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Speaker:
Amanda: Hello, and welcome to the Open Education's Pub101. Thank you for joining us for today's session. I'm Amanda Larson, and I am the co-chair of Pub101. I'm also the Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant at Ohio State, and I'm going to be the hostess with the mostest today, and I'll facilitate this session.
So in just a couple of minutes, I'm going to hand it off to Abbey Elder, who is fantastic and wonderful from Iowa State, and she's going to talk to us today about the joyous prospect of working with authors. And as always, we're going to leave time for you to have questions and conversation, and there might be some of you here who already have experience working with authors, and we invite you to share your experiences and resources. Here are a few housekeeping details. We have an orientation document that includes our schedule and links to session sites and the recordings. So if you can't make it to a session and want to know what you've missed, that is the place to check. Please check that document.
Please also remember that there's a companion resource for these sessions, the Pub101 Canvas curriculum. That's where you'll find the resources and templates mentioned throughout the sessions this spring. We're also recording this session and it will get added to our YouTube Pub101 Spring 2025 playlist. Most importantly, we are definitely committed to providing a friendly and safe and welcoming environment for everybody aligned with our community norms. So please join us in creating a safe and constructive space.
Today we're going to kick off today's conversation. We have a brief, reflective question, and today's question is, I have to move the chat off of it. That's not helpful. What do you imagine your typical author will want to do? For example, do you think they'll want to create a book from scratch, adapt an existing work, collaborate with students, work alone, collaborate with other co-authors? And if you could take just a second and reflect on that and then throw an answer in the chat, that would be great.
Anna says, remix and collaborate, adapt and collaborate, remix, create a book from scratch, adapt and collaborate. Abbey says that our typical author really wants to make something happen on their own, but they may not know that collaborating is an option. All of the above is a great answer. Is there such a thing as a typical author? I feel like that it could be anything. I think that's also fair. That's very, very fair.
Thank you for posting the question in the chat, Karen. Create a book from scratch, usually alone. So my answer to this question is also create a book from scratch, usually alone. Or they want to remix copyrighted materials into their work and I have to talk them down off that ledge. With that said, I'm going to hand it over to Abbey to talk to us today about working with authors. Take it away, Abbey.
Abbey: Thank you, Amanda. All right, let me go ahead and share my slides and hopefully everything works perfectly and there are no problems at any point in time. Lovely. Okay.
Hello everyone. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about working with authors, and my entire presentation is really structured around examples of actual times I've worked with authors on projects of many different sizes and shapes and the ways that different types of people might affect the way that you work with them.
So first, for some context, I am the Open Access and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Iowa State University and the statewide Open Education Coordinator for the Iowa Open Education Action Team. In these two roles I lead is ISU's Open Education Program, coordinating publications from our authors, training instructors on the implementation of open pedagogy and open education in their courses. And I support a cross institutional group of open ed advocates, helping them reach others across our state and assessing the growth of open education programs across all of our institutions. That's only one job technically.
So my publishing context though, is a little bit unique. I do not technically have publishing in my job title in any way. Our publishing program was first started in 2018 with the launch of our Open Education Mini-Grant program with our digital press launching the next year under our Scholarly Publishing Services Librarian. The ISU Digital Press now has two staff members. If you were here last year, it did not. So this is good news. Harrison Inefuku is the Head, and Scott McCleary is our new Production Editor. So I currently help with author onboarding and limited production support, but previously I was also doing all of the work that Scott does as our Production Editor. So to help us understand a little bit more of how different authors might coordinate with an open education publication, I want to talk about three different people and the ways that they worked with our team to develop their OER.
The first I called the loner. This author came to us with drafts they had already been working on for quite some time and a plan for how they wanted to proceed. Their content was already formatted in LaTeX. They did not necessarily follow our guidelines. There was no alternative text, there was improper use of headings. And after discussing what we needed from them, source files, alt text, additional support, and the options for publishing their work, they agreed to let us test a Pressbooks import for them.
So our production editor created a macro to convert their LaTeX to HTML for import into Pressbooks, and we're now working with them on next steps. But a lot of this was a, well, they've already done a lot of the work. They didn't come to us early. They didn't tell us anything. They are just doing their own thing and we have to figure out how to approach this while still supporting them. So that's the loner.
Then we've got the collaborator. So this author explained their project's needs early on and worked with me to get buy-in for their project. I worked with them directly to draft H5P exercises to complement their content. We imported their content. I made some edits for design, accessibility and inclusion, helped them find images that were openly licensed, and they relied on me heavily during the editing and refining phases of their project quite a bit. The final project has been commended for its content and presentation has been published for a few years now. So this was overall a really good outcome, but the project itself was a lot.
And finally, we have the anxious. So this is an author who during their projects onboarding took notes and didn't really ask many questions. They developed their content following our template, followed the rules, worked alone for about a year, and every check-in email they would reply, "I'm doing fine. Everything's on schedule." It's only now recently after being prompted to share a draft of a sample chapter that we could review that we learned the author didn't actually understand the support that was available for them. They'd done excessive work by themselves trying to figure out how to get everything done, but they'd been too embarrassed to ask for help or for clarifications on what exactly we offered.
So each of these people, the anxious, the loner, the collaborator come with different things with these relationships. Some of them have their own expectations of what a publisher is and what they do. Some of them might think, "Oh, well I have to do all of this on my own and just figure it out." And others might say, "Well, this is a full service support. This is what this process is. I'll let them do the work." All bringing different things.
I want to ask, first off, have you ever worked with an author like one of these? Have you been in one of these situations yourself where you're helping to support someone and then you find out they didn't really understand what was available, or maybe they were really needy and needed additional support to get their work done, but it was a fulfilling experience nonetheless? Feel free to share in the chat.
And thank you, Amanda, for explaining what H5P are. Or perhaps if you've never worked with an author before, please feel free to let me know as well. Yeah, one person saying yes to all three, rewarding all the way around. Yes to all three. I've had an author record hours of PowerPoints with voiceover only to realize that wasn't accessible. Absolutely. Haven't worked with an author yet. That is okay. That's also what you're here for. Yeah, so we've got a good spread of people who've worked with different types of people, different kinds of outcomes, and trying to figure out what else you can do as well. Absolutely.
And this isn't necessarily true just for OER as we have some instructional designers in the chat. I'm sure you understand as well, when you get to hear from someone and they say, "I've been working on my course, I put everything together," and then you look at it and say, "Oh, we have a template for that. We could have helped you through this process."
All right, so let's move on to the next section of this and talk a little bit about the fact that none of these situations are necessarily all bad. There are pros and cons to each of these relationships and these types of people that we're working with as authors. The loner, for example, has made some really good content. They weren't in a hurry. They had done everything on their own. But because they started without our support, without any guidance on what we needed from them, there was a lot of remediation that's needed to get them to publication.
The collaborator's energy led to a really great OER. We collaborated, we learned together, we talked about what was possible and really thought through what was the best way to make their materials expressive. But because they needed support, that led to a bad work-life balance for me personally.
And the anxious author seemed to be the least problematic, the easiest to work with. But in reality, there was a lot of retroactive training and meetings that had to happen to get them back on track When we realized not only were they behind schedule, they also didn't realize what support was available to get them to the finish line of their project.
So this is all to say that I really want you to remember, authors are all people. They have different things they're bringing into these conversations, to these situations as they work through their publications. They're not necessarily authors. They're a person who says, "I'm really anxious about making sure I do this right. I have had other experiences with publishers and they expect me to do this." Or maybe they really don't know what to expect, and anything you give them at face value, they will take as it is. A lot of issues we face when working with authors don't stem from them alone either. They stem from us maybe not communicating well enough what the expectations for them are and what they can expect from us.
So what can you learn from my experiences here? Well, first I want to say working with authors is about a lot of things. It's not just about communication. It's also about respect, respecting them as authors who are also instructors who have a lot of other things going on in their lives. I just met with someone today who said, "Hey, I'm about a year off from where I'm supposed to be on my grant because I just had my first kid and I did not think that that would just stop me in my tracks for four months. It happens."
Second, there's managing expectations. Again, setting those guidelines in place for this is what we need from your drafts, this is what you can expect from us, and this is when you should ask us for help.
Three, communicating enough. And I think communicating enough is a really important way of describing this because for some authors communicating enough is checking in at the start and end of the semester to make sure everything's on track. And for some of them, like our anxious author, maybe it would've been every three weeks, checking in and making sure we're on the same page, making sure that they had everything they needed to keep moving forward.
And finally, developing shared goals for their project. So shared goals isn't just about understanding what their goals are. It's also about making sure that their goals align with us as a publisher or as a service provider and making sure that what we're developing and providing for them meets their needs as well. So in some ways, it's, "Okay, you want to do this, here's what we can offer." But in other ways it's, "Hey, we offer these other things. Would you like to take advantage of that as well?" For example, like I mentioned earlier, we use Pressbooks here at Iowa State. So we like to tell people about the different options we have for embedding videos. So you don't have to do something that's just a simple PDF like you might on your own.
So how do you actually build those relationships, build that respect in, and think about how to put forward those expectations? There are a few questions to ask as you get started. First, what does the author want? Okay, where are they coming from this? What is the purpose of their project? Second, what is their desired end result? So do they want this to be a handbook, a textbook? Is this going to be something they want to update over time or is this going to be something that is a full first edition set in stone at the end of the day? What is their timeline? So do they expect to have this done at the end of the summer? Do they expect to have this done next spring? Do they expect to have this done maybe the winter of 2026? Because the differences between those three people is also going to be a difference in what you can expect from them in timelines for producing their work and expectations. And finally, do they have other preferences for technology, art, or licenses? Are there specific tools they want to use like Jupyter Notebooks? Do they need help finding materials that are openly licensed for their images? And do they understand what it means to openly license their work?
All of these things will change how you approach working with the author because if their purpose is to just make a lab book for their students that can be printed, they want to have it done by the end of the summer, their end result is really just a PDF and they don't really have a preference for technology as long as they can learn it quickly, that's going to be a very different experience to someone who wants to make a full service, interactive material that plugs into your LMS and can pull back things for different exercises into the grade book and they want to have it done in the next year or two. They're flexible. Those authors are very different people with different types of needs and the other groups on your campus you're going to need to partner with to support them will also be different.
Which brings us to what can the author do? So this isn't just about their experience. This is also about their position. Are they full-time an adjunct or do they have other things on their mind that are taking up their time? What does their teaching load look like? Do they have funds available to support their work? Do they have different technology proficiencies? For example, if an instructor wants to create videos, but they don't really have the ability to do that with the tools they have right now, they've never done it before and you don't have support on campus for video production, that might be a little bit harder than someone who does YouTube videos on the side or already puts out weekly videos for their lectures for students.
And also support from their department is a huge piece of this because while an author might be a lecturer with a relatively high teaching load and no funds available, if their department chair says this is a priority and we want to focus on it, they might get additional time dedicated to supporting an OER project. Which brings me to my next question. What is a question you might ask to get to know an author's purpose for pursuing an OER publication besides why are you doing this? What else might you ask to get an idea of, okay, why? What is this? What is this for? Great question. Have you used OER before? 'Cause that will also get at the idea of are they thinking about this as an OER? Are they just thinking of this as making something for their class?
Amanda notes, I like to ask how they want to use the final product because that's a big piece of it. Is this something you're going to give to your students as a study guide? Is this something you're going to refer to in class? Is this the basis for labs? Lovely question. Why are you moving away from your current book? Because this might be a situation where a commercial material is no longer a meeting an author's needs, or maybe they're using a book that they wrote themselves, but they want to make a new addition as an OER. There are some very good questions in the chat here, so I highly recommend checking them out, everyone.
What does success look like for this project? Absolutely. And a great question. Are you okay with someone taking your work and modifying it for their needs? That's an interesting way of bringing up the topic of, hey, do you understand what it means to openly license your work? What I often like to do is also flip that and say, "Have you looked at other open materials that you might adapt as the basis for this or incorporate into your book?" Because that brings in the idea of reciprocity rather than just making it a, you're giving something away that other people can take. It can be part of a back and forth. These are wonderful comments. Thank you everyone.
