Hello -
I want to follow up with the question about institutional access to press book. There was a comment in the chat box during our meeting yesterday about our institutions having access to press book. I would like some clarification for that. is this something for creators only or users, too?
Do institutions need this access to use an already written OER press book? What is the cost of this access?
thank you
Hi Robin, thanks for following up about Pressbooks access. Pressbooks is an open-source book formatting tool, and one of the many tools with which you can publish your OER. The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) which we’ll refer to as part of the program is a book on Pressbooks, and as you can see, it is available on the web, but also in a number of different formats. As a creator, you would set up and format your book in Pressbooks, and later share a link to the book so others can read it on the web or download it in their format of choice.
There’s also other tools that you can use to host and share your OER: I mentioned PreTeXt as an example of what the Math team is doing, but there are more. This report, called Mind the Gap, does a great landscape analysis of the different tools available, if you are curious.
Pressbooks is a paid tool - you can use it as an individual, or your institution can also purchase an instance for all their faculty/students. Since you’re part of the Textbook Success Program, we can set you up in the Rebus Press (our Pressbooks instance) at no cost. I know you mentioned wanting to create not just a textbook, but also supplement it with other ancillary materials to make a robust course on World Music to share in your LMS or on OER Commons. This might mean that you and your team spends a bit of time discussing exactly what elements you’d like to include in your project, and then review some of these different tools to see which one (or which combination) can best help display these elements & meet your project goals.
It might take a bit of thinking and pondering to land on the best tool or set of tools for your project, and if you have questions, please let me know. If you’re set on using Pressbooks, that’s great, and I can coordinate with you to set your book up. There’s no rush on my end, so please take your time to evaluate all the different options.
