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.
