Cyril Oberlander
Need
• Students are unable to afford the high cost of textbooks, and this often detrimentally impacts their studies.
• Providing textbooks to students is often prohibitively expensive and difficult for libraries.
• Expanding the library’s role in student learning on campus will benefit all students.
Benefit
• Enables libraries and faculty to produce high-quality open textbooks.
• Reduces the cost barriers to education and support faculty authorship.
• Builds a collaborative framework and innovative partnership of faculty, librarians, and instructional designers.
• Raises the global impact of teaching and learning.
State University of New York (SUNY) libraries have been addressing the rising cost of textbooks for years. Each library has developed distinct and independent strategies for dealing with textbook costs and the resulting impact on our students. Recently, however, SUNY libraries started taking the initiative to explore collaborative strategies and solutions that will reduce textbook costs. One group of libraries has adopted a publisher subscription model that licenses online textbooks from commercial publishers, while another group has developed a pilot program to create open textbooks. This later program is known as the Open SUNY Textbook project.
In the past, the most common strategy for academic libraries to address textbook costs has been to place textbooks on course reserves. However, academic libraries managing textbooks on reserve face several challenges, among them:
• Funding the purchase of textbooks is costly, and libraries are generally unable to provide all the required readings.
• Short checkout periods for high-use textbooks give libraries a limited capacity to adequately and reliably serve the needs of students.
• Circulating high-use textbooks from shelves behind the counter and administering overdue fines takes staff time away from other essential duties and therefore is costly in terms of library staffing.
Maintaining library textbooks on reserve is clearly a limited, expensive, and unsustainable solution. Academic libraries and their academic institutions need new strategies that reduce the cost of textbooks. Innovative strategies are essential because the cost of textbooks has a direct and measurable impact on learning. In a study of over 22,000 students, the 2012 Florida Student Textbook Survey found that because of textbook costs, at times 64 percent of students didn’t purchase a required textbook, 45 percent did not register for a course, 49 percent took fewer courses, and 27 percent dropped a course.1 In addition, between 2002 and 2012, during a severe economic recession, the cost of textbooks rose 82 percent, as reported by the 2013 U.S. GAO report College Textbooks.2 The average annual cost of textbooks, according to the College Board, is $1,200 per year.
If the Open SUNY Textbook program could reduce that average cost by only 10 percent, in the next few years, the annual cost savings to our 462,698 SUNY students could be over $5.5 million. The projected cost savings would increase with the number of titles that are published and adopted, as well as any expanded use beyond SUNY.
The Open SUNY Textbook program is a new strategy to create a publishing initiative designed to lower the cost of textbooks, raise the global impact of teaching and learning through high-quality free learning resources, and enhance the connections between author and reader. The goal is to make this program both a scalable and a sustainable solution to lowering the cost of textbooks. In order to achieve these goals, collaboration is essential. In essence SUNY libraries are leading a publishing program that is a collaboration between faculty authors, reviewers, and librarians, all solving real-world problems with innovation. Together, we can significantly and positively impact higher education while reducing cost barriers to students and highlighting faculty authorship.
Origins of the Pilot
In 2012, SUNY announced an Innovative Instruction Technology Grants program (IITG) establishing a competitive peer-reviewed award of up to $60,000 to “demonstrate, communicate and replicate innovations developed at the campus (departmental) level throughout SUNY.”3 Cyril Oberlander, SUNY Geneseo’s Milne Library director and principal investigator, wrote a grant application for $20,000 in collaboration with librarians from Geneseo, The College at Brockport, The College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Upstate Medical University, and University at Buffalo. These participating libraries, along with SUNY Fredonia which joined later, piloted the publication and development of this unique open textbook program. Open textbooks are free or freely-distributed online textbooks that help reduce the cost barriers to education. Open textbooks are available using a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-NC-SA) that allows everyone to read online free of charge and print, copy, or adapt with attribution for noncommercial purposes and derivatives that are shared-alike.
The primary goals of the Open SUNY Textbook grant application were to establish a pilot for reducing cost barriers to higher education and to develop a distributed library publishing service infrastructure. The grant was also designed to encourage innovation and collaboration across higher education institutions. Ideally the Open SUNY Textbook program develops a community of practice among libraries that encourages faculty authorship and the growth of academic-friendly publishing services.
Fortunately, this unique program was awarded IITG funding in July 2012, and the participants began building a collaborative framework and innovative partnership of faculty, librarians, and instructional designers. SUNY Press also joined the program as a publishing consultant. Donna Dixon, co-director of SUNY Press, described the editorial workflow and shared templates they utilize for publishing scholarly monographs. The Open SUNY textbook publishing program is not a university press; it is an evolving publishing service created to serve a niche need. Nevertheless, the SUNY Press templates and advice served to help frame our thinking and guide the design of various forms (acceptance, revise and resubmit, reviewer letters) and to develop manuscript style guides. Details about the Open SUNY Textbook program and its templates are described in the e-book Open SUNY Textbook Program (http://opensuny.org/omp/index.php/SUNYOpenTextbooks/catalog/book/9).