All right, so let's move on and talk a little bit about some more situations you might run into as you're going through this work. Besides, what can your author do, another question you might ask is: What can you do? So yeah, it matters what your author can do, what resources they have access to, whether they have time to devote to OER development. But also, what can you personally do? Do you have time on your schedule? Is this part of your job? Is this something that you have the ability to facilitate? For example, can you manage workflows, systems or platforms? Do you have access to a platform like Manifold, Pressbooks, LibreTexts, or even just Word? Do you have a repository where you can share materials? Figuring out what you have access to is really the first step.
Can you help schedule check-ins and make sure that people are on top of things as they go through their work? Really, this topic is about communicating expectations, communicating expectations of what authors can expect from you, and understanding who does what. When it comes to these questions of workflows, systems, platforms, timelines, really the question is what expectations are reasonable? So based on your job, what can you actually ask people to expect from you, and what can you offer? Because you don't want to say, "Of course, this is a full service publisher." This is something you're doing as a quarter of your time, or even less just to support people as best you can.
So another question you might ask is: What can you not do? A lot of the time when we're talking about OER publishing work, if you're officially doing publishing, let's say for sure this is something that you've integrated into your role in some way and you know you can do some of this work, you still have to say, what can you not do? Are there services you don't offer or projects you won't take on? For example, we don't personally do copy editing work because we don't have the staffing for it, and it takes a lot of funding to hire others to do it. Can you support the author's platform preferences or specific formatting needs? Do you allow certain fonts or color choices or disallow certain ones? Do you accommodate closed projects or ones with no derivatives licenses, or are there specific use cases for those?
For example, you might say, "All of our projects are open access and they're licensed under CC by NCSA at the most closed, unless it's maybe a student led project or an open pedagogy project that might need to be more closed down than that." And can the author leave out alternative text and have you add it in later? Now that's a clear please say no and be willing to say no, whenever there's something that comes up that is a non-negotiable for you that you do not want to do.
And also think about when you make exceptions. So a lot of the times when we're setting these expectations in place, we're doing it so we can have a flat base to work from. Okay, across the board, these are our rules, these are our settings that we're expecting from people. And that way we can make exceptions when it's necessary, but there are problems when we make exceptions for some people and not others. The problems with, as I call it vibes-based exceptions, is you might be doing it for the wrong reasons. Are you certain that you aren't limiting or extending support based on an unconscious bias? "Well, I really like this person. They remind me of me when I got started. I want to help them out."
When you make these sorts of exceptions willy-nilly, rather than having an expectation, as I mentioned earlier with the no derivatives licenses for student created work, then you're setting up situations where you can also be taken advantage of if you're going above and beyond, or maybe even limiting yourself from helping others who might need that support more.
Another thing I want to point out I mentioned a little bit earlier, is that you are not the individual that needs to be doing everything related to OER publishing at your institution. Maybe you are the one in charge of it. Maybe you are the one starting it up. Maybe you're the one exploring it, but it doesn't have to be just you. Leveraging support from other offices at your institution, other individuals across your campus can be extremely useful for getting OER work off the ground, especially if it's work that needs support from experts. So you could get technology experts who can test publishing tools, maybe your IT department. You can get instructional designers to help with the outlines, chapter templates. Understanding different things like how to write good learning objectives is incredibly useful for authors as they're working on textbooks for the first time.
Librarians can help find OER to remix or media to include as openly licensed. Accessibility practitioners can review content as it's drafted or at certain stages in the process. Again, this is about what people are willing to do and what makes sense for their time. And you of course can oversee and enforce the deadlines during the production. You can help people understand, okay, this is how this works, this is what we're expecting from you and what you can expect from us. And all of these roles can be for different people in different groups. It depends on what your institution has access to and what you personally feel comfortable doing. But you don't have to do it alone.
So before I move on to the onboarding new author section, I want to ask you one more question, and that is: Are there individuals in any of these units or others that currently partner with you on OER publishing work or OER support on your campus? Or are there others that you could reach out to that you haven't already? I know a lot of you haven't worked with authors yet, so feel free to just brainstorm people you could reach out to at your institution. And thank you, Amanda, for saying it's okay to not support every project that someone pitches. Sometimes a project is a bad idea regardless of whether they have funding.
Yeah, centers for teaching and learning are always excellent to work with. The writing center, absolutely. Especially if you're thinking about getting in touch with people who have access to student assistance who can help with things like peer review or copy editing or other support on campus that might already have some sort of process in place for that. Someone has a great relationship with your accessibility office, which is lovely. Not all of us have accessibility offices, sadly.
Print shop or marketing for graphic design support. And also University Printing can be a great person to partner with if you want to have optional print available for materials, especially if it's for a specific class. So a lot of authors really want to make sure their students can buy materials for their courses in print, even if it's in a limited quantity or print-on-demand. You guys have great ideas. All right, so let's go ahead and move on to the next section, onboarding new authors.
Okay, we've talked a lot about when you already have a relationship with an author, when you're already working through processes, when you're building workflows, but what about onboarding someone for the first time? There are a couple of different steps to go through as you think about this. The first is the planning meeting. This might include a discussion with the authors about what it is they're doing. What is the general structure of their OER? Is it a lab book? Is it a textbook? Is it a set of modules? Is it mostly videos with a little bit of text? Is it mostly text with a little bit of images? What does this look like?
Then their production process, the drafting, editing and review steps. This might be your production process where you're outlining this is what we need from you at different stages and what you can expect from us. Or it could be what they've done already and what they expect to go through next. You might also talk about anything that might be tricky. Okay, so are there going to be a lot of complex tables in this work? Is there're going to be a lot of mathematical equations, multiple languages, other things you need to work through? I'm working on an accounting book right now, and so we had to talk through, okay, what's the best way to format an accounting spreadsheet but in a book, but also make it good. It's a question.
And finally, talk through expectations for peer review or other production work that they might expect. So if you offer support with formatting or if you coordinate peer review or if you have recommendations for peer review, these are all things to talk about early on so your authors understand what it is that they're doing and what it actually looks like. Because sometimes just saying these are the steps that we're going through and the things that we've thought through helps people feel more comfortable in seeing you as a publisher, as a person that's supporting them in making something really official and not just someone who's saying, "Here's some tools. Go forth and do." Which can be good, but it's different sorts of relationships you might be having with them.
At this point, after you've met with the instructor, the author, and talked through what they want to do, it's good to set expectations for workflows. So are they going to draft their content in Word, LaTeX, Markdown, Pressbooks, LibreTexts, directly in a tool or separately from it and import it later? There's a lot of different things you might set in place for expectations at this stage. Should they prepare a sample chapter for you to review and make sure that they're following your guidelines? I personally recommend this because that way you can catch early on if they didn't actually understand what you meant by alternative text. And it's good to also go over who's responsible for reviewing content for accessibility, formatting, cover art design and other steps like this. Personally for us, all of those final pieces there are handled by our team, but we also have a team, so it's easier to say that.
And finally, what should they expect from you? What is your typical response time? So some people might say, "Okay, when I give you the final draft of the manuscript, how long till it'll be published?" Hard to answer that question because it depends. But you can say, "After you get it to us, we'll look it over and we'll get back to you in this amount of time about next steps." Really, this is about setting guidelines that you can expect from all your authors to prevent scope creep. So you're not saying, "Yeah, we can do this. We can do that. We'll make this work," and then things get a little bit snowbally.
As you're doing all of this work, you're talking to people, you're setting expectations, you're having your first meetings and figuring out what their project needs. There's a few things that can help. First, find the best mode of communication for you and the author. Is that email, is that phone or Zoom meetings? Is that in-person meetings or discussions over at messenger app like Slack or Teams? Is that using a project management tool to keep track of how they're going down a process? There's a lot of different things that might work for different people. For example, I am still having weekly meetings with one of our authors who's been working on a book for two years now. That works for us. But other people might just want to email every few weeks or every month or every few months depending on the project. But regardless, it's best to set up regular check-ins, monthly or bimonthly, or set guidelines for when authors should update you on their progress if that's at the end of a semester or at certain points throughout the year.
And there's another thing you probably think about. When you're working with an author who's really excited about doing something big and exciting and interesting and useful and new, sometimes an OER can balloon beyond what it was supposed to be. It can be something that develops over time and gets better, but the idea of it before it's published might be ballooning before you get to that point. It's good to tell authors, "Hey, you can do more with this later. Your OER can develop after it's published." You should reinforce that they can continue to build on their work iteratively over time, but it still needs to get shared. It needs to get out at some point.
As a lot of people say, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. A resource that isn't published isn't doing anyone any good. It doesn't matter if it would have been open in two years and be the most amazing philosophy textbook you've ever seen in your life. Right now it's a draft in a box folder that's sitting off to the side because they really want to figure out a new way to explain Socrates. Not helpful. So a lot of the time when you're working with ambitious authors, I like to say, "Okay, let's call this the first edition now. Let's say this is it for this, and then we can put out a second edition later. We can put out an update. You can come back to this after you teach with it in your class." But until it is published, until it is out and shared with other people, it's not doing anything. It's not supporting anyone as their work.
And what you're also missing out on in this is the potential for people to give feedback, to build on it and do more interesting things. Maybe that first edition is then adapted for a Canadian context and someone builds out videos or interactives to go with it. Something that your author might not even have considered to begin with could then be integrated into future updates of the work as something that grows beyond their initial idea. So what is our new process? I mentioned a little bit earlier that I used to do all of the production work and support and helping authors, and we had some situations where I was helping directly as an author was developing their materials. But what do we do now?
Currently, our workflow here at the ISU Digital Press is to first meet with an author about their project, their scope, their timeline, and their needs. Then discuss the capabilities of our tools. Oh, you can add text boxes, you can add videos. Here's what H5P needs. Then train authors on accessibility, formatting content and share our contact info with campus partners who can offer support with those things, our Center for Learning and Teaching, our Accessibility folks. And then share our formatting guidelines and instructions for sharing image files. At that point, we'll set up a box folder and say, "Here's where you deposit your drafts when they're done. Here's how you explain which image file goes where, and here's where you drop your image files in full so we have them at their full resolution."
Then the authors work on their own. They draft their content in Word or LaTeX and send their completed files to us for import. If they have peer review that they want to do, we'll do peer review prior to that import to allow for easier editing, unless H5P is a heavy element in the text. Again, these are interactive exercises that need to be put on the webpage for people, so it's best in that case to share it in context. And then we import, format, publish, and handle marketing for the completed texts.
So it's a lot less back and forth and back and forth and more heavily front loaded with training and supporting people and understanding what we can do, some communication throughout as they develop their materials, and then again, heavy support from us to get things at the final finish line after they've developed what they need. This works for us in part because we have two staff, so that helps a lot with the process, but also because it means we're not going back and forth with our authors as much and they're not having to go in and make changes themselves.
Still every situation is different. There are going to be things that we run into with this new process that is not necessarily the best thing ever. There are a lot of roadblocks you cannot expect, and so here's some things that you should know about ahead of time. First, unexpected roadblocks might be communication issues, either because of something you said or if something your author has said. It might be, "Hey, we can't publish your book. Because the accessibility office is busy right now, we just don't have the time, they don't have the time to work on this. We need to hold it back a little bit."
Maybe it's a communication issue of your co-author didn't understand what it meant to openly license a work. We really need them to agree to this before we can publish it because we can't just say, stick a CC BY license on something that doesn't have the full consent of the authors. Maybe there's schedule changes. Like I said, an author might have a child for the first time and say, "Whoops. Well, fall is not going to happen. Maybe next fall for the publication." Maybe the drafts will take some more time or maybe absolutely new things will start happening in the government that changes the way that grant payouts work. For example, "Oh, sorry, author. The grant's office is really backed up with other things right now. So you can't hire an assistant for your project until we get this worked out."
Maybe there are personal emergencies or staffing changes. Regardless, unexpected things will happen. And recognizing that that's not your fault and that's not the author's fault, they just will happen, is an important piece of this puzzle. So yes, things will go wrong, but being able to just roll with the punches and figure it out as you go along is part of publishing in general, but also just any kind of work you might do. I see the chat going wild. Good notes. Thanks guys.
So navigating these roadblocks. Well, first you might consider evaluating and editing your schedule as necessary. You say, "Okay, we were expecting to have this done by fall, but we'll push it to next fall and that'll be fine. Here's when we'll check in for updates." You might refer back to earlier discussions and setting expectations. Say, "Hey, I know this is not really working for you, but as we shared earlier on, when we were talking with you at the beginning of your project, we do need to go through the accessibility office before we can get this published. So it's going to take another two weeks so we can get on their schedule."
