIY Textbook Author Grant

The Collective involves librarians and academic colleagues working with 29 other New Zealand and Australian universities to trial the process for publishing Open Education Resources/Textbooks using Pressbooks, an open access platform. The Collective will operate as a two-year pilot from January 2022.

The pilot will be conducted in two phases. This year is Phase 1, that will allow participating institutions to begin publishing open textbooks (‘DIY publishing’). In Phase 1 we can publish two open textbooks. We have one well advanced and the other under consideration, but we can add more.

We welcome hearing from all academic authors who want to be involved or just want to find out more. 

• Academics can take part in the OER Collective without being lead author on a textbook (which would be a large commitment). Contributing to other textbook projects is fine, for example by writing or reviewing a chapter. The Collective is hoping to encourage this. One strategy will be that we’ll introduce new participants in the Authors Community of Practice to the email list and encourage them to share information about their book projects.

Contact

Philip Worthington (philip.worthington@vuw.ac.nz) is the University’s main contact for the OER Collective. Contact Philip if you have questions or would like to start creating an open textbook. We’d like to talk with you in more detail about your open textbook ideas.