The Open Textbook Toolkit by Waller, Cross, & Rigling

Gutierrez, Vincente         

      

Waller, M., Cross, W. M., & Rigling, L. (2017). The Open Textbook Toolkit. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 49(1), 53-65. doi: 10.3138/jsp.49.1.53

Waller, Cross and Rigling’s (2017) article centers the relationship between university press and academic library in the scholarly communication ecosystem and how open educational resources (OER) can strengthen these partnerships. The authors go over possible barriers to and benefits of collaboration, citing that open textbooks could be a promising bridge between them. These barriers include: differences between how library and press are evaluated and perceived, differing business models and funding sources, and an underappreciation for the other’s strengths and potential. Collaboration between them can lead to innovation and can potentially reduce costs. These partnerships can remold the scholarly communication system with open textbooks as a “promising area” for collaboration (p. 56). Waller, Cross and Rigling (2017) state that “with their shared academic values, libraries and presses have an opportunity to intervene and reclaim textbooks from the for-profit publishers that have captured the textbook market” (p. 57). This situation ultimately led to North Carolina State University (NCSU) and University of North Carolina (UNC) Press’s Open Textbook Toolkit. This project began with NCSU’s 2013 Alt-Textbook project which provided instructors who replaced commercial textbooks with an OER a grant of between $500 and $2000. Despite its success, one barrier that remained is that there was limited availability of OER resources. To aid in the creation and adoption, they developed the Open Textbook Toolkit to break “down the creation of an open textbook or similar type of OER into simple, flexible, and scalable components” (p. 60). The Toolkit will be tested on the psychology field and was just awarded a research grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The research will take place in three phases: “1) a planning and preparation phase; 2) a survey and focus group phase; and 3) an evaluation, reporting, and dissemination phase” (p. 61). The goal is to create a strong library-press partnership via the Toolkit.

            The article centers on the commonalities and differences between academic libraries and university presses and hopes that OER resources will not only address the many financial burdens of depending on a commercial presses but also strengthen collaboration between the libraries and presses. They hope the Open Textbook Toolkit will unify them in a “clear, mission-driven project” (p. 63). The most valid and useful point the article makes is that a unifying project can help strengthen the partnership of academic library and university press. It seems to me that this would alleviate some of the financial burden placed upon the collection and free up some resources for better collection development. The benefits of and barriers to collaboration between library and press are also noteworthy. A downside, though, is that this article seems incomplete without the hard data about how the research of the project is turning out. Another aspect that could improve this article could be about how faculty views OER resources, i.e. what are the benefits and downsides to the shift. I also wanted to know what the specifics behind the Open Textbook Toolkit were and how exactly it supports library, faculty, and university press. Overall, this article could be well-utilized in giving students a perspective of how a project can unite or strengthen the relationship between university library and press, but its lack of specifics about the Toolkit and some faculty impressions about OER would be of more interest and enlightening to the student. It would be a great companion piece to their future research on the Open Textbook Toolkit, when available. Though this article is not technically about collection development, it does give some insight into what some universities are doing to develop and encourage OER collections and utilization of that collection.