You might reflect on what you can finish now or work on later. Say, "Hey, I really appreciate that you're doing this right now, that this is a thing that you're interested in working on, but we can't do this right now because of X, Y, Z. Let's at least get X and we'll get Y, Z later." You can be transparent about where issues are arising and how long it might take. "Okay, yeah, the Grants Office is having some problems, so because we don't know how long that will take, we'll work around it as well as we can." Take notes on how you can avoid this in the future if possible. Sometimes it's not possible to really say that something is reasonable or expected and be flexible throughout this process. We really can't account for everything as I mentioned earlier.
If at any point you feel like you're stuck, you say, "Okay, well, this is just a problem. I don't know how we're going to deal with this. I don't know how anyone thinks that I was capable of being a publisher. What's wrong with me?" Take a step back, determine what actually needs done to get out of this problem. Are you the one who's stuck or is it the author first of all? Is it because you're thinking through what steps you should be taking? Or is it because you're waiting for the author to finish a specific step in the process? Make sure you're in agreement with them about how to proceed. After all, this is their material, this is their course, this is their OER. You're not just going to say, "This is what we're doing," when they need something specific for their teaching.
And remember, if you set a bad example early on, say you work really closely with someone and you give them way more support than you need to, you can enforce boundaries as a new workflow later on, whether it's official or not. That's partly why we have our new standard workflow for working with authors because we need to say, "I know in the past that we were willing to do all of these different things to help you through your project, but we need to follow a structure so we can support the number of authors we have now." I think we have 20 in the pipeline, so it takes some time to get that set up. But reinforcing new workflows can be really useful for getting out of situations where authors expect more than you can actually give.
All right, reflecting and moving on, the hard part. You've gotten through all of the parts of the process of figuring out who are these authors that you're working with? What sort of problems might you encounter as you're working with different types of people, whether it comes to communications, expectations or the work that you're doing specifically. Now, what comes next?
Maybe you've had a really bad project. Should you set new standards and expectations for your work say, "Okay, well this was a bad experience. We shouldn't do things like this anymore." Take a step back from publishing support altogether. "Okay, I just wasn't up for this," or just refuse to work with that particular author in the future. Sometimes it really is a situation where the individual you're working with is not meeting your needs, is not meeting your standards, and it might be the best case for you to just not support another book if they come to you with another idea.
Next, you might think about balancing standards with needs, okay? We've got the situation where you'd had something that happened that was really bad. Was that bad because of the author, you, or the expectations set out before them? Well, sometimes it is those expectations and sometimes it's that the author needs more help. A lot of the time when you're trying to set standards for a publishing work, then you might say, "Okay, well, we really have to have these high standards for what we're expecting from people." And at the same time, authors are saying, "Well, we really don't have the ability to meet those standards at the base level. We're not graphic designers." Some of them are. "We're not people that have a lot of experience with Adobe Illustrator. We haven't actually made interactive exercises before for our courses. This is our first time writing a textbook. I usually write scholarly articles." There's a lot of training and scaffolding that needs to happen to support authors as they're getting into publishing an OER.
You might need to alter your workflow to accommodate their needs and ensure their projects get done, because sometimes the bad experience isn't really their fault. It's because they're not trained to do this. It's a new situation. Of course, other times you might work with an author that's published three textbooks in the past and they know exactly what they're doing, but it's not going to be everybody. Sometimes the healthiest thing to do is just to say, "Well, this is good enough. We're just going to call it here." And that might mean you don't have the prettiest book in the world. It doesn't have the most engaging design elements. It's not the most interactive. But maybe the content is really good. Maybe it covers all of the information that it needs to, the modules meet the needs of the specific course it was developed for, and that is good enough. Because again, OER can be adapted over time. People can build upon it if it doesn't quite meet the needs of their course, and maybe it can become something better in a second edition, in a Canadian edition, in an edition for an Australian audience. There are all kinds of people adapting and building upon works that we're creating right here, and making them more interesting, engaging or different than what they were before.
Regardless, as you're developing out support for authors, it's also good to say, "Okay, well this isn't for me. I can't do this right now. I should not be the one offering the support to you directly. I should not be the one building graphic design elements for your book." No one is entitled to your labor, especially if it is not part of your full-time job. And instead, you can say, "Let's look at who else on campus might be able to support you with this. Let's talk to the instructional design team. Let's talk to people at the system or state level that are available to provide support with these sorts of issues. Let's talk to whoever manages our Manifold instance and see if the Open Education Network can help perhaps." Regardless, it's good to think about when to step away and say, "Okay, this is a little bit too much for me right now, so I'm not going to push this out to be what I want it to be."
That is a lot of things we've just covered. So I want to take a step back now and just chat about your experiences. What sort of works have you published, or are you hoping to publish in the future? What questions do you have about working with authors, and what sort of things have I talked about today that you want to go over in more depth? That's the end of the slides.
Amanda: Thank you, Abbey, for sharing all of that with us and your vast experience with working with authors. I had a situation this year where I had to be like, "I have all these other things on my plate and you're terrible to work with, so I'm going to set new boundaries."
Abbey: That does happen. Yeah.
Amanda: So that is valid, that both of those things can happen at the same time. I'm going to kick off the Q&A with a question about, I'm really curious in your list of your new plan, what does your accessibility training look like? How do you handle that with authors? Could you share that with us?
Abbey: Yeah. The main piece is really explaining why headings need to be in hierarchical order and what that means, and that we can make them the sizes that they need to be. You don't have to make the text of the heading five because you want it to be smaller. That's really the first step, sadly. Besides that, headings and alt texts are the two major pieces that we review. Besides that, most things are more tailored to a specific example. For example, we often have people trying to format images and content in a table to make it appear how they want it to, and we'll explain, "Okay, this is a really interesting graphic. Let's take this table you made and make it into a graphic because it should not be a table," and work through questions like that. So really understanding the basics is as far as we go, and it depends on the individual instructor. That's really why the getting a test import of a single chapter is an important part of the process for us. So we can catch those early on if there's something that's going to be an issue down the line.
Amanda: Thank you so much. I was curious if it was just headers and alt text, 'cause that's where I start with them, too.
Abbey: Headers, alt text and tables, that's the three big ones.
Amanda: Tables are very tricky to make accessible if you didn't know, friends. Karen asked-
Abbey: Especially if people have the ... they have a heading row and then a subheading row because they're under a category and they just really want it to show up like that, and you have to say no.
Amanda: That's not accessible.
Abbey: No.
Amanda: Karen asks: In term of timelines, authors sometimes expect that once the writing is done, it's a short road to publication, but there can be stuff that takes a lot of time to prepare for publication too. Can you speak more to that?
Abbey: Yeah. I think the first thing to keep in mind is that a lot of authors are really excited about having a publication and they'll say, "Oh, this is a real publication and I want to share it as such." But then they also want to have it where they give you the draft in July and have it ready for their class in August, and they don't want to go through peer review because that would slow it down. And we have to say, "Okay, which of these do you want? Do you want to have materials that you can pilot in your class this fall and they will be available for your class and we'll do peer review and editing later? Or do you want to have this as a publication you can put on your CV right now?" Because if you want it to be a real publication, we have to go through peer review, so we have to find those pain points.
And so a lot of the time it is the we'll soft pilot so you can get your student feedback. We'll set up the peer review so you can get the peer review feedback. But we're not actually publishing this officially until after those pieces are done because I want you to get the best of both worlds from this and not try to rush this out so you can have it published for use in your class.
It also means that they're able to make those changes that they might not have thought of before the peer review process. For example, you get other people teaching the class that say, "Oh, this is really great. Did you know so-and-so just published a new version of this infographic online that you can use?" And then the author says, "Wow, okay. I don't have to use this outdated infographic explaining this concept. Thank you, peer." It happens more often than you'd think.
Amanda: Rachel says: I really think it's important to understand that the author interest level drops off so dramatically after the drafts are finished so we can get the buy-in to be police later, which I also agree with.
Abbey: That is another piece where I think it's really helpful to get the student piloting phase into the process because students are the best at catching typos. The author, after you hit Publish, is the first best person at finding typos because they'll suddenly find every single one that they didn't find the first time around, but after them, it's the students in class who will point out, "You misspelled the word author," and that just happens.
Amanda:
I encourage instructors the first time they pilot to give an extra credit assignment for just that task. You can find a typo in the book, you get X many extra credit points with a cap. You can't get all of the extra credit points to the whole book, but ...
Abbey: Absolutely.
Amanda: To encourage it. Yeah. Does anyone else have any questions? There's still a couple minutes to answer them. Feel free to come off of mute if you would like to ask on the microphone or to put them in the chat.
Does your team handle accessibility or do you partner with another unit?
Abbey: Absolutely. So we personally do accessibility reviews ourselves. We used to partner with another unit, but it's a unit of two staff, and then all of a sudden they had a lot of things on their hands when they were told they have to review every single website at the university, and they were no longer able to help us with books. So when a staff that's a unit of two people has to make sure that things are in compliance with the law, other things have to go behind. So that is what our team does now. Here's our books, by the way, just to give a kudos to all of our excellent authors.
Amanda: I also handle all of the first accessibility remediation for our books at Ohio State. I use a tool that I'll link in the chat if you want to save it, and you can put it in the Pressbooks URL, and it will go through and it will tell you what initially is wrong, and it'll also tell you what it can't look for so that it needs to be remediated by a human. But I will tell you, what it catches mostly is people who put their headings in the wrong order.
Abbey: I find it really helps when you get the hint that the alt text is too long. That is the best feedback I get from an online accessibility tracker. It'll say, "Hey, you made this way too long." And I'll say, "Okay." Well, I'll put that at the bottom of the page and link to it, and I'll have short alt text in the actual alt text field to save myself some trouble down the line. Someone else asked: Do you also use screen readers in the process? Not right now, I do not, but I do try to go through just about everything else I can, in part because it is still just me doing that. Amanda does. Thank you, Amanda.
While folks are chatting up in the chat, I'll also share one thing that I did not bring up today, but I find it's very useful specifically for onboarding authors, and that is talking about what support you offer at the after publication stage or at publication stage. A lot of the time what people ask me is, "Okay, but how do you get it out there? How do you help people find this?" And it is a multi-pronged approach where we first get it submitted to the open textbook library, thank you, Karen. But then also add it to OER Commons, we add it to our library catalog. Our metadata folks are lovely, and they're willing to do that for us and to share it out with others who want to put it into their own catalogs.
We then assign a DOI to the materials, so it'll be pulled into the author's Google Scholar profile as a publication, which is also very useful for them. And then finally, we get it up in, because we use Pressbooks, the Pressbooks directory, so we have it in all of these different places for people to find. And then, I also put out the most annoying mailing lists where I say new publication from us. I know it's been three weeks, here's another one. But it is a good way to make sure that your author's works are getting out to more people and that they're able to find it.
Yes, we do DOIs, not ISBNs, in part because an ISBN is focused on a specific format. So we would have to have one for the PDF, one for the online, one for the ebook, et cetera, to distinguish them, and that would get unwieldy. Whereas for DOIs, because they're flexible for online materials, it's better for our needs. And we already have journals, so it was easier to put in our workflow.
Other questions? I mentioned it a lot early on, but it's one of those things when you think about working with an author that you can't say, well, all authors. Because as we started, the very first question of today's meeting, what does a typical author look for in a publication? There is no typical author. Some of them are high-strung, anxious, and uncertain about how to ask questions. Some of them are very willing to work on their own to the point where they probably shouldn't. And some of them really want to work with you directly and to talk with you every step of the way and ask you a lot of questions and maybe more questions they need to. But each of those people is an individual with specific needs that need to be accounted for in some way through whatever workflow you're going to use to support them.
Thank you, Karen. Sharing out some more stuff about Unit 1 in the curriculum where you'll learn more about actually developing open textbooks and not just the people work around it. I could talk about that too, but I won't. You'll have other people. Well, we are at time, so thank you everybody for coming today.
Amanda: Thank you so much, everybody. We'll see you next week.
