Sarah Beaubien, Scholarly Communications Coordinator, and Charles Lowe, Department of Writing professor and editor of two OA texts, concluded a successful Digital Commons Community webinar yesterday on the topic of developing and offering open-access textbooks through their repository, ScholarWorks@GVSU.
Open-access textbooks are a growing field within the open educational resources (OER) arena, and professors are beginning to show interest in creating and sharing resources they can use in lieu of expensive textbooks. Institutional repositories are an excellent publishing venue for these valuable resources, making them easily discoverable, accessible, and downloadable for both students and faculty.
In the webinar, Sarah and Charles illustrated—to almost 200 attendees—their strategies and successes in bringing targeted, high-quality texts to students at minimal or no cost. Charles discussed his own process in creating an OA textbook and using it in his teaching, and Sarah presented the services the IR offers for these and other original OA texbooks authored by GVSU faculty.
To view the webinar, click here: https://www.bepress.com/webinar/serving-students-faculty-open-access-textbooks/.
If you are interested in reading more about publishing books in Digital Commons, see “Extending Library-led Publishing Services: Paul Royster on Open Access Books.”
Writing Spaces
