Estimated reading time for this article:
25
minutes.
Our Pub101 for Authors 2026 series concludes with smart steps authors might consider for their newly published works. Join Cheryl Casey (University of Arizona) and Meggie Mapes (University of Kansas) as they share their comprehensive knowledge and hands-on experience helping authors promote OER with different audiences, track reader engagement, address sustainability and ongoing maintenance, plan for subsequent editions, and much more. Hosted by Melissa Chim (Excelsior University).
Audio Transcript
Speakers:
Melissa: Hello and welcome to the Open Education's Pub101 for Authors. Today is our last session, if you can believe it. Two months goes by really quick.
Thank you for joining us today for today's session. My name is Melissa Chim, and I'm the Scholarly Communications Librarian at Excelsior University and I'll be your host and facilitator today. Soon I'll be handing it over to Cheryl Casey, Open Education Librarian at the University of Arizona, and Meggie Mapes, Introductory Course Director at the University of Kansas. And we're going to talk about, now you're published so what happens next?
We'll leave time for questions and conversation. In addition, there may be many of you who have experience with this topic in addition to our guests. And we invite you to share your experiences and resources as well.
Here's a few housekeeping details. We have an orientation document that includes our schedule and links to session slides and recordings. If you can make it to a session and want to know what you missed, please check the orientation document that we could put in the chat in a moment. Slides, session, recordings, and curriculum connections are included in that document. And we are committed to providing a friendly and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. Please join us in creating a constructive space.
And to kick off today's conversation, we have a brief reflective question for everybody, and that is, how do you discover newly published works in your field? It's a good one, right? I could speak to that really quickly, just as a librarian. We do have kind of lists with the publishers that we have relationships with databases. And sometimes they come out with these lists that they send out or that we could log in and see, and it'll show new publications in the field. Oh, Christopher writes, "Listservs that send out information and emails." Oh, there's a lot coming in. Oh, it's moving my screen. "From professional organizations that talk about new publications." Oh, that's a really good one. "Oh, the blogosphere, various publisher and publication websites."
And Christine writes, "I'm on many mailing lists that helps me identify new publications that I then explore to determine if they're a good fit or not." Oh yeah, these listservs, they're big ones, especially in librarian world. Oh, this is a great one too. Justin wrote, "Word of mouth. Always inspiring to talk to someone who recommends something relevant." That is a great one, especially if you're in a conference or something like that and you get to talking with different people, they probably know about certain titles coming out that maybe you would never come across. And Courtney writes, "Before being a librarian, I was trained as a folklorist." Very cool. "I keep up to date with the professional org that tends to let us know what is being published. If you go to professional conferences, they usually have all the publishers there either soliciting or selling new stuff." That is very true.
Yeah. So it seems like the big theme here is definitely networking, whether it's online or in person in conferences. It seems that's how everyone is getting to know those new publications in their fields. All right. And so now I will hand things over to Cheryl and Meggie and we can get started. Thank you.
Meggie: Thank you so much, Melissa. Cheryl and I know, I won't speak for Cheryl, but I will speak for myself, I'm really happy to get to chat with you all today. I know these kinds of series that happen through the OEN are really, really important, especially if you're feeling a little bit alone as you think about publishing.
So Cheryl and I are excited to really help walk through and answer the question, "Now what?" And we've organized it into first, myself, which is the author perspective. And then Cheryl's going to talk through a more kind of open education librarian perspective. So there might be a slight amount of overlap, but we're really going to be talking about things like what do you do to promote the book, to keep track of it for promotion, for example, and really think about some big and broad questions.
So we're going to start on my end by really giving you a little bit of context. So I appreciate that introduction, Melissa. I'm a faculty member and Introductory course director at the University of Kansas. And what that means is I oversee all of our public speaking and professional public speaking classes. When I began in 2017, I was really popular very quickly with publishers because of the amount of students who circulate through the course. And in early 2019, I convened a textbook selection committee, where we reviewed a lot of public speaking textbooks. And that committee opted to recommend that we adopt an open book. And then after looking at the open books within public speaking, it wasn't really meeting the needs that we had for our students.