END OF VIDEO
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Hosted by Amanda C. Larson of Ohio State University, the second synchronous session of Pub101 in 2025 provides practical guidance for working with faculty authors. Iowa State University's Abbey Elder shares examples of positive and negative author-publisher relationships, recommendations for onboarding and communicating with authors, considerations when developing expectations for authors, and much more.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Audio Transcript
Speaker:
- Amanda C. Larson (Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant, Ohio State University)
- Abbey Elder (Open Access & Scholarly Communication Librarian, Iowa State University)
Amanda: Hello, and welcome to the Open Education's Pub101. Thank you for joining us for today's session. I'm Amanda Larson, and I am the co-chair of Pub101. I'm also the Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant at Ohio State, and I'm going to be the hostess with the mostest today, and I'll facilitate this session.
So in just a couple of minutes, I'm going to hand it off to Abbey Elder, who is fantastic and wonderful from Iowa State, and she's going to talk to us today about the joyous prospect of working with authors. And as always, we're going to leave time for you to have questions and conversation, and there might be some of you here who already have experience working with authors, and we invite you to share your experiences and resources. Here are a few housekeeping details. We have an orientation document that includes our schedule and links to session sites and the recordings. So if you can't make it to a session and want to know what you've missed, that is the place to check. Please check that document.
Please also remember that there's a companion resource for these sessions, the Pub101 Canvas curriculum. That's where you'll find the resources and templates mentioned throughout the sessions this spring. We're also recording this session and it will get added to our YouTube Pub101 Spring 2025 playlist. Most importantly, we are definitely committed to providing a friendly and safe and welcoming environment for everybody aligned with our community norms. So please join us in creating a safe and constructive space.
Today we're going to kick off today's conversation. We have a brief, reflective question, and today's question is, I have to move the chat off of it. That's not helpful. What do you imagine your typical author will want to do? For example, do you think they'll want to create a book from scratch, adapt an existing work, collaborate with students, work alone, collaborate with other co-authors? And if you could take just a second and reflect on that and then throw an answer in the chat, that would be great.
Anna says, remix and collaborate, adapt and collaborate, remix, create a book from scratch, adapt and collaborate. Abbey says that our typical author really wants to make something happen on their own, but they may not know that collaborating is an option. All of the above is a great answer. Is there such a thing as a typical author? I feel like that it could be anything. I think that's also fair. That's very, very fair.
Thank you for posting the question in the chat, Karen. Create a book from scratch, usually alone. So my answer to this question is also create a book from scratch, usually alone. Or they want to remix copyrighted materials into their work and I have to talk them down off that ledge. With that said, I'm going to hand it over to Abbey to talk to us today about working with authors. Take it away, Abbey.
Abbey: Thank you, Amanda. All right, let me go ahead and share my slides and hopefully everything works perfectly and there are no problems at any point in time. Lovely. Okay.
Hello everyone. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about working with authors, and my entire presentation is really structured around examples of actual times I've worked with authors on projects of many different sizes and shapes and the ways that different types of people might affect the way that you work with them.
So first, for some context, I am the Open Access and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Iowa State University and the statewide Open Education Coordinator for the Iowa Open Education Action Team. In these two roles I lead is ISU's Open Education Program, coordinating publications from our authors, training instructors on the implementation of open pedagogy and open education in their courses. And I support a cross institutional group of open ed advocates, helping them reach others across our state and assessing the growth of open education programs across all of our institutions. That's only one job technically.
So my publishing context though, is a little bit unique. I do not technically have publishing in my job title in any way. Our publishing program was first started in 2018 with the launch of our Open Education Mini-Grant program with our digital press launching the next year under our Scholarly Publishing Services Librarian. The ISU Digital Press now has two staff members. If you were here last year, it did not. So this is good news. Harrison Inefuku is the Head, and Scott McCleary is our new Production Editor. So I currently help with author onboarding and limited production support, but previously I was also doing all of the work that Scott does as our Production Editor. So to help us understand a little bit more of how different authors might coordinate with an open education publication, I want to talk about three different people and the ways that they worked with our team to develop their OER.
The first I called the loner. This author came to us with drafts they had already been working on for quite some time and a plan for how they wanted to proceed. Their content was already formatted in LaTeX. They did not necessarily follow our guidelines. There was no alternative text, there was improper use of headings. And after discussing what we needed from them, source files, alt text, additional support, and the options for publishing their work, they agreed to let us test a Pressbooks import for them.
So our production editor created a macro to convert their LaTeX to HTML for import into Pressbooks, and we're now working with them on next steps. But a lot of this was a, well, they've already done a lot of the work. They didn't come to us early. They didn't tell us anything. They are just doing their own thing and we have to figure out how to approach this while still supporting them. So that's the loner.
Then we've got the collaborator. So this author explained their project's needs early on and worked with me to get buy-in for their project. I worked with them directly to draft H5P exercises to complement their content. We imported their content. I made some edits for design, accessibility and inclusion, helped them find images that were openly licensed, and they relied on me heavily during the editing and refining phases of their project quite a bit. The final project has been commended for its content and presentation has been published for a few years now. So this was overall a really good outcome, but the project itself was a lot.
And finally, we have the anxious. So this is an author who during their projects onboarding took notes and didn't really ask many questions. They developed their content following our template, followed the rules, worked alone for about a year, and every check-in email they would reply, "I'm doing fine. Everything's on schedule." It's only now recently after being prompted to share a draft of a sample chapter that we could review that we learned the author didn't actually understand the support that was available for them. They'd done excessive work by themselves trying to figure out how to get everything done, but they'd been too embarrassed to ask for help or for clarifications on what exactly we offered.
So each of these people, the anxious, the loner, the collaborator come with different things with these relationships. Some of them have their own expectations of what a publisher is and what they do. Some of them might think, "Oh, well I have to do all of this on my own and just figure it out." And others might say, "Well, this is a full service support. This is what this process is. I'll let them do the work." All bringing different things.
I want to ask, first off, have you ever worked with an author like one of these? Have you been in one of these situations yourself where you're helping to support someone and then you find out they didn't really understand what was available, or maybe they were really needy and needed additional support to get their work done, but it was a fulfilling experience nonetheless? Feel free to share in the chat.
And thank you, Amanda, for explaining what H5P are. Or perhaps if you've never worked with an author before, please feel free to let me know as well. Yeah, one person saying yes to all three, rewarding all the way around. Yes to all three. I've had an author record hours of PowerPoints with voiceover only to realize that wasn't accessible. Absolutely. Haven't worked with an author yet. That is okay. That's also what you're here for. Yeah, so we've got a good spread of people who've worked with different types of people, different kinds of outcomes, and trying to figure out what else you can do as well. Absolutely.
And this isn't necessarily true just for OER as we have some instructional designers in the chat. I'm sure you understand as well, when you get to hear from someone and they say, "I've been working on my course, I put everything together," and then you look at it and say, "Oh, we have a template for that. We could have helped you through this process."
All right, so let's move on to the next section of this and talk a little bit about the fact that none of these situations are necessarily all bad. There are pros and cons to each of these relationships and these types of people that we're working with as authors. The loner, for example, has made some really good content. They weren't in a hurry. They had done everything on their own. But because they started without our support, without any guidance on what we needed from them, there was a lot of remediation that's needed to get them to publication.
The collaborator's energy led to a really great OER. We collaborated, we learned together, we talked about what was possible and really thought through what was the best way to make their materials expressive. But because they needed support, that led to a bad work-life balance for me personally.
And the anxious author seemed to be the least problematic, the easiest to work with. But in reality, there was a lot of retroactive training and meetings that had to happen to get them back on track When we realized not only were they behind schedule, they also didn't realize what support was available to get them to the finish line of their project.
So this is all to say that I really want you to remember, authors are all people. They have different things they're bringing into these conversations, to these situations as they work through their publications. They're not necessarily authors. They're a person who says, "I'm really anxious about making sure I do this right. I have had other experiences with publishers and they expect me to do this." Or maybe they really don't know what to expect, and anything you give them at face value, they will take as it is. A lot of issues we face when working with authors don't stem from them alone either. They stem from us maybe not communicating well enough what the expectations for them are and what they can expect from us.
So what can you learn from my experiences here? Well, first I want to say working with authors is about a lot of things. It's not just about communication. It's also about respect, respecting them as authors who are also instructors who have a lot of other things going on in their lives. I just met with someone today who said, "Hey, I'm about a year off from where I'm supposed to be on my grant because I just had my first kid and I did not think that that would just stop me in my tracks for four months. It happens."
Second, there's managing expectations. Again, setting those guidelines in place for this is what we need from your drafts, this is what you can expect from us, and this is when you should ask us for help.
Three, communicating enough. And I think communicating enough is a really important way of describing this because for some authors communicating enough is checking in at the start and end of the semester to make sure everything's on track. And for some of them, like our anxious author, maybe it would've been every three weeks, checking in and making sure we're on the same page, making sure that they had everything they needed to keep moving forward.
And finally, developing shared goals for their project. So shared goals isn't just about understanding what their goals are. It's also about making sure that their goals align with us as a publisher or as a service provider and making sure that what we're developing and providing for them meets their needs as well. So in some ways, it's, "Okay, you want to do this, here's what we can offer." But in other ways it's, "Hey, we offer these other things. Would you like to take advantage of that as well?" For example, like I mentioned earlier, we use Pressbooks here at Iowa State. So we like to tell people about the different options we have for embedding videos. So you don't have to do something that's just a simple PDF like you might on your own.
So how do you actually build those relationships, build that respect in, and think about how to put forward those expectations? There are a few questions to ask as you get started. First, what does the author want? Okay, where are they coming from this? What is the purpose of their project? Second, what is their desired end result? So do they want this to be a handbook, a textbook? Is this going to be something they want to update over time or is this going to be something that is a full first edition set in stone at the end of the day? What is their timeline? So do they expect to have this done at the end of the summer? Do they expect to have this done next spring? Do they expect to have this done maybe the winter of 2026? Because the differences between those three people is also going to be a difference in what you can expect from them in timelines for producing their work and expectations. And finally, do they have other preferences for technology, art, or licenses? Are there specific tools they want to use like Jupyter Notebooks? Do they need help finding materials that are openly licensed for their images? And do they understand what it means to openly license their work?
All of these things will change how you approach working with the author because if their purpose is to just make a lab book for their students that can be printed, they want to have it done by the end of the summer, their end result is really just a PDF and they don't really have a preference for technology as long as they can learn it quickly, that's going to be a very different experience to someone who wants to make a full service, interactive material that plugs into your LMS and can pull back things for different exercises into the grade book and they want to have it done in the next year or two. They're flexible. Those authors are very different people with different types of needs and the other groups on your campus you're going to need to partner with to support them will also be different.
Which brings us to what can the author do? So this isn't just about their experience. This is also about their position. Are they full-time an adjunct or do they have other things on their mind that are taking up their time? What does their teaching load look like? Do they have funds available to support their work? Do they have different technology proficiencies? For example, if an instructor wants to create videos, but they don't really have the ability to do that with the tools they have right now, they've never done it before and you don't have support on campus for video production, that might be a little bit harder than someone who does YouTube videos on the side or already puts out weekly videos for their lectures for students.
And also support from their department is a huge piece of this because while an author might be a lecturer with a relatively high teaching load and no funds available, if their department chair says this is a priority and we want to focus on it, they might get additional time dedicated to supporting an OER project. Which brings me to my next question. What is a question you might ask to get to know an author's purpose for pursuing an OER publication besides why are you doing this? What else might you ask to get an idea of, okay, why? What is this? What is this for? Great question. Have you used OER before? 'Cause that will also get at the idea of are they thinking about this as an OER? Are they just thinking of this as making something for their class?
Amanda notes, I like to ask how they want to use the final product because that's a big piece of it. Is this something you're going to give to your students as a study guide? Is this something you're going to refer to in class? Is this the basis for labs? Lovely question. Why are you moving away from your current book? Because this might be a situation where a commercial material is no longer a meeting an author's needs, or maybe they're using a book that they wrote themselves, but they want to make a new addition as an OER. There are some very good questions in the chat here, so I highly recommend checking them out, everyone.
