Office Hours: Developing Maintenance Plans for Published Open Textbooks
Channel: Rebus Community
Date: 2019-02-27

The special guests at this month's session of the Rebus Community and Open Textbook Network Office Hours were Josie Gray (Coordinator of Collection Quality, Open Education, BCcampus); Liz Mays (Adjunct Faculty, Arizona State University; Director of Sales & Marketing, Pressbooks); and  Anthony Palmiotto (Editorial Director, OpenStax).

We invest a lot of time, energy, and funds in developing open textbooks. Maintaining your textbook after publication is an important way to make sure that investment keeps paying off. In this session, we explored how authors and publishers can develop a plan to ensure their textbooks stay up-to-date. We considered annual review and revision plans, including what should be on a maintenance checklist and who could be responsible. We also discussed what to do with “old” versions, including those in POD services and institutional repositories. Throughout the discussion we parsed out how the maintenance process is unique to open textbooks, and how OER’s online nature makes it amenable to updates and future editions.

The audio transcript of this session is available on the Rebus Community website: https://about.rebus.community/2019/02/february-office-hours-developing-maintenance-plans-for-published-open-textbooks-audio-transcript/