So I was lucky to receive a University of Kansas Libraries grant. And in 2019, I hunkered down, did a little bit of adaptation from one of those books, but it resulted, as you see here, in the fall of 2019 with Speak Out, Call In: Public Speaking as Advocacy. And what I'm really going to talk you through the next 10, 15 minutes or so is what I learned about promoting the book, about using instructor resources strategically, about tracking output and impact, and then when I decided to revise and how I decided to revise. What were some of those key courses? And along the way, I'm really going to help focus on what I did, but also what I would change and the things that I would do differently before transitioning over to Cheryl to provide you with what will be her brilliance. I joke every time I present with Cheryl, which is pretty regularly, I learn something new. So I'm excited for you all to be on the journey with us today.
So now that you have a little bit of context about that book, on the next slide, I want to talk you through some things I initially did to promote the book. Now, there's a question though that I want us to ruminate on as you are an author or maybe close to being an author. And it's a question I didn't consider, which is, "If I promote this work, do I have the capacity to maintain accessible access?" I had actually no idea the widespread adoption that would happen with Speak Out, Call In. And this question is something I really, really sit with now. And I'll talk you through again how I answered this question or how I navigated it when I realized I was a little bit unprepared.
Initially though, I did a few things and continue to do a few things to promote the book, and these are really specific to my discipline. So I used social media, not only my personal social media page, but importantly, really looked at discipline-specific groups. So what were, for example, communication groups that were not only around public speaking, but also around communication in general. And I just posted it, available in there free once it was initially ready. I also looked at repositories. So KU is really lucky to have what's called KU ScholarWorks as an open repository where they help in managing, and also the Open Textbook Library. So where can I go and where can I put the work where I know folks are already searching for open kinds of resources?
And then I also did really, really targeted feedback and promotion. So as an introductory course director and course coordinator, I just sent emails out to everyone I knew in my field who had that similar title and invited them to take a look. Because I'd already been doing some presenting with the Open Education Network, I knew that sometimes when we think about promoting, we think about wholesale promotion of a book. And instead what I did is, sure, shared a link to the specific book, but I also sent specific teasers about chapters. So I said, "You might not be interested in adopting a whole book, but there is a chapter on online public speaking and digital public speaking, which is an area in my discipline which is highly, highly underdeveloped." So I was able to, not only by emailing them directly, but also posting on discipline specific listservs, to say, "Here's an open book and also here are a few chapters that might pique your interest if you're not ready to fully adopt but want to supplement."
And then I also looked at conferences. So I did a few things at conferences. The first thing I did is I just started submitting panels as all over the place where I could talk about Open Education and used those conversations as a partial vehicle. I brought hard copies of the book. I'm really lucky that our bookstore is incredibly supportive, so much so that they will print for free open books for desk copies for all of our GTAs and lectures. So having that, I was able to again really show that physical book and physical copy. And then I shamelessly printed some Canva flyers. I just had flyers around as you are networking or thinking. And those were some of the things that I really began to do as I was promoting.
Now again, when I think back to this opening question, if I promote the book, do I have the capacity to maintain access? I realized pretty quickly that I needed to develop a system to track adoption, to make connections because I care and needed feedback from people within my own discipline so that I could honor the expertise of folks who were really applying this in their own courses. Because of my 2/2 load, I'm not teaching public speaking on a regular basis, so I really do rely on other folks in order to do so.
And that means what I did is think about instructor resources. So instructor resources as a huge part of the system that I developed as an author. And so here are a couple of things that I did to not just create instructor resources, but some of the intention and motivation that I created around writing them. So we know, of course, as a director in critical pedagogue, I was always aware how central instructor resources are for graduate teaching assistants and for adjuncts in particular. So when I got the grant from KU Libraries, I quickly allocated funds to support graduate teaching assistant creation of those instructor resources. I used it as an opportunity not only to pay them, but also to have conversations about creating instructor resources.So I had two assistants who did the majority of the creation of those resources.
When I did it, I didn't do anything fancy. I made a Dropbox file. And in the text of the book on page 1, I said, "If you're interested in instructor resources, here is my email." I also included that in all the places where I was promoting, because again, in many ways that was, not the page turner, but it was the motivating factor. It really helped a lot of folks to know that there were some instructor resources. Not perfect, but there were some. So having contact information was helpful.