What does success look like for this project? Absolutely. And a great question. Are you okay with someone taking your work and modifying it for their needs? That's an interesting way of bringing up the topic of, hey, do you understand what it means to openly license your work? What I often like to do is also flip that and say, "Have you looked at other open materials that you might adapt as the basis for this or incorporate into your book?" Because that brings in the idea of reciprocity rather than just making it a, you're giving something away that other people can take. It can be part of a back and forth. These are wonderful comments. Thank you everyone.
All right, so let's move on and talk a little bit about some more situations you might run into as you're going through this work. Besides, what can your author do, another question you might ask is: What can you do? So yeah, it matters what your author can do, what resources they have access to, whether they have time to devote to OER development. But also, what can you personally do? Do you have time on your schedule? Is this part of your job? Is this something that you have the ability to facilitate? For example, can you manage workflows, systems or platforms? Do you have access to a platform like Manifold, Pressbooks, LibreTexts, or even just Word? Do you have a repository where you can share materials? Figuring out what you have access to is really the first step.
Can you help schedule check-ins and make sure that people are on top of things as they go through their work? Really, this topic is about communicating expectations, communicating expectations of what authors can expect from you, and understanding who does what. When it comes to these questions of workflows, systems, platforms, timelines, really the question is what expectations are reasonable? So based on your job, what can you actually ask people to expect from you, and what can you offer? Because you don't want to say, "Of course, this is a full service publisher." This is something you're doing as a quarter of your time, or even less just to support people as best you can.
So another question you might ask is: What can you not do? A lot of the time when we're talking about OER publishing work, if you're officially doing publishing, let's say for sure this is something that you've integrated into your role in some way and you know you can do some of this work, you still have to say, what can you not do? Are there services you don't offer or projects you won't take on? For example, we don't personally do copy editing work because we don't have the staffing for it, and it takes a lot of funding to hire others to do it. Can you support the author's platform preferences or specific formatting needs? Do you allow certain fonts or color choices or disallow certain ones? Do you accommodate closed projects or ones with no derivatives licenses, or are there specific use cases for those?
For example, you might say, "All of our projects are open access and they're licensed under CC by NCSA at the most closed, unless it's maybe a student led project or an open pedagogy project that might need to be more closed down than that." And can the author leave out alternative text and have you add it in later? Now that's a clear please say no and be willing to say no, whenever there's something that comes up that is a non-negotiable for you that you do not want to do.
And also think about when you make exceptions. So a lot of the times when we're setting these expectations in place, we're doing it so we can have a flat base to work from. Okay, across the board, these are our rules, these are our settings that we're expecting from people. And that way we can make exceptions when it's necessary, but there are problems when we make exceptions for some people and not others. The problems with, as I call it vibes-based exceptions, is you might be doing it for the wrong reasons. Are you certain that you aren't limiting or extending support based on an unconscious bias? "Well, I really like this person. They remind me of me when I got started. I want to help them out."
When you make these sorts of exceptions willy-nilly, rather than having an expectation, as I mentioned earlier with the no derivatives licenses for student created work, then you're setting up situations where you can also be taken advantage of if you're going above and beyond, or maybe even limiting yourself from helping others who might need that support more.
Another thing I want to point out I mentioned a little bit earlier, is that you are not the individual that needs to be doing everything related to OER publishing at your institution. Maybe you are the one in charge of it. Maybe you are the one starting it up. Maybe you're the one exploring it, but it doesn't have to be just you. Leveraging support from other offices at your institution, other individuals across your campus can be extremely useful for getting OER work off the ground, especially if it's work that needs support from experts. So you could get technology experts who can test publishing tools, maybe your IT department. You can get instructional designers to help with the outlines, chapter templates. Understanding different things like how to write good learning objectives is incredibly useful for authors as they're working on textbooks for the first time.
Librarians can help find OER to remix or media to include as openly licensed. Accessibility practitioners can review content as it's drafted or at certain stages in the process. Again, this is about what people are willing to do and what makes sense for their time. And you of course can oversee and enforce the deadlines during the production. You can help people understand, okay, this is how this works, this is what we're expecting from you and what you can expect from us. And all of these roles can be for different people in different groups. It depends on what your institution has access to and what you personally feel comfortable doing. But you don't have to do it alone.
So before I move on to the onboarding new author section, I want to ask you one more question, and that is: Are there individuals in any of these units or others that currently partner with you on OER publishing work or OER support on your campus? Or are there others that you could reach out to that you haven't already? I know a lot of you haven't worked with authors yet, so feel free to just brainstorm people you could reach out to at your institution. And thank you, Amanda, for saying it's okay to not support every project that someone pitches. Sometimes a project is a bad idea regardless of whether they have funding.
Yeah, centers for teaching and learning are always excellent to work with. The writing center, absolutely. Especially if you're thinking about getting in touch with people who have access to student assistance who can help with things like peer review or copy editing or other support on campus that might already have some sort of process in place for that. Someone has a great relationship with your accessibility office, which is lovely. Not all of us have accessibility offices, sadly.
Print shop or marketing for graphic design support. And also University Printing can be a great person to partner with if you want to have optional print available for materials, especially if it's for a specific class. So a lot of authors really want to make sure their students can buy materials for their courses in print, even if it's in a limited quantity or print-on-demand. You guys have great ideas. All right, so let's go ahead and move on to the next section, onboarding new authors.
Okay, we've talked a lot about when you already have a relationship with an author, when you're already working through processes, when you're building workflows, but what about onboarding someone for the first time? There are a couple of different steps to go through as you think about this. The first is the planning meeting. This might include a discussion with the authors about what it is they're doing. What is the general structure of their OER? Is it a lab book? Is it a textbook? Is it a set of modules? Is it mostly videos with a little bit of text? Is it mostly text with a little bit of images? What does this look like?
Then their production process, the drafting, editing and review steps. This might be your production process where you're outlining this is what we need from you at different stages and what you can expect from us. Or it could be what they've done already and what they expect to go through next. You might also talk about anything that might be tricky. Okay, so are there going to be a lot of complex tables in this work? Is there're going to be a lot of mathematical equations, multiple languages, other things you need to work through? I'm working on an accounting book right now, and so we had to talk through, okay, what's the best way to format an accounting spreadsheet but in a book, but also make it good. It's a question.
And finally, talk through expectations for peer review or other production work that they might expect. So if you offer support with formatting or if you coordinate peer review or if you have recommendations for peer review, these are all things to talk about early on so your authors understand what it is that they're doing and what it actually looks like. Because sometimes just saying these are the steps that we're going through and the things that we've thought through helps people feel more comfortable in seeing you as a publisher, as a person that's supporting them in making something really official and not just someone who's saying, "Here's some tools. Go forth and do." Which can be good, but it's different sorts of relationships you might be having with them.
At this point, after you've met with the instructor, the author, and talked through what they want to do, it's good to set expectations for workflows. So are they going to draft their content in Word, LaTeX, Markdown, Pressbooks, LibreTexts, directly in a tool or separately from it and import it later? There's a lot of different things you might set in place for expectations at this stage. Should they prepare a sample chapter for you to review and make sure that they're following your guidelines? I personally recommend this because that way you can catch early on if they didn't actually understand what you meant by alternative text. And it's good to also go over who's responsible for reviewing content for accessibility, formatting, cover art design and other steps like this. Personally for us, all of those final pieces there are handled by our team, but we also have a team, so it's easier to say that.
And finally, what should they expect from you? What is your typical response time? So some people might say, "Okay, when I give you the final draft of the manuscript, how long till it'll be published?" Hard to answer that question because it depends. But you can say, "After you get it to us, we'll look it over and we'll get back to you in this amount of time about next steps." Really, this is about setting guidelines that you can expect from all your authors to prevent scope creep. So you're not saying, "Yeah, we can do this. We can do that. We'll make this work," and then things get a little bit snowbally.
As you're doing all of this work, you're talking to people, you're setting expectations, you're having your first meetings and figuring out what their project needs. There's a few things that can help. First, find the best mode of communication for you and the author. Is that email, is that phone or Zoom meetings? Is that in-person meetings or discussions over at messenger app like Slack or Teams? Is that using a project management tool to keep track of how they're going down a process? There's a lot of different things that might work for different people. For example, I am still having weekly meetings with one of our authors who's been working on a book for two years now. That works for us. But other people might just want to email every few weeks or every month or every few months depending on the project. But regardless, it's best to set up regular check-ins, monthly or bimonthly, or set guidelines for when authors should update you on their progress if that's at the end of a semester or at certain points throughout the year.
And there's another thing you probably think about. When you're working with an author who's really excited about doing something big and exciting and interesting and useful and new, sometimes an OER can balloon beyond what it was supposed to be. It can be something that develops over time and gets better, but the idea of it before it's published might be ballooning before you get to that point. It's good to tell authors, "Hey, you can do more with this later. Your OER can develop after it's published." You should reinforce that they can continue to build on their work iteratively over time, but it still needs to get shared. It needs to get out at some point.
As a lot of people say, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. A resource that isn't published isn't doing anyone any good. It doesn't matter if it would have been open in two years and be the most amazing philosophy textbook you've ever seen in your life. Right now it's a draft in a box folder that's sitting off to the side because they really want to figure out a new way to explain Socrates. Not helpful. So a lot of the time when you're working with ambitious authors, I like to say, "Okay, let's call this the first edition now. Let's say this is it for this, and then we can put out a second edition later. We can put out an update. You can come back to this after you teach with it in your class." But until it is published, until it is out and shared with other people, it's not doing anything. It's not supporting anyone as their work.
And what you're also missing out on in this is the potential for people to give feedback, to build on it and do more interesting things. Maybe that first edition is then adapted for a Canadian context and someone builds out videos or interactives to go with it. Something that your author might not even have considered to begin with could then be integrated into future updates of the work as something that grows beyond their initial idea. So what is our new process? I mentioned a little bit earlier that I used to do all of the production work and support and helping authors, and we had some situations where I was helping directly as an author was developing their materials. But what do we do now?
Currently, our workflow here at the ISU Digital Press is to first meet with an author about their project, their scope, their timeline, and their needs. Then discuss the capabilities of our tools. Oh, you can add text boxes, you can add videos. Here's what H5P needs. Then train authors on accessibility, formatting content and share our contact info with campus partners who can offer support with those things, our Center for Learning and Teaching, our Accessibility folks. And then share our formatting guidelines and instructions for sharing image files. At that point, we'll set up a box folder and say, "Here's where you deposit your drafts when they're done. Here's how you explain which image file goes where, and here's where you drop your image files in full so we have them at their full resolution."
Then the authors work on their own. They draft their content in Word or LaTeX and send their completed files to us for import. If they have peer review that they want to do, we'll do peer review prior to that import to allow for easier editing, unless H5P is a heavy element in the text. Again, these are interactive exercises that need to be put on the webpage for people, so it's best in that case to share it in context. And then we import, format, publish, and handle marketing for the completed texts.
So it's a lot less back and forth and back and forth and more heavily front loaded with training and supporting people and understanding what we can do, some communication throughout as they develop their materials, and then again, heavy support from us to get things at the final finish line after they've developed what they need. This works for us in part because we have two staff, so that helps a lot with the process, but also because it means we're not going back and forth with our authors as much and they're not having to go in and make changes themselves.
Still every situation is different. There are going to be things that we run into with this new process that is not necessarily the best thing ever. There are a lot of roadblocks you cannot expect, and so here's some things that you should know about ahead of time. First, unexpected roadblocks might be communication issues, either because of something you said or if something your author has said. It might be, "Hey, we can't publish your book. Because the accessibility office is busy right now, we just don't have the time, they don't have the time to work on this. We need to hold it back a little bit."
Maybe it's a communication issue of your co-author didn't understand what it meant to openly license a work. We really need them to agree to this before we can publish it because we can't just say, stick a CC BY license on something that doesn't have the full consent of the authors. Maybe there's schedule changes. Like I said, an author might have a child for the first time and say, "Whoops. Well, fall is not going to happen. Maybe next fall for the publication." Maybe the drafts will take some more time or maybe absolutely new things will start happening in the government that changes the way that grant payouts work. For example, "Oh, sorry, author. The grant's office is really backed up with other things right now. So you can't hire an assistant for your project until we get this worked out."
Maybe there are personal emergencies or staffing changes. Regardless, unexpected things will happen. And recognizing that that's not your fault and that's not the author's fault, they just will happen, is an important piece of this puzzle. So yes, things will go wrong, but being able to just roll with the punches and figure it out as you go along is part of publishing in general, but also just any kind of work you might do. I see the chat going wild. Good notes. Thanks guys.