The Open SUNY Textbook team first wrote a call for authors and developed a rubric to evaluate any manuscript proposals received. They sent out the call for authors to all SUNY campuses, offering an incentive of $3,000 for authoring an Open SUNY Textbook or $4,000 for authoring an Open SUNY Textbook that included students in the production and assessment of their learning. Two weeks after the call for authors was sent to all SUNY campuses, the team received 38 manuscript proposals.
The $20,000 grant funding limited our selection to only four titles; however, the College of Brockport, SUNY ESF, SUNY Fredonia, and SUNY Geneseo libraries all contributed library funding to significantly increase the number of titles selected for publication from 4 to 15. This increase added a great variety of disciplines to this publishing pilot, helping the team develop a comprehensive understanding of publishing across disciplines. However, it also significantly increased the publishing challenges because we had to incorporate a variety of style guidelines, formats, and copy-editing domain expertise. That said, this was a pilot to develop distributed publishing expertise capable of scale across the academy, and the Open SUNY Textbook team and libraries were up for the challenge.
Many open textbook programs lack publishing services, including peer-review, copyediting, and text layout, that are vital for producing high-quality textbooks. These services are essential for both the faculty as authors and the faculty as textbook adopters. Open SUNY Textbooks authors receive feedback and suggestions for their textbook from a peer reviewer. The peer reviewer also provides a public review to summarize the strengths and design of the textbook for faculty considering the adoption of the textbook. These public reviews are published inside the textbook so that it follows any copies that are saved or shared. After the authors accept or reject suggestions from the reviewer and revise their manuscripts, the manuscript is copyedited by qualified librarians or professional freelance copy editors. After the author approves suggestions made by copy editors and checks the galley proof made during the text layout phase, the publishing team at SUNY Geneseo library adds the open textbook into the Open SUNY Textbook Catalog (http://opensuny.org). The works are initially published in a PDF e-book but will later be published in EPUB3 format as well to make them more accessible by a variety of mobile devices. These books are also added to OCLC’s WorldCat so everyone can find them and they may also be added to the University of Minnesota’s Open Textbook Catalog.
One of the important components being developed during the textbook pilot is a distributed pool of library publishing experts—copy editors with identified disciplinary strengths, instructional designers, graphic and text designers, and so on. The availability and accessibility of publishing experts will empower college and university faculty to publish their works. The perceived value of librarians is enhanced among faculty because they bring innovative collaborations to the learning environment in this academic-friendly model. Consortia strengthen the ability of libraries to develop publishing by taking advantage of the unique skills and individual capacity at multiple libraries. A consortial approach allows the project to expand or contract more easily and operate more cost effectively.
Open SUNY Textbooks are freely available to everyone thanks to the authors and their use of a Creative Commons License, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA). This allows faculty to assign these textbooks, and students can read or print copies of chapters or the whole book. However, there are three important limits or conditions: the use must attribute the author and title of the work, it must be for noncommercial purposes, and any derivative uses must be shared-alike and use the same Creative Commons license. The authors retain the copyright of their work, and if requested, the authors are supported in placing their work for sale as an affordable print book in Amazon’s CreateSpace, a print-on-demand service.
A print edition is an important offering because some 60 percent of students prefer paying for an affordable print copy of a free open textbook rather than merely having access to the online textbook, according to a survey from the Student Public Interest Research Group.4 In addition, any royalty from the sale of the print edition goes to the author or to whom they designate, which is an added incentive to publish open textbooks with our program. An important point to clarify is that the online version remains free to everyone from the Open SUNY Textbook catalog.
This ambitious and innovative program published the first five of fifteen open textbooks one year after approving the manuscript proposals. The other ten titles are in various stages of publication, scheduled for 2014. The Open SUNY Textbook program also received a renewal IITG funding for $60,000 to start another call for authors and expand the program with another fifteen titles by the end of 2015. The second pilot also added more participating SUNY libraries, and there is interest outside SUNY to run a parallel program hosted by our Open Monograph Press (OMP), the open-source publishing platform we utilize for our publishing catalog. OMP was recently released by the Public Knowledge Project (http://pkp.sfu.ca) and provides a streamlined, web-based author-submission-workflow and catalog of books.
The team will be applying what they learned from the first pilot, aiming to build a sustainable open textbook program that scales. Potential growth for this program could include 64 SUNY campuses, City University of New York, and other New York libraries, ideally growing into a statewide or regional library publishing initiative. In addition, the next pilot will include an enhanced selection process that encourages participating libraries to consult with their local faculty using a blind proposal review that ranks the likely adoption of proposed manuscripts. This selection-review process evaluates the manuscript proposal’s strengths and weaknesses and market conditions, and seeks the best peer reviewers. This collaborative strategy encourages discussions between faculty members and librarians about courses and course resources, and it will enhance the awareness of the cost of textbooks, alternatives such as open textbooks, and the Open SUNY Textbook program.