The other thing about having folks contact me directly for instructor resources was that as soon as they began contacting me, I would say, "Absolutely. Here's a link to those instructor resources. I'm happy to add you. Would you mind, on letterhead for your institution, provide me a letter of verification of adoption and just let me know how many classes you have and how many students per class so that I could begin to file away those for promotion, for tracking, and for tenure files?" But I added that into my system right away.
The second is I realized that getting that contact information and having a list of folks who had adopted was going to be really, really helpful in the future if I wanted to solicit feedback surveys for revision purposes. Especially in 2019, I wasn't aware, I don't think any of us were, about some of the huge changes in requirements that would start to overhaul many of the things that we had taken for granted in terms of censorships, shall we say. And so those feedback surveys in the future became really instrumental for me making strategic revision decisions where I could make sure I wasn't eliminating access for a book for folks in states that might have additional concerns that I wanted to be aware of.
And then I also added those folks to a communication open pedagogy listserv that I created. And my goal there was, in hopes to motivate other folks who'd be interested in writing open or if we wanted to create new resources in the future, that we would have a bit of a community here. So again, I used instructor resources to push the door open and think about the creation of a system that could support me, help and connect other instructors within my discipline, and also make sure that I was getting resources to folks who really needed it. Now, one thing I would change in terms of instructor resources, and this might sound simple, but I wasn't that thoughtful or strategic about the slides. And I mean very basic things like contrast, accessibility requirements, thinking about using alt text. Some of those things, we did very basic bare bones kind of presentation slides. So I would've thought a little bit more strategically, which we'd do in the second round of revisions.
The other thing I would've changed, and kind of did, you'll see here on the next slide, is I was lucky to work with the OEN on a Manifold grant. And what I realized is this is a kind of double-edged sword because on the one hand, I really wanted to make those instructor resources openly licensed. I didn't want to have to be the gatekeeper for folks to have access to those instructor resources, one, because of just my own time. Again, the amount of labor that's required. It's part of my value to have the resources openly licensed along with the textbook.
So what I did in my graduate pedagogy class is worked with graduate students to create additional instructor resources. And we called it, you see here, the Public Speaking Open Pedagogy Project. That was in, I want to say, 2022 or 2023. Since then, I've had a graduate student who is in my initial cohort return to me this year and say, "I want to expand this. This was so great, so interesting to me. Can we do more work to create additional resources here?" So we'll actually begin to do that this fall.
One difficulty though, however, is if I'm not the kind of gatekeeper, it's a little bit more difficult to track adoption. So you have to think there about strategy. Of course, if folks can go and have access to those resources, I lose a little bit of clarity about how many people have adopted the specific kind of instructor. So just keep that in your mind or aware. Now, what I do when folks email me to access instructor resources is, I both add them to the Dropbox file and I share this resource with them so that they still have access to it and I'm still able to apply the system that I had talked through a little bit with you.
So that's a little bit about the kind of promoting phase. The next phase for me was really the tracking phase. How do I keep track of what's happening with this book? Why do I want to keep track? And I did a kind of very basic Google Analytics and Pressbooks initially. I know Pressbooks now is really great at really showing analytics. One thing that was helpful for me in using the Google Analytics was that it showed not just how many people were using or accessing the book or certain chapters, but it gave me an idea of where. So geographically, it showed me how significant the readership truly, truly was.
This actually, this example is from quite a few years ago. We are now within readership up to oftentimes around 20 to 30,000 per month. And so this really helped again, not only to see the amount, but also where. And again, it really provided evidence for me about the claim that we make around open being more accessible beyond a Western perspective, and those analytics absolutely demonstrated truth. So when we think about widespread impact, that kind of geographic insight was really, really important for me when I not only went up for promotion, but also when I was, for example, trying to apply for an award.
So on that next slide, we'll see how in addition to tracking from that perspective, I also use, like I'd mentioned, that letterhead adoption verification from folks who had adopted. I used repository tracking, so KU ScholarWorks, where again, we have an incredible team over at KU Libraries who I think once every six months they send me a readership update for folks who have downloaded the PDF.