So navigating these roadblocks. Well, first you might consider evaluating and editing your schedule as necessary. You say, "Okay, we were expecting to have this done by fall, but we'll push it to next fall and that'll be fine. Here's when we'll check in for updates." You might refer back to earlier discussions and setting expectations. Say, "Hey, I know this is not really working for you, but as we shared earlier on, when we were talking with you at the beginning of your project, we do need to go through the accessibility office before we can get this published. So it's going to take another two weeks so we can get on their schedule."
You might reflect on what you can finish now or work on later. Say, "Hey, I really appreciate that you're doing this right now, that this is a thing that you're interested in working on, but we can't do this right now because of X, Y, Z. Let's at least get X and we'll get Y, Z later." You can be transparent about where issues are arising and how long it might take. "Okay, yeah, the Grants Office is having some problems, so because we don't know how long that will take, we'll work around it as well as we can." Take notes on how you can avoid this in the future if possible. Sometimes it's not possible to really say that something is reasonable or expected and be flexible throughout this process. We really can't account for everything as I mentioned earlier.
If at any point you feel like you're stuck, you say, "Okay, well, this is just a problem. I don't know how we're going to deal with this. I don't know how anyone thinks that I was capable of being a publisher. What's wrong with me?" Take a step back, determine what actually needs done to get out of this problem. Are you the one who's stuck or is it the author first of all? Is it because you're thinking through what steps you should be taking? Or is it because you're waiting for the author to finish a specific step in the process? Make sure you're in agreement with them about how to proceed. After all, this is their material, this is their course, this is their OER. You're not just going to say, "This is what we're doing," when they need something specific for their teaching.
And remember, if you set a bad example early on, say you work really closely with someone and you give them way more support than you need to, you can enforce boundaries as a new workflow later on, whether it's official or not. That's partly why we have our new standard workflow for working with authors because we need to say, "I know in the past that we were willing to do all of these different things to help you through your project, but we need to follow a structure so we can support the number of authors we have now." I think we have 20 in the pipeline, so it takes some time to get that set up. But reinforcing new workflows can be really useful for getting out of situations where authors expect more than you can actually give.
All right, reflecting and moving on, the hard part. You've gotten through all of the parts of the process of figuring out who are these authors that you're working with? What sort of problems might you encounter as you're working with different types of people, whether it comes to communications, expectations or the work that you're doing specifically. Now, what comes next?
Maybe you've had a really bad project. Should you set new standards and expectations for your work say, "Okay, well this was a bad experience. We shouldn't do things like this anymore." Take a step back from publishing support altogether. "Okay, I just wasn't up for this," or just refuse to work with that particular author in the future. Sometimes it really is a situation where the individual you're working with is not meeting your needs, is not meeting your standards, and it might be the best case for you to just not support another book if they come to you with another idea.
Next, you might think about balancing standards with needs, okay? We've got the situation where you'd had something that happened that was really bad. Was that bad because of the author, you, or the expectations set out before them? Well, sometimes it is those expectations and sometimes it's that the author needs more help. A lot of the time when you're trying to set standards for a publishing work, then you might say, "Okay, well, we really have to have these high standards for what we're expecting from people." And at the same time, authors are saying, "Well, we really don't have the ability to meet those standards at the base level. We're not graphic designers." Some of them are. "We're not people that have a lot of experience with Adobe Illustrator. We haven't actually made interactive exercises before for our courses. This is our first time writing a textbook. I usually write scholarly articles." There's a lot of training and scaffolding that needs to happen to support authors as they're getting into publishing an OER.
You might need to alter your workflow to accommodate their needs and ensure their projects get done, because sometimes the bad experience isn't really their fault. It's because they're not trained to do this. It's a new situation. Of course, other times you might work with an author that's published three textbooks in the past and they know exactly what they're doing, but it's not going to be everybody. Sometimes the healthiest thing to do is just to say, "Well, this is good enough. We're just going to call it here." And that might mean you don't have the prettiest book in the world. It doesn't have the most engaging design elements. It's not the most interactive. But maybe the content is really good. Maybe it covers all of the information that it needs to, the modules meet the needs of the specific course it was developed for, and that is good enough. Because again, OER can be adapted over time. People can build upon it if it doesn't quite meet the needs of their course, and maybe it can become something better in a second edition, in a Canadian edition, in an edition for an Australian audience. There are all kinds of people adapting and building upon works that we're creating right here, and making them more interesting, engaging or different than what they were before.
Regardless, as you're developing out support for authors, it's also good to say, "Okay, well this isn't for me. I can't do this right now. I should not be the one offering the support to you directly. I should not be the one building graphic design elements for your book." No one is entitled to your labor, especially if it is not part of your full-time job. And instead, you can say, "Let's look at who else on campus might be able to support you with this. Let's talk to the instructional design team. Let's talk to people at the system or state level that are available to provide support with these sorts of issues. Let's talk to whoever manages our Manifold instance and see if the Open Education Network can help perhaps." Regardless, it's good to think about when to step away and say, "Okay, this is a little bit too much for me right now, so I'm not going to push this out to be what I want it to be."
That is a lot of things we've just covered. So I want to take a step back now and just chat about your experiences. What sort of works have you published, or are you hoping to publish in the future? What questions do you have about working with authors, and what sort of things have I talked about today that you want to go over in more depth? That's the end of the slides.
Amanda: Thank you, Abbey, for sharing all of that with us and your vast experience with working with authors. I had a situation this year where I had to be like, "I have all these other things on my plate and you're terrible to work with, so I'm going to set new boundaries."
Abbey: That does happen. Yeah.
Amanda: So that is valid, that both of those things can happen at the same time. I'm going to kick off the Q&A with a question about, I'm really curious in your list of your new plan, what does your accessibility training look like? How do you handle that with authors? Could you share that with us?
Abbey: Yeah. The main piece is really explaining why headings need to be in hierarchical order and what that means, and that we can make them the sizes that they need to be. You don't have to make the text of the heading five because you want it to be smaller. That's really the first step, sadly. Besides that, headings and alt texts are the two major pieces that we review. Besides that, most things are more tailored to a specific example. For example, we often have people trying to format images and content in a table to make it appear how they want it to, and we'll explain, "Okay, this is a really interesting graphic. Let's take this table you made and make it into a graphic because it should not be a table," and work through questions like that. So really understanding the basics is as far as we go, and it depends on the individual instructor. That's really why the getting a test import of a single chapter is an important part of the process for us. So we can catch those early on if there's something that's going to be an issue down the line.
Amanda: Thank you so much. I was curious if it was just headers and alt text, 'cause that's where I start with them, too.
Abbey: Headers, alt text and tables, that's the three big ones.
Amanda: Tables are very tricky to make accessible if you didn't know, friends. Karen asked-
Abbey: Especially if people have the ... they have a heading row and then a subheading row because they're under a category and they just really want it to show up like that, and you have to say no.
Amanda: That's not accessible.
Abbey: No.
Amanda: Karen asks: In term of timelines, authors sometimes expect that once the writing is done, it's a short road to publication, but there can be stuff that takes a lot of time to prepare for publication too. Can you speak more to that?
Abbey: Yeah. I think the first thing to keep in mind is that a lot of authors are really excited about having a publication and they'll say, "Oh, this is a real publication and I want to share it as such." But then they also want to have it where they give you the draft in July and have it ready for their class in August, and they don't want to go through peer review because that would slow it down. And we have to say, "Okay, which of these do you want? Do you want to have materials that you can pilot in your class this fall and they will be available for your class and we'll do peer review and editing later? Or do you want to have this as a publication you can put on your CV right now?" Because if you want it to be a real publication, we have to go through peer review, so we have to find those pain points.
And so a lot of the time it is the we'll soft pilot so you can get your student feedback. We'll set up the peer review so you can get the peer review feedback. But we're not actually publishing this officially until after those pieces are done because I want you to get the best of both worlds from this and not try to rush this out so you can have it published for use in your class.
It also means that they're able to make those changes that they might not have thought of before the peer review process. For example, you get other people teaching the class that say, "Oh, this is really great. Did you know so-and-so just published a new version of this infographic online that you can use?" And then the author says, "Wow, okay. I don't have to use this outdated infographic explaining this concept. Thank you, peer." It happens more often than you'd think.
Amanda: Rachel says: I really think it's important to understand that the author interest level drops off so dramatically after the drafts are finished so we can get the buy-in to be police later, which I also agree with.
Abbey: That is another piece where I think it's really helpful to get the student piloting phase into the process because students are the best at catching typos. The author, after you hit Publish, is the first best person at finding typos because they'll suddenly find every single one that they didn't find the first time around, but after them, it's the students in class who will point out, "You misspelled the word author," and that just happens.
Amanda:
I encourage instructors the first time they pilot to give an extra credit assignment for just that task. You can find a typo in the book, you get X many extra credit points with a cap. You can't get all of the extra credit points to the whole book, but ...
Abbey: Absolutely.
Amanda: To encourage it. Yeah. Does anyone else have any questions? There's still a couple minutes to answer them. Feel free to come off of mute if you would like to ask on the microphone or to put them in the chat.
Does your team handle accessibility or do you partner with another unit?
Abbey: Absolutely. So we personally do accessibility reviews ourselves. We used to partner with another unit, but it's a unit of two staff, and then all of a sudden they had a lot of things on their hands when they were told they have to review every single website at the university, and they were no longer able to help us with books. So when a staff that's a unit of two people has to make sure that things are in compliance with the law, other things have to go behind. So that is what our team does now. Here's our books, by the way, just to give a kudos to all of our excellent authors.
Amanda: I also handle all of the first accessibility remediation for our books at Ohio State. I use a tool that I'll link in the chat if you want to save it, and you can put it in the Pressbooks URL, and it will go through and it will tell you what initially is wrong, and it'll also tell you what it can't look for so that it needs to be remediated by a human. But I will tell you, what it catches mostly is people who put their headings in the wrong order.
Abbey: I find it really helps when you get the hint that the alt text is too long. That is the best feedback I get from an online accessibility tracker. It'll say, "Hey, you made this way too long." And I'll say, "Okay." Well, I'll put that at the bottom of the page and link to it, and I'll have short alt text in the actual alt text field to save myself some trouble down the line. Someone else asked: Do you also use screen readers in the process? Not right now, I do not, but I do try to go through just about everything else I can, in part because it is still just me doing that. Amanda does. Thank you, Amanda.
While folks are chatting up in the chat, I'll also share one thing that I did not bring up today, but I find it's very useful specifically for onboarding authors, and that is talking about what support you offer at the after publication stage or at publication stage. A lot of the time what people ask me is, "Okay, but how do you get it out there? How do you help people find this?" And it is a multi-pronged approach where we first get it submitted to the open textbook library, thank you, Karen. But then also add it to OER Commons, we add it to our library catalog. Our metadata folks are lovely, and they're willing to do that for us and to share it out with others who want to put it into their own catalogs.
We then assign a DOI to the materials, so it'll be pulled into the author's Google Scholar profile as a publication, which is also very useful for them. And then finally, we get it up in, because we use Pressbooks, the Pressbooks directory, so we have it in all of these different places for people to find. And then, I also put out the most annoying mailing lists where I say new publication from us. I know it's been three weeks, here's another one. But it is a good way to make sure that your author's works are getting out to more people and that they're able to find it.
Yes, we do DOIs, not ISBNs, in part because an ISBN is focused on a specific format. So we would have to have one for the PDF, one for the online, one for the ebook, et cetera, to distinguish them, and that would get unwieldy. Whereas for DOIs, because they're flexible for online materials, it's better for our needs. And we already have journals, so it was easier to put in our workflow.
Other questions? I mentioned it a lot early on, but it's one of those things when you think about working with an author that you can't say, well, all authors. Because as we started, the very first question of today's meeting, what does a typical author look for in a publication? There is no typical author. Some of them are high-strung, anxious, and uncertain about how to ask questions. Some of them are very willing to work on their own to the point where they probably shouldn't. And some of them really want to work with you directly and to talk with you every step of the way and ask you a lot of questions and maybe more questions they need to. But each of those people is an individual with specific needs that need to be accounted for in some way through whatever workflow you're going to use to support them.
