LibGuides: Open Educational Resources: Authoring and Licensing

Publishing Platforms and Guides for Authors

Communities

Learn more about OER by connecting with various communities through listservs, newsletters and conferences.

Open Education Network (OEN)
Formerly Open Textbook Network, OEN promotes access, affordability, and student success through the use of open textbooks
Library Publishing Coalition
The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) fosters collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and the development of common practices for library publishers.
Rebus Community
The Rebus Foundation builds new models and technology for open book publishing and reading on the web, to encourage deeper engagement, and to enable people (and machines) to use and build on books and reading in new and meaningful ways
Unizin Learning Environments
The Unizin Consortium is finding solutions for the biggest issues facing higher education institutions today: affordability, access, and learner success.
LibreTexts
A multi-institutional collaborative effort to improve education at all levels of higher learning by developing Open Access Resources. "In a nutshell, it's a bunch of people making the world a better place by sharing the world's scientific knowledge, and you can help!"

Guides to Authoring OER Textbooks

Authoring Open Textbooks (OEN)
From the Open Education Network, this guide includes a checklist for getting started, case studies of publishing programs, textbook organization and elements, writing resources, and an overview of useful tools.
OER Starter Kit (Iowa State University)
By Abby Elder. This guide is for instructors who are unfamiliar to open education and want to use or create open educational resources (OER). This guide has 5 sections:
* Getting Started
* Copyright
* Finding OER
* Teaching with OER
* Creating OER
Modifying an Open Textbook: What You Need to Know (OEN)
Also from OEN, this guide focuses on the technological aspects of editing open textbooks found in the Open Textbook Library or elsewhere, and will help you assess the effort, expertise, and technical tools needed.
Guide to Developing Open Textbooks
Produced by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and released as CC BY SA, this 66 page guide presents technical advice for textbook development in a variety of platforms and formats.
BCampus Self-Publishing Guide
This guide provides details on the preparation, planning, writing, publication, and maintenance of an open textbook.
BCcampus Accessibility Toolkit, 2nd Edition
The goal of the Accessibility Toolkit is to provide the resources needed so that each content creator, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, teaching assistant, etc. has the opportunity to create a truly open and accessible textbook.

Authoring Platforms and Software.

Many online sites and platforms are available for anyone who wants to create an OER. See the following links for these sites and their features.

Pressbooks
Create eBooks and books in print.
Open Author (OERCommons)
Open Author helps you build Open Educational Resources, lesson plans, and courses (on your own, or with others) — and then publish them, to the benefit of educators and learners everywhere.
Book templates in Overleaf
Basic services are free, cost for additional features.

Creative Commons Licenses

Image Attribution: Wikimedia Commons under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

About Creative Commons. Creative Commons (CC) is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creative works and knowledge through their CC licenses. CC licenses allow work to be reused without permission when their conditions are met. CC licenses are standardized, free to use, and have been applied to over 1 billion copyrighted works and across 9 million web sites. They have been found to be legally valid in many jurisdictions and countries.

CC licenses have 4 conditions (BY, SA, NC and ND) and their works can be licensed in 6 different ways. See the chart above for more details.

Creative Commons for Faculty and Instructors. Did you find an OER or other work with a CC license and want to use it for your instruction or for scholarly activity? You are allowed to reuse it without permission as long as conditions of the license are followed.

Creative Commons for Creators. You can freely share your work as an OER and keep your copyright. The most common way to make your work an OER is to add a Creative Commons (CC) license to it and that is all! No registration or forms required! The CC license you choose describes conditions for your work to be shared, distributed or remixed. If anyone wants to use your work beyond the conditions of your CC license, they would need your permission.

About Creative Commons Licenses
Choose a License (Creative Commons)
This tool will ask questions to help determine the recommended Creative Commons license for your work.
Creative Commons (Research Guide)
Get additional information about Creative Commons.