I also look in disciplinary publications. This might be specific to communication. Our introductory courses in public speaking, we have so many, so many students and courses across the United States that one of our main journal publications every around two to three years will publish a kind of ranking of adoption for textbooks. So that's another place that you can look to see around Impact. Don't forget about your own student use or folks that you know are working and tracking. I have solicited, for example... in anonymous feedback and surveys of my own students, I've added a question specifically about the textbook so that I can also use that data. And I've used this not only for promotion, but applied for an award. So I was lucky that our National Communication Association organization recognized the Speak Out, Call In as a textbook of the year a few years ago using all of these data.
And then finally, of course, I used the Open Textbook Library reviews. So on the next slide, you'll see that I'm actually able to go and look at the reviews that have been completed and get a sense of not just the beautiful, amazing feeling 5 stars there, but also the content that really is solicited from more of a qualitative perspective.
Importantly, when I use those reviews, it's not just for promotion. That feedback is also really, really meaningful when we ask ourselves this question about revising or revision. So I published the first edition of Speak Out, Call In in 2019. After about five years, I was thinking, "Okay, it might be time to revise."
So if I think here about how do we identify as authors, when it might be time to revise, especially for an entirely new second edition, and then how do we keep track, here's a few things that I really ruminated on. So like I had mentioned, I solicited those instructors who had adopted and created a feedback survey. I asked them questions like, "What chapters do you use the most? What's missing from those chapters?" And then I asked them, "Would you be willing to review new content? Would you be willing to participate in peer review circles of content if I was interested in doing a second revision?" And if I'm honest, I really thought nobody was going to fill this survey out, and that was not the case. I had such incredible colleagues and folks who had adopted give feedback. And of course they did because folks are invested in having quality materials in their own courses.
So I used that feedback. I used the Open Textbook Library, excuse me, reviews. And I also looked at changes within the discipline and changes in requirements. And here's what I mean. In public speaking, there are shifts and changes, of course, in how we talk about what public speaking is. I'd mentioned online public speaking before. The Kansas Board of Regents a few years ago just made some big changes again to our introductory and general education core requirements. So being able to have and scan to see what's happening within the discipline and what changing requirements are occurring can help me determine whether or not I need to, in fact, have a revision.
I also am having my ear to the ground because you'll notice that in the title of the book is the word "advocacy." And never did I think when I was going to be writing this book that the word advocacy might be a word on a federal list, but it is. So that's a kind of question to be considering for me, is whether or not I would receive feedback in that survey from folks who were nervous about the language in the book. And I received none actually, which is why I didn't change the title of the book itself. So those were helpful.
The other thing I'll mention is that in many of the introductory courses, I got feedback from instructors that they're required to have a book within five years of its publication. So that they were worried that if I didn't have a new second revision, that they wouldn't be able to keep the first edition because of certain requirements they have. I had overwhelming feedback that they wanted more about AI in public speaking and more about online public speaking. I also wanted to, of course, update examples, et cetera, throughout. And so I kept track by doing word change tracking.
Pressbooks for me was so easy to have a change-per-word document that I just uploaded. And because I had that document, I just did tracked changes. And then within those, I provided those tracked changes to folks who volunteered for peer review circles and said, "Here's the book, here are the changes," and gave them a bit of a rubric to provide that feedback. Once I made the changes in the revision, I worked with a graphic designer to make a new front, a new cover page. And then I put a revision overview in the second edition of the text. I also updated and created an entirely new list of instructor resources.
So what you'll see on this kind of next slide is that second edition. It is similar in nature, but the front is a bit different. I still have folks... One difficulty or downside is not every person reaches out to me to get instructor resources. And so I realized I had a lot of folks who had adopted that I wasn't aware of, which also meant they weren't aware of the second edition because I struggled to figure out how to make contact and communicate with folks. If there are ideas or folks have ideas, I would love that. But really, of course, it doesn't prohibit folks from using the first edition. It just enables others, if they're interested, to adopt based on the overview of the revision that I was really able to provide. So those are just a few things around my post-author experience. I hope they're helpful for you. I'm going to transition over to Cheryl now.