Thank you, Karen. Sharing out some more stuff about Unit 1 in the curriculum where you'll learn more about actually developing open textbooks and not just the people work around it. I could talk about that too, but I won't. You'll have other people. Well, we are at time, so thank you everybody for coming today.
Amanda: Thank you so much, everybody. We'll see you next week.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
11:04:07 From Karen Lauritsen : Our โOne Stop Docโ - https://z.umn.edu/pub101-25
11:04:28 From Abbey Elder : Reacted to "Our โOne Stop Docโ -..." with ๐๐ป
11:04:33 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "Our โOne Stop Docโ -..." with ๐๐ป
11:05:14 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "Our โOne Stop Docโ -..." with ๐
11:05:18 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "Seyed! Gig em Aggies..." with ๐
11:05:28 From Anna Uribe : Remix and collaborate
11:05:33 From Karen Brunner : Adapt and collaborate
11:05:37 From Emily Mineart : Remix
11:05:39 From Bonnie Finn : create a book from scratch
11:05:42 From Leah McAlister : Adapt and collaborate
11:05:45 From Abbey Elder : Our "typical author" really wants to make something happen on their own, but they might not know collaborating is an option!
11:05:46 From Joelle Thomas : Adapt and collaborate
11:05:47 From Rachel Fleming : All of the above!
11:05:48 From christine moynihan : Is there such a thing as a typical author? I feel like it could be anything
11:05:48 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Replying to "Seyed! Gig em Aggies..."Hey Daniel! Yes! ๐
11:05:48 From Rose Adams : adapt and collaborate
11:06:03 From Jessica McClean : Create a book from scratch, usually alone
11:06:04 From Karen Lauritsen : What do you imagine your โtypicalโ author will want to do? For example, create a book from scratch, adapt an existing work, collaborate with students, work aloneโฆ
11:06:09 From Lydia Burrage-Goodwin : Reacted to "Is there such a thin..." with ๐
11:06:21 From Micah Gjeltema : A lot of authors I speak to have lots of slides and lecture notes theyโve developed over years that they feel can be formatted into a โbookโ
11:06:22 From Sara Lynnore - St. Olaf College : Collaborate with others, create supplementary materials for current coursework
11:06:40 From Rachel Fleming : Reacted to "A lot of authors I s..." with โ๏ธ
11:10:42 From Amanda Larson : H5P are interactive HTML5 learning objects - https://h5p.org
11:11:02 From Karen Brunner : Reacted to "H5P are interactive ..." with ๐
11:12:00 From CIndy Gruwell : Yes to all three, rewarding all the way around
11:12:06 From Nicole Gresham : Yes to all three as well
11:12:08 From Daniel DuPont (he/him) : Yes, I had an author record hours of powepoints with voiceover only to realize this wasn't accessible
11:12:09 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : I have been part of a team supporting one author through the Rebus program. I was the instructional designer member of the team.
11:12:16 From Lora Amsberryaugier : I haven't worked with an author yet.
11:12:19 From Amanda Larson : Replying to "Yes, I had an author..." yikes!
11:12:23 From Lora Largo : I have never worked with an author.
11:12:23 From Rose Adams : I haven't yet worked with an author but it's common for our faculty to not identify ways we could be useful to them at the library
11:12:25 From Anna Uribe : Haven't worked with an author yet
11:12:25 From Karen Lauritsen : Yes! Iโve worked with and also identify as each type of these authors ๐
11:12:26 From Emily Mineart : I've never worked with an author yet
11:12:31 From Courtney Stortz : I haven't worked with an author yet
11:12:34 From Whitney Russell : Worked on projects including H5P, about to work with my first author this year
11:12:35 From Joelle Thomas : The โdoing a lot on their own and not looping us in until late, requiring a lot of work to be redoneโ is very relatable
11:12:36 From Emily Mineart : Reacted to "I haven't yet worked..." with โ๏ธ
11:12:39 From Whitney Russell : for OER
11:12:47 From Leah McAlister : I haven't worked with an author yet
11:12:48 From Daniel DuPont (he/him) : Replying to "Yes, I had an author..." I wish they had come to me in the beginning instead of the end so we could figure out other ways to create the material
11:13:02 From Lydia Burrage-Goodwin : Reacted to "The โdoing a lot on ..." with ๐
11:13:05 From Karen Brunner : I haven't directly worked with an author; the closest experience is a faculty member who created an OER independently, but only wanted help finding funding/stipend.
11:13:08 From Amanda Larson : Replying to "Yes, I had an author..." ๐ฏ that's often how I feel
11:13:10 From Sara Lynnore - St. Olaf College : Mostly a combination of 1 & 3 - everyone does the "I'm fine" emails!
11:20:17 From Nicole Gresham : Have you used OER before?
11:20:30 From Amanda Larson : I like to ask how they want to use the final product
11:20:34 From Karen Brunner : Is this a departmental goal?
11:20:35 From Lora Amsberryaugier : are you concerned about the cost of textbooks for your students
11:20:45 From Daniel DuPont (he/him) : Why are they moving away from their current book?
11:20:48 From Stephanie Wiegand : Are you planning to create supplemental materials - test banks, study guides, slides, etc.
11:20:48 From Rachel Fleming : what does success look like for this project?
11:21:04 From Rose Adams : What do you like about the resources you're currently using and what do you wish was different?
11:21:05 From Sara Lynnore - St. Olaf College : How many others need to have access or ownership permissions to update? In case they leave the college and someone else picks up the materials
11:21:07 From Karen Lauritsen : Are there any books you like on this topic? Looking for things the author may want to emulate or differentiate
11:21:27 From Stephanie Wiegand : Are you okay with someone taking your work and modifying it for their needs?
11:21:34 From Amanda Larson : Reacted to "How many others need..." with ๐ฏ
11:21:36 From CIndy Gruwell : Reacted to "Are you okay with so..." with ๐๐ผ
11:21:39 From Karen Lauritsen : Reacted to "Are you okay with so..." with ๐๐ผ
11:21:39 From Amanda Larson : Reacted to "Are you okay with so..." with ๐๐ผ
11:21:47 From Joelle Thomas : Reacted to "Are you okay with so..." with ๐๐ผ
11:22:19 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : How do you see our collaboration evolving as we work together?
11:22:26 From Amanda Larson : Reacted to "How do you see our c..." with ๐ฅฐ
11:22:32 From CIndy Gruwell : Reacted to "How do you see our c..." with ๐ฅฐ
11:22:57 From Karen Lauritsen : Reacted to "How do you see our c..." with ๐ฅฐ
11:25:19 From Amanda Larson : It's okay to remember that you don't have to support every project! It's okay for things to not be a fit for your program. I say no to projects regularly.
11:28:29 From CIndy Gruwell : Centers for Teaching and Learning
11:28:41 From Stephanie Wiegand : I haven't reached out yet - but Writing Center?
11:28:52 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "Centers for Teaching..." with ๐
11:28:53 From Jessica McClean : We have a great relationship with our accessibility office.
11:28:59 From Amanda Larson : Reacted to "We have a great rela..." with ๐ฅฐ
11:29:10 From Sara Lynnore - St. Olaf College : Reacted to "We have a great rela..." with ๐
11:29:12 From Emily Mineart : Reacted to "Centers for Teaching..." with ๐
11:29:13 From Rachel Fleming : print shop or marketing for graphic design support
11:29:24 From Whitney Russell : writing center and center for instruction and innovation
11:29:51 From Stephanie Wiegand : Does anyone partner with programs? Like graphic arts students?
11:30:34 From Amanda Larson : Replying to "Does anyone partner ..." That's a great idea!
11:30:38 From Sara Lynnore - St. Olaf College : We have student workers that we'll sometimes bring into projects if the author/faculty needs a lot of graphic design work done. Or content management into some type of platform
11:30:55 From Jessica McClean : Reacted to "We have student work..." with ๐
11:31:42 From Rachel Fleming : Replying to "Does anyone partner ..." always good to talk with faculty in the program about what kind of partnership works - and compensating students for professional freelance work.
11:32:41 From Karen Lauritsen : Yes, love the sample chapter!
11:33:01 From Joelle Thomas : Reacted to "We have student work..." with ๐
11:34:12 From Amanda Larson : also it's hardly ever a whole textbook done over one summer semester
11:36:11 From Amanda Larson : here's my example of in progress but published book - https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/h5pteachingresources/
11:36:32 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "here's my example of..." with โค๏ธ
11:36:32 From Nicole Gresham : Reacted to "here's my example of..." with ๐
11:36:38 From Amanda Larson : and a book with versioning
11:36:38 From Amanda Larson : https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/choosingsources/
11:37:07 From Amanda Larson : the versioning page - https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/choosingsources/back-matter/version-history/
11:37:30 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "the versioning page ..." with โค๏ธ
11:38:15 From Micah Gjeltema : Reacted to "the versioning page ..." with โค๏ธ
11:39:22 From Micah Gjeltema : Replying to "the versioning page ..." This is a great idea! Stealing this
11:39:34 From Joelle Thomas : Reacted to "the versioning page ..." with โค๏ธ
11:39:39 From Amanda Larson : Replying to "the versioning page ..." As you can see I remixed it! ๐
11:40:16 From Daniel DuPont (he/him) : changes in DOE funding? nahhhh ;)
11:40:24 From Amanda Larson : Reacted to "changes in DOE fundi..." with ๐คฃ
11:40:34 From Rose Adams : Reacted to "changes in DOE fundi..." with ๐ญ
11:40:37 From Karen Lauritsen : Reacted to "changes in DOE fundi..." with ๐ญ
11:40:40 From Nicole Gresham : Reacted to "changes in DOE fundi..." with ๐ญ
11:41:49 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "changes in DOE fundi..." with ๐ญ
11:43:16 From Amanda Larson : I have had to do this is in the past year
11:43:51 From Joelle Thomas : Reacted to "changes in DOE fundi..." with ๐ญ
11:46:18 From Amanda Larson : Other people can remix it and make it fancy if they want to and the license allows
11:48:54 From Karen Lauritsen : In terms of timelines, authors sometimes expect that once the writing is done, itโs a short road to publication. But there can be stuff that takes a lot of time to prepare for publication, too. Can you speak more to that?
11:48:57 From Daniel DuPont (he/him) : that's such a good point about headings and size!
11:48:58 From Amanda Larson : that's so real though!
11:50:08 From Sara Lynnore - St. Olaf College : Self Care #learningthehardway
11:50:20 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "Self Care #learningt..." with ๐
11:50:21 From Amanda Larson : Reacted to "Self Care #learningt..." with ๐
11:50:23 From Karen Lauritsen : Reacted to "Self Care #learningt..." with โค๏ธ
11:50:53 From Amanda Larson : they want both! ๐
11:51:02 From Rachel Fleming : I really think it is important to understand that the author interest level drops off so dramatically after the drafts are finished, so we can get the buy in to be bullies later!
11:52:37 From Karen Lauritsen : I see all my typos after I publish too
11:53:22 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Does your team handle accessibility or do you partner with another unit?
11:54:02 From Abbey Elder : https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/plugins/books/
11:54:43 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Do you also use screen readers in the process?
11:54:51 From Amanda Larson : https://www.experte.com/accessibility
11:55:15 From Amanda Larson : Yes I also use a screen reader to test the content
11:55:24 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : which one?
11:56:43 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Do you use ISBNs or DOIs?
11:57:29 From Amanda Larson : Replying to "which one?" I test usually with NVDA and Jaws
11:57:38 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "I test usually with ..." with ๐
11:57:45 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Replying to "which one?" Thank you, Amanda! :)
11:58:11 From Karen Lauritsen : To prep for next week, when weโll talk about how to develop an open textbook, we suggest reviewing Unit 1 in the Pub101 curriculum.
11:58:48 From Karen Lauritsen : Replying to "To prep for next wee..." https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173
11:58:50 From Amanda Larson : Replying to "which one?" I want to try the one Steel Wagstaff at Pressbooks showed that was built in to the browser tools
11:58:57 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Thank you so much; great sessions and very useful info!
11:59:00 From Sara Lynnore - St. Olaf College : Thank you!
11:59:04 From Cameron Boucher : Thanks!
11:59:04 From Nicole Gresham : TY!
