Group 5: Recognition for Reviewers

Goal: Develop best-practices for recognizing/incentivizing reviewers of Open Textbooks.

Reviewers make an invaluable contribution to open textbooks. This group will review and propose mechanisms to incentivize, and provide recognition for reviewers, including ideas such as:

  • In-text credits
  • Contributor badges
  • Rewards for student feedback
  • ORCID profile entries
  • Recommendations for listing reviewing on CVs
  • Gamification/Social points for reviewing
  • Recommendations regarding Tenure / Promotion
  • Ways to communicate other intangible rewards
  • Financial payment

If you would like to be a part of this group, please comment below with a bit about yourself, any specific interests on the subject and any initial thoughts on the group’s purpose.

Wonder if you’d like another member? As an academic dean, this topic is a key issue for me and probably will be for other academics. I contributed to the the OTN working group on textbook editing last year; my past includes several years’ work as a project manager for a commercial prepress outfit, a PhD in history, and a dozen scholarly books to my credit (or discredit).

Hi @rsaunders, we would love another member, thanks for reaching out! The perspective from those in senior management positions will be very valuable as we work on this issue. As we get more people joining up we’ll put together more of a workplan, so watch this space for more details. Great to have you join us.

I would like to join this group!

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I would be glad to join this group if more are needed. Our current Open Textbook Initiative includes small stipends ($200 ea.) for two pre-publication peer-reviewers per title, the same amount that we pay for post publication peer review within the Open Textbook Network library. I have some ideas for finding peer reviewers within our consortium of 39 college and university libraries and will be actively pursuing this soon.

@rashford Hi Robin, we’d love to hear your ideas for finding peer reviewers! The review board approach we’re working on will hopefully be one option, but it’s important to have others to go to.

I’d like to be a part of this group as well. I have experience with open credentials/badges, and would like to examine ways to reward reviewers as contributors to OER projects.

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