Cheryl: Thanks so much, Meggie. It's super helpful to hear your experience. And as far as diverting people or alerting people to the second edition, you might consider putting a note in the first edition, this area, sharing a link to the second.
Okay. Now we'd like to get some feedback from you. And what I'd like to try is a chat waterfall. And if you haven't done this before, I'd like you to consider this question and type your answer in the chat, but wait to hit send until I say go. And that way you're not trying to read and write at the same time. Okay. So thinking about the various aspects of post-publication ... Oh no, I lost my screen. Uh-oh. Okay. Where am I?
Meggie: That's okay. I'll read it. I'll read it while you find it, Cheryl.
Cheryl: Thank you.
Meggie: How about that? Yes.
Cheryl: Thank you. That would be helpful.
Meggie: All good. Yes. So "Thinking about the various aspects of post-publication, promotion, analytics, assessment, maintenance, and promotion and tenure, which seems most challenging and why?"
Cheryl: So go ahead and write your response in the chat and I'll give you a few seconds to do that. And then I'll give you a signal to hit send. Thank you, Meggie. All right, ready? On the count of three, hit send. One, two, three. And there it goes. I love the chat waterfall. Excellent.
So Matthew says, "Promoting seems hard as it feels like punching into waves." I like that analogy. Yeah. Christine says, "Promotion and tenure. How do you convince others that this type of publication is as valuable as traditional publishing?" Love that question. I'm going to get into that a little bit and share some resources that have been developed by the DOERS Network to demonstrate impact for promotion and tenure or your annual reviews.
Justin says, "Maintenance." Yes. "Finding the time and energy to solicit feedback and make edits." Yeah.
Gary says, "Promotion. And second, promotion and tenure." Yeah, that feeling of self-promotion always makes me feel a little ... It can be hard to self-promote. It does feel uncomfortable sometimes. So we'll talk about strategies for that. You can use other people's words to promote your book and use their praise and highlight the 5-star reviews of Meggie's book. So yeah, I love that comment. Another vote for promotion and tenure. Another vote for maintenance.
Jessica mentions that the book she's working on is on health policy and it's ever-changing. Oh yes, definitely. And Amanda mentions assessment of use. So thank you all for those comments. Okay. Now I'm going to try and get out of this chat screen again. Let's see if this will work. Okay, cool. The next question I had, and the second part, is that if we had a magic wand or unlimited resources and funding, what help or resources would you want either from an organization like the Open Education Network or from your library or your department or your institution?
"Infrastructure for peer review." Oh, yes. I love that suggestion. I know that the Rebus community has a little bit of infrastructure around that, but yeah, we could ...Yes. "A grant program for authors." Agreed, Melissa. "Either institutional or nationally or statewide." Jessica, "A course release for writing." Yep, some places have that. We do not. It's really tough to find that time to carve out. Gary says in his field of math, it's difficult to come up with a lot of homework problems and a homework platform that supports them. Yeah. So open math, I assume you've tried and found that a little bit lacking maybe. And through OpenStax, there are some lower cost courseware and homework platforms that you can partner with, but we frequently hear that, that that's an area of support that we could use help with.
Oh, "Listservs send out information." Yes. I'll be talking about three big ones that I recommend highly. Matthew says, "Blogosphere LI." I'm not sure what LI is, sorry. "Various publisher and publication websites." Christine mentions being on a mailing list.
All right. So you have done all the work to complete your book, you've published it, and now it's important to get that word out to the world. And because there is no central repository for OER, I really recommend doing a combination of what I call the fire hose approach, which is blasting out the word to as wide an audience as possible, and the dartboard approach, which is being more targeted and specific in your audience.
So with the fire hose approach and promoting widely and wildly, the first thing is to possibly work with your marketing department on an article or a blog post or a press release. Different institutions have different procedures for how these get released. And so knowing what your internal procedures and who your partners would be is good to find out in advance and to plan for. I know some of our press releases took months to develop, so getting started on those early as they go through their various levels of approval can be helpful. Sharing on social media like LinkedIn or X or Facebook or BlueSky or Mastodon. If you have that network of colleagues, they can help repost and reshare and really amplify your message.