11:59:05 From Emily Smith : Thank you!
11:59:07 From Stephanie Wiegand : Thank you!
11:59:08 From Jessica McClean : Thank you!
11:59:10 From Micah Gjeltema : Thanks!
11:04:28 From Abbey Elder : Reacted to "Our โOne Stop Docโ -..." with ๐๐ป
11:04:33 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "Our โOne Stop Docโ -..." with ๐๐ป
11:05:14 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "Our โOne Stop Docโ -..." with ๐
11:05:18 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "Seyed! Gig em Aggies..." with ๐
11:05:28 From Anna Uribe : Remix and collaborate
11:05:33 From Karen Brunner : Adapt and collaborate
11:05:37 From Emily Mineart : Remix
11:05:39 From Bonnie Finn : create a book from scratch
11:05:42 From Leah McAlister : Adapt and collaborate
11:05:45 From Abbey Elder : Our "typical author" really wants to make something happen on their own, but they might not know collaborating is an option!
11:05:46 From Joelle Thomas : Adapt and collaborate
11:05:47 From Rachel Fleming : All of the above!
11:05:48 From christine moynihan : Is there such a thing as a typical author? I feel like it could be anything
11:05:48 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Replying to "Seyed! Gig em Aggies..."Hey Daniel! Yes! ๐
11:05:48 From Rose Adams : adapt and collaborate
11:06:03 From Jessica McClean : Create a book from scratch, usually alone
11:06:04 From Karen Lauritsen : What do you imagine your โtypicalโ author will want to do? For example, create a book from scratch, adapt an existing work, collaborate with students, work aloneโฆ
11:06:09 From Lydia Burrage-Goodwin : Reacted to "Is there such a thin..." with ๐
11:06:21 From Micah Gjeltema : A lot of authors I speak to have lots of slides and lecture notes theyโve developed over years that they feel can be formatted into a โbookโ
11:06:22 From Sara Lynnore - St. Olaf College : Collaborate with others, create supplementary materials for current coursework
11:06:40 From Rachel Fleming : Reacted to "A lot of authors I s..." with โ๏ธ
11:10:42 From Amanda Larson : H5P are interactive HTML5 learning objects - https://h5p.org
11:11:02 From Karen Brunner : Reacted to "H5P are interactive ..." with ๐
11:12:00 From CIndy Gruwell : Yes to all three, rewarding all the way around
11:12:06 From Nicole Gresham : Yes to all three as well
11:12:08 From Daniel DuPont (he/him) : Yes, I had an author record hours of powepoints with voiceover only to realize this wasn't accessible
11:12:09 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : I have been part of a team supporting one author through the Rebus program. I was the instructional designer member of the team.
11:12:16 From Lora Amsberryaugier : I haven't worked with an author yet.
11:12:19 From Amanda Larson : Replying to "Yes, I had an author..." yikes!
11:12:23 From Lora Largo : I have never worked with an author.
11:12:23 From Rose Adams : I haven't yet worked with an author but it's common for our faculty to not identify ways we could be useful to them at the library
11:12:25 From Anna Uribe : Haven't worked with an author yet
11:12:25 From Karen Lauritsen : Yes! Iโve worked with and also identify as each type of these authors ๐
11:12:26 From Emily Mineart : I've never worked with an author yet
11:12:31 From Courtney Stortz : I haven't worked with an author yet
11:12:34 From Whitney Russell : Worked on projects including H5P, about to work with my first author this year
11:12:35 From Joelle Thomas : The โdoing a lot on their own and not looping us in until late, requiring a lot of work to be redoneโ is very relatable
11:12:36 From Emily Mineart : Reacted to "I haven't yet worked..." with โ๏ธ
11:12:39 From Whitney Russell : for OER
11:12:47 From Leah McAlister : I haven't worked with an author yet
11:12:48 From Daniel DuPont (he/him) : Replying to "Yes, I had an author..." I wish they had come to me in the beginning instead of the end so we could figure out other ways to create the material
11:13:02 From Lydia Burrage-Goodwin : Reacted to "The โdoing a lot on ..." with ๐
11:13:05 From Karen Brunner : I haven't directly worked with an author; the closest experience is a faculty member who created an OER independently, but only wanted help finding funding/stipend.
11:13:08 From Amanda Larson : Replying to "Yes, I had an author..." ๐ฏ that's often how I feel
11:13:10 From Sara Lynnore - St. Olaf College : Mostly a combination of 1 & 3 - everyone does the "I'm fine" emails!
11:20:17 From Nicole Gresham : Have you used OER before?
11:20:30 From Amanda Larson : I like to ask how they want to use the final product
11:20:34 From Karen Brunner : Is this a departmental goal?
11:20:35 From Lora Amsberryaugier : are you concerned about the cost of textbooks for your students
11:20:45 From Daniel DuPont (he/him) : Why are they moving away from their current book?
11:20:48 From Stephanie Wiegand : Are you planning to create supplemental materials - test banks, study guides, slides, etc.
11:20:48 From Rachel Fleming : what does success look like for this project?
11:21:04 From Rose Adams : What do you like about the resources you're currently using and what do you wish was different?
11:21:05 From Sara Lynnore - St. Olaf College : How many others need to have access or ownership permissions to update? In case they leave the college and someone else picks up the materials
11:21:07 From Karen Lauritsen : Are there any books you like on this topic? Looking for things the author may want to emulate or differentiate
11:21:27 From Stephanie Wiegand : Are you okay with someone taking your work and modifying it for their needs?
11:21:34 From Amanda Larson : Reacted to "How many others need..." with ๐ฏ
11:21:36 From CIndy Gruwell : Reacted to "Are you okay with so..." with ๐๐ผ
11:21:39 From Karen Lauritsen : Reacted to "Are you okay with so..." with ๐๐ผ
11:21:39 From Amanda Larson : Reacted to "Are you okay with so..." with ๐๐ผ
11:21:47 From Joelle Thomas : Reacted to "Are you okay with so..." with ๐๐ผ
11:22:19 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : How do you see our collaboration evolving as we work together?
11:22:26 From Amanda Larson : Reacted to "How do you see our c..." with ๐ฅฐ
11:22:32 From CIndy Gruwell : Reacted to "How do you see our c..." with ๐ฅฐ
11:22:57 From Karen Lauritsen : Reacted to "How do you see our c..." with ๐ฅฐ
11:25:19 From Amanda Larson : It's okay to remember that you don't have to support every project! It's okay for things to not be a fit for your program. I say no to projects regularly.
11:28:29 From CIndy Gruwell : Centers for Teaching and Learning
11:28:41 From Stephanie Wiegand : I haven't reached out yet - but Writing Center?
11:28:52 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "Centers for Teaching..." with ๐
11:28:53 From Jessica McClean : We have a great relationship with our accessibility office.
11:28:59 From Amanda Larson : Reacted to "We have a great rela..." with ๐ฅฐ
11:29:10 From Sara Lynnore - St. Olaf College : Reacted to "We have a great rela..." with ๐
11:29:12 From Emily Mineart : Reacted to "Centers for Teaching..." with ๐
11:29:13 From Rachel Fleming : print shop or marketing for graphic design support
11:29:24 From Whitney Russell : writing center and center for instruction and innovation
11:29:51 From Stephanie Wiegand : Does anyone partner with programs? Like graphic arts students?
11:30:34 From Amanda Larson : Replying to "Does anyone partner ..." That's a great idea!
11:30:38 From Sara Lynnore - St. Olaf College : We have student workers that we'll sometimes bring into projects if the author/faculty needs a lot of graphic design work done. Or content management into some type of platform
11:30:55 From Jessica McClean : Reacted to "We have student work..." with ๐
11:31:42 From Rachel Fleming : Replying to "Does anyone partner ..." always good to talk with faculty in the program about what kind of partnership works - and compensating students for professional freelance work.
11:32:41 From Karen Lauritsen : Yes, love the sample chapter!
11:33:01 From Joelle Thomas : Reacted to "We have student work..." with ๐
11:34:12 From Amanda Larson : also it's hardly ever a whole textbook done over one summer semester
11:36:11 From Amanda Larson : here's my example of in progress but published book - https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/h5pteachingresources/
11:36:32 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "here's my example of..." with โค๏ธ
11:36:32 From Nicole Gresham : Reacted to "here's my example of..." with ๐
11:36:38 From Amanda Larson : and a book with versioning
11:36:38 From Amanda Larson : https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/choosingsources/
11:37:07 From Amanda Larson : the versioning page - https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/choosingsources/back-matter/version-history/
11:37:30 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "the versioning page ..." with โค๏ธ
11:38:15 From Micah Gjeltema : Reacted to "the versioning page ..." with โค๏ธ
11:39:22 From Micah Gjeltema : Replying to "the versioning page ..." This is a great idea! Stealing this
11:39:34 From Joelle Thomas : Reacted to "the versioning page ..." with โค๏ธ
11:39:39 From Amanda Larson : Replying to "the versioning page ..." As you can see I remixed it! ๐
11:40:16 From Daniel DuPont (he/him) : changes in DOE funding? nahhhh ;)
11:40:24 From Amanda Larson : Reacted to "changes in DOE fundi..." with ๐คฃ
11:40:34 From Rose Adams : Reacted to "changes in DOE fundi..." with ๐ญ
11:40:37 From Karen Lauritsen : Reacted to "changes in DOE fundi..." with ๐ญ
11:40:40 From Nicole Gresham : Reacted to "changes in DOE fundi..." with ๐ญ
11:41:49 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "changes in DOE fundi..." with ๐ญ
11:43:16 From Amanda Larson : I have had to do this is in the past year
11:43:51 From Joelle Thomas : Reacted to "changes in DOE fundi..." with ๐ญ
11:46:18 From Amanda Larson : Other people can remix it and make it fancy if they want to and the license allows
11:48:54 From Karen Lauritsen : In terms of timelines, authors sometimes expect that once the writing is done, itโs a short road to publication. But there can be stuff that takes a lot of time to prepare for publication, too. Can you speak more to that?
11:48:57 From Daniel DuPont (he/him) : that's such a good point about headings and size!
11:48:58 From Amanda Larson : that's so real though!
11:50:08 From Sara Lynnore - St. Olaf College : Self Care #learningthehardway
11:50:20 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "Self Care #learningt..." with ๐
11:50:21 From Amanda Larson : Reacted to "Self Care #learningt..." with ๐
11:50:23 From Karen Lauritsen : Reacted to "Self Care #learningt..." with โค๏ธ
11:50:53 From Amanda Larson : they want both! ๐
11:51:02 From Rachel Fleming : I really think it is important to understand that the author interest level drops off so dramatically after the drafts are finished, so we can get the buy in to be bullies later!
11:52:37 From Karen Lauritsen : I see all my typos after I publish too
11:53:22 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Does your team handle accessibility or do you partner with another unit?
11:54:02 From Abbey Elder : https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/plugins/books/
11:54:43 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Do you also use screen readers in the process?
11:54:51 From Amanda Larson : https://www.experte.com/accessibility
11:55:15 From Amanda Larson : Yes I also use a screen reader to test the content
11:55:24 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : which one?
11:56:43 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Do you use ISBNs or DOIs?
11:57:29 From Amanda Larson : Replying to "which one?" I test usually with NVDA and Jaws
11:57:38 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Reacted to "I test usually with ..." with ๐
11:57:45 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Replying to "which one?" Thank you, Amanda! :)
11:58:11 From Karen Lauritsen : To prep for next week, when weโll talk about how to develop an open textbook, we suggest reviewing Unit 1 in the Pub101 curriculum.
11:58:48 From Karen Lauritsen : Replying to "To prep for next wee..." https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173
11:58:50 From Amanda Larson : Replying to "which one?" I want to try the one Steel Wagstaff at Pressbooks showed that was built in to the browser tools
11:58:57 From Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni : Thank you so much; great sessions and very useful info!
11:59:00 From Sara Lynnore - St. Olaf College : Thank you!
11:59:04 From Cameron Boucher : Thanks!
11:59:04 From Nicole Gresham : TY!
11:59:05 From Emily Smith : Thank you!
11:59:07 From Stephanie Wiegand : Thank you!
11:59:08 From Jessica McClean : Thank you!
11:59:10 From Micah Gjeltema : Thanks!
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