11 The role of the RMIT Open Publishing Team
The role of the RMIT Open Publishing Team is three-fold:
- Assess the suitability of your work for open publication.
- Guide authors through the publishing process.
- Provide post-publication support.
Assess suitability of your work for open publication
In deciding whether to support your work for open publication, the RMIT Open Publishing Team will assess whether it will contribute to the teaching and learning needs of your audience within the RMIT community.
The criteria applied to assess suitability are set out here.
The RMIT Open Publishing Team will prioritise works which are high impact, have Australian and New Zealand content, rebalance representation, and cover emerging disciplines. Specifically, RMIT Open Press will prefer works which meet one or more of the following criteria:
- There are no alternative resources with suitable subject coverage.
- Alternative resources are prohibitively expensive and/or have restrictive licence models.
- The resource focuses on Indigenous content and/or is written by Indigenous authors.
- The resource fills gaps in content specific to the Australian or New Zealand context, such as law or where content is influenced by local regulation or protocols.
- The resource will be used in core courses in a number of programs.
- The subject matter supports areas of strategic importance for RMIT University, such as the RMIT Graduate Attributes.
- The resource is interdisciplinary and/or is created by a cross-disciplinary team.
- The resource is authored collaboratively across institutions.
- The resource is completely new, not an adaptation.[1]
If your proposal is not accepted for publication, the RMIT Open Publishing Team will provide feedback in accordance with the above criteria. The Team can provide advice on ways on enhancing your proposal for resubmission.
Guidance through the open publishing process
The RMIT Open Publishing Team focuses on supporting authors to publish their open works using the Pressbooks platform. Your work will be published with an RMIT Open Press imprint. The RMIT Open Publishing Team offers support and guidance to authors to successfully achieve each stage of the CAUL OER Collective Publishing Workflow.
Publication support
The RMIT Open Publishing Team will provide access to Pressbooks, a desktop publishing and authoring platform. We will provide access to training materials and troubleshoot issues that arise.
Introduction to Pressbooks (5:00 mins)
(“Introduction to Pressbooks” by Pressbooks.)
Editorial support
The RMIT Open Publishing Team will provide authors with guidelines on editorial standards, including the RMIT Open Publishing Style Guide, and advice on aligning content to the formatting of the Pressbooks authoring platform. However, the Team does not offer a copy editing nor a proofreading service.
Support for copyright compliance
The RMIT Open Publishing Team will provide advice on, and support for, using third-party resources in your work. Open resources are preferred, and the Team will advise on locating and using them. The Team will also provide the author with a Content Copyright Tracker to record all third-party resources in your work. The Team will complete the copyright compliance process by seeking permissions where required.
Advice on choosing a Creative Commons licence
The RMIT Open Publishing Team can advise on the appropriate Creative Commons licence for the purpose of your work. We recommend CC BY NC, but authors can apply a licence of their choice.
Works that use a Creative Commons licence allow an individual or organisation permission to reuse the work to suit their needs (depending on the licence type) under copyright law. There are six different licence types.
- CC BY – allows the reuser to adapt, modify and distribute the work, as long as the creator is attributed.
- CC BY SA – allows the reuser to adapt, modify and distribute the work, as long as the creator is attributed. You must also licence the modified work under identical terms.
- CC BY NC – allows the reuser to adapt, modify and distribute the work for non-commercial purposes only. The creator must also be attributed.
- CC BY NC SA – allows the reuser to adapt, modify and distribute the work for non-commercial purposes only. The creator must also be attributed, and you must also licence the modified work under identical terms.
- CC BY ND – allows the reuser to copy and distribute the work, as long as the creator is attributed. The work cannot be altered or modified.
- CC BY NC ND – allows the reuser to copy and distribute the work, as long as the creator is attributed. The work cannot be altered or modified and can only be used for non-commercial purposes.[2]
The RMIT OER Capability Toolkit has extensive information on Creative Commons licences.
Advice on grants
The provision of grants is not currently a feature of publishing via the RMIT Open Press. However, there may be opportunities that arise, such as the CAUL Collective grants program for open textbooks. The Open Publishing Team can advise on applying for CAUL Collective grants and the availability of other grants.
Technical and design support
The RMIT Open Publishing Team will provide support for the Pressbooks platform, including:
- plugins, such as H5P, TablePress, and MathJax
- graphic design capabilities
- cover design using supplied templates.
Pedagogical design is not within the scope of the Open Publishing Team. We recommend including a learning designer from your college to assist in this area.
Distribution plan
The RMIT Open Publishing Team will provide advice on where your work can be made available, including:
- RMIT Open Press (RMIT’s Pressbooks platform)
- LibrarySearch
- Pressbooks Directory
- The Digest of the Australasian Open Educational Practice Special Interet Group (OEPSIG)
- OER discovery platforms
- The National edeposit (NED) service, maintained by the National and State Libraries Australasia.
Marketing strategy
The RMIT Open Publishing Team role
The RMIT Open Publishing Team will support marketing outreach as defined by the Library’s communications plan which includes:
- notifications on the Library homepage
- notifications in Teaching Life and RMIT Global news
- Yammer posts
- RMIT Open Press website
- posts on open networks such as OEPSIG and OEPSIG Digest, and the CAUL Modern Curriculum blog.
The author role
Authors are encouraged to promote their work. For example:
- contribute to outreach messaging by the Library’s communications channels
- promote via social media
- promote via the authors’ own professional communication channels
- provide a book launch.
Archiving
The RMIT Open Publishing Team will create and manage an archive of your published work and all associated files.
Post publication support
The RMIT Open Publishing Team will continue to support you after your work has been published.
Updates, revisions and new editions
The nature of open publishing is that your work can evolve as a dynamic resource and change over time as it is adopted and adapted by other educational communities.
Furthermore, publishing your work as an open resource allows the authors the ability to update it regularly on an ongoing basis. How you approach making changes to your work will depend on the nature and amount of change involved.
As a guide, there are three broad and overlapping kinds of changes:
- Updates: These are minor changes or additions such as correction of typos, clarification of text, amendment of errata or addition of new supplementary material.
- Revisions: These are changes made after a systematic review of the work. These will tend to be more significant, and include things such as addition of new concepts and changes in terminology. If a systematic review of the work has taken place you may still wish to indicate that the current work is a revision to signify its currency, even if only minor changes have been made.
- New editions: These are major changes including addition of significant material such as a new chapter, changes in content such as a revised clinical guideline, or incorporation of new theory or knowledge. If you create a new edition, you might choose to unpublish the previous version as a new edition is assumed to supersede the previous.
After publication, editing access to the work will cease. The RMIT Open Publishing Team will advise on how to manage updates and revisions, including versioning control in your OER. The Team will re-enable editing access to the work to make requested corrections or revisions.
If you want to develop a new edition of your work, plan it as you would a new work. The RMIT Open Publishing Team can advise you on how to create a copy of your original edition for editing directly in Pressbooks, or how to download the book as an OTF file which you can edit in Word.
Metrics
The RMIT Library will periodically collect statistical information on your resource that measures metrics based on the number of downloads and views your work receives. Tools used for this purpose include the Pressbooks platform, which provides analytics around total visitors and page views over a selected time period, and Google Analytics, which tracks how users interact and engage with your content by providing insights into user behaviour and demographics.
- Adapted from Open Educational Resource Collective administration guide for library staff: Establish institutional priorities by CAUL is licenced under CC BY 4.0 ↵
- Creative Commons. (n.d.). About CC licenses. https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/ CC BY 4.0 ↵
