Share all the details about your latest OER project: its content, scope, participants, subject, timeline, and more. We’re currently preparing for our Feedback-a-thon. Zoe Wake Hyde and Apurva Ashok will be available on April 2nd at 10 am EST / 2pm UTC & 3 pm EST / 7pm UTC.
To participate fill out the following template to best present your open textbook idea.
Answer the following questions in less than 250 words each.
How did you decide to make this textbook?
As a sober person with many sober queer and trans friends, we have found it very difficult to access 12-step recovery programs because of the out-of-date language in the “Big Book of AA”. Several of us have written an inclusive version of this book, and are looking for a way to get it published, prior to it being officially approved by AA World Services (which can take notoriously long).
What have you done so far?
The text has been written but needs a final pass, as well as formatting.
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Who is on your team?
Several other sober queer and trans people in Canada and the US.
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Please share a maximum of three questions. These questions can be specific to your project or address broader open textbook themes.
We are hoping to be considered by Rebus to be published.
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If you haven’t already, take a look at our suggestions for building a team and project scoping in The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far).
Hi @rcw! Thanks so much for sharing your project with us - what a brilliant initiative and valuable contribution to the community.
I’ll start by explaining a bit about Rebus as we’re not a typical publisher. We’re working to support collaborative open textbook publishing (which in a broad sense can include all kinds of educational content, so I think your projects fits within scope), and we have a process or model that people can follow, and some mechanisms to help connect people with collaborators. This is different to a typical publisher who will take a manuscript and do the work of editing & formatting for you - instead, we’re working to enable people to do those things themselves in a collaborative way.
In addition, a key part of what we do is work with ‘open’ resources, which means openly licensed content. We use the Creative Commons licenses which allow the creators to retain the copyright, but give clear permissions up front for people wanting to use, distribute and adapt their content. It’s not clear from your initial post if this is something you’ve considered, so want to confirm if this is the path you intend to take.
If you’re still interested in what we do given these explanations, let me know and we can get you started! And if not, I have a couple of other suggestions for how you can get your book out to the world, so do let me know.
Thank-you so much for responding to my post! I do think that Rebus’ format and mission are in alignment with this project, and I’d love to proceed with the collaboration! What are our next steps?
I think the first step I’d recommend is to read our project scoping info and create a project summary - much of this will have already been done given the stage you’re at, but it’s important info to capture & share with potential collaborators.
Following that, you can write a call for contributions depending on your main need right now. If by ‘final pass’ you mean a copyedit & proofread, you can have it focused on that. Once you’ve written the call, you can post it in the contributor marketplace and let us know on the promotion thread if you’d like us to share it. Check out our recruitment guide and info on building a team too, for more ideas on how to spread the word.
Following that, when it comes to formatting, you might want to take a look at Pressbooks. It’s a book production tool built on WordPress so very easy to pick up. Pressbooks automatically creates a web version of your book so anyone can access it, and you can create PDF (including for print on demand), ebook and editable formats from the same source.
Let me know if this gets you started and we can keep the conversation going
@rcw, I wanted to share a quick update: we now have a set of simple steps that you can complete to start a new project, and receive a dedicated discussion space for your project. You can find our instructions here: Create a New Project.
As always, if you had any questions or comments, you could let us know here or post in the Help & Questions category. Looking forward to seeing how you get along!