Developing Local for Global Scale
To develop a cooperative open textbook publishing program, we had to build our capacity for an academic-friendly publishing service. For SUNY Geneseo’s Milne Library, that was done for library publishing services with several key hires, role assignment, and projects. First among our hires was Joe Easterly, our Electronic Resources and Digital Scholarship librarian, who helped infuse digital scholarship roles in Technical Services through a text encoding project called Digital Thoreau (http://digitalthoreau.org). Kate Pitcher, head of Technical Services, and her dedicated staff added publishing services to the role of the department. Technical Services staff are an ideal choice given their expertise in metadata and detailed projects. Another key hire to support and enhance the publishing platforms was Leah Root, our Publishing Web Services developer. We also hired Allison Brown as our editor and production manager, an indispensable role for our publishing services. These were all crucial investments to allocate necessary staffing, resources, expertise, and support to growing our publishing capacity.
We also established an eight-member publishing team to focus discussions and develop infrastructure and platforms that the library would support, such as Open Monograph Press for monographs, Open Journal Systems for journals, Omeka for digital collections, and WordPress for communities.
In 2012, Milne Library started publishing reprints of special collection works in the public domain. The first five projects gave us the opportunity to develop and refine publishing workflows. By May of 2013 we published our first new work, Tagging Along, by Stuart Symington Jr., a memoir that incorporated several images from our special collections. Many thanks to support from Liz Argentieri, our Special Collections librarian, and to Sheryl Rhodes, our Instruction librarian, for her copyediting services.
Publishing the Library Publishing Toolkit in August 2013 (www.publishingtoolkit.org) was an invaluable project that helped build our understanding of best practices and strategies for library publishing. The eight-month collaboration between SUNY Geneseo and the Monroe County Library System, with Allison Brown serving as editor, managed the call for authors and resulting compilation of 36 articles about the development of publishing services by public and academic libraries. This project served as an applied research project that helped us gather much needed case studies and strategies and build our expertise with editorial and publishing workflows.
Developing the Open SUNY Textbook program is our most ambitious and innovative publishing program. The rapid prototyping and the variety of collaborations make this publishing initiative uniquely adapted to producing high-quality open textbooks and helping define academic-friendly publishing. Together with talent from across the SUNY libraries and faculty, we have already made an impact. One week after publishing two open textbooks during Open-access Week on October 23, 2013, our Open SUNY Textbook catalog had 1,349 new visitors, 20 percent of them from abroad.
Looking forward, the program’s iteration will include refinements to improve efficiency and effectiveness, and it will increase the number of participants. Important factors to assess: what worked well, what we can improve, how to grow the collaboration, how to market for adoption and authoring, and most importantly, the impact on student learning. We are interested in working with others who are developing similar programs. Our vision is to develop a robust infrastructure to support the evolution of open textbook publishing. This includes modular personalization by faculty as well as learning analytics combined with a friendly suite of tools to create, manage, and share interactive learning objects in flexible learning environments. These are critical features to address the rapidly evolving nature and needs of higher education.
The need to support faculty in the production of open textbooks is clearly becoming more evident:
“Publishers do, however, hoard enormous war chests from sales of educational materials, and we should question whether they have taken control of teaching and learning processes that would be more appropriately owned and overseen by academics . . .
“Ultimately, I chose . . . publishing open textbooks . . . because it gave me the greatest control over my project and the potential for the greatest impact . . .
We need to realize our power as authors and publishers. Working collaboratively, we can create dynamic teaching and learning environments.”5
Libraries are increasingly aware that in collaboration with faculty, they can help solve one of the critical issues facing higher education: the rising cost of a college education. By focusing on open textbooks and open educational resource publishing, we strengthen the position of our faculty and colleges at a time of rapid changes in higher education. Libraries have experienced and successfully navigated the rapidly evolving learning environment early and have changed significantly. In order to connect faculty author to reader and teacher to learner in sustainable ways, librarians are tapping into their connector and curation expertise to provide faculty authors. Together libraries can lower the cost of education by developing important and useful networks between authors, readers, teachers, and learners. The Open SUNY Textbook program launched thanks to SUNY’s IITG grant funding, and its progression is due to the collaborations of all the librarians and libraries involved in the planning and operations of the program—especially to the faculty authors and peer reviewers.
Notes
1. “2012 Florida Student Textbook Survey,” 2012, www.openaccesstextbooks.org/pdf/2012_Florida_Student_Textbook_Survey.pdf.
2. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “College Textbooks: Students Have Greater Access to Textbook Information: Report to Congressional Committees,” 2013, www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-368.
3. The State University of New York, “Provost Announcement 2012 Innovative Instruction Technology Grants,” 2012, accessed March 1, 2014, www.suny.edu/provost/IITGProvostAnnouncement.cfm.
4. Student Public Interest Research Group, “New Report Finds Switching to Open Textbooks Saves Students Thousands” (September 30, 2010, www.studentpirgs.org/news/new-report-finds-switching-open-textbooks-saves-students-thousands.
5. Joe Moxley, “Open Textbook Publishing: Who Is Best Suited to Control Textbooks: The Faculty or the Publishers?” Academe (September/October 2013), www.aaup.org/article/open-textbook-publishing#.UqOtYWbnbL8.