And then sharing on OER listservs. And so the Open Education Network has one that's really great. Spark has another one that reaches a wide audience. And then CCCOER, which is the Community College Consortium for OER, and anyone can join that, also has a wide-reaching Listserv. And so when I'm publicizing a book, I send out a message to all three listservs. And I know that there's duplication, but I want to reach as wide an audience as possible.
I also want to expand my book's discoverability. Meggie touched on some of these, but submitting to the Open Textbook Library. There's a place on the Open Textbook Library website where if they don't discover it before you recommend that they add it to the library, you can suggest that they add it to the library. With Merlot and OER Commons, you just have to create free accounts and you'll be able to upload the book and all of the metadata so people can sort and search and find your book. Yes, thank you, Karen, for sharing the link for suggestions for the Open Textbook Library.
And if you are publishing in Pressbooks, working with your network administrator to make sure that it's added to the network catalog so that it automatically gets pulled into the Pressbooks directory and is findable there. And then from all of these spots, they get pulled into mega search tools like OASIS or the Mason OER MetaFinder. And so that just amplifies discovery even more.
I do want to share a couple of examples. This is a press release that we released for the Culinary Medicine project that we did a few years ago. So we listed all of the campus partners. We had a website, project website, where we could post updates and direct people to. And this was coordinated by one of the college partners. These are some examples from LinkedIn. The first one is by a professor promoting her own textbook. And the second is from an OER program coordinator, Abbey Elder, the fabulous Abbey Elder at Iowa State University, where she's promoting one of their network's new publications. And we were really surprised with Culinary Medicine, how effective sharing on LinkedIn was when we started checking the network site traffic in Pressbooks. I was surprised how much traffic was coming from LinkedIn. And that hadn't been top of mind before.
So with the dartboard approach, you're more focused and targeted. Oh, Amanda notes, "Yes, LinkedIn has really picked up now that... Yes, Twitter." There used to be a fabulous OER community on Twitter. And when it transitioned to X, many, many people left, and that was a big loss. And now it's kind of scattered around, like Amanda said, some on LinkedIn, Mastodon, BlueSky. But yeah, I really miss the old Twitter.
Okay. So the dartboard approach, it is, as Meggie said, sharing on your disciplinary listservs, reaching out to colleagues. And Meggie gave really good examples of how she did that in her network. And I would also recommend sharing with your administration, making sure that your department heads, your college dean, your director, your provost, whatever infrastructure is at your institution, making sure that they're aware that this is out there and is supporting institutional goals and making an impact.
And Meggie gave some great examples of presenting at conferences. There are a wide range of OER conferences. Some of the big ones globally are OER Global and the Open Education Conference in October. There are lots and lots of regional and statewide conferences that are often free to attend. They often accept proposals from people outside their state. So you can go present to Florida or Arizona or other states and get word out about your project. So these are great ways to raise awareness about OER in general, but also about your book in particular.
And then piloting the book. And I'll just add on to what Meggie has already shared. Surveys can be a really great tool. And there are existing surveys out there that you can adapt so you don't have to start from scratch or reinvent the wheel. We have found it helpful to offer a few points of extra credit to the students or even time during class to fill out the survey just to make sure that the completion rates are higher. Focus groups can be super helpful. Meggie already shared the contact me note in the book, asking users to report adoptions or to email about issues found. And so there's some great examples already out there that you can duplicate on how to solicit that user feedback.
And then you can also choose to do post publication peer review. I know in our tenure and promotion process, anything that's peer-reviewed counts more when it comes to scholarships. So that can be a really great thing to add to your book. And of course you can name your peer reviewers in your publication, but you can ask them to even follow the 10 category review rubric that the Open Textbook Library uses for its textbook reviews, look for new content in ever-changing fields. Are there gaps that they teach to you? And maybe this book doesn't include. As Meggie said, these are great ideas for revisions.
And then maintaining the book. And Meggie made a great point about the importance of that long-term commitment. I'm starting to use the analogy with authors of it's kind of like adopting a puppy. You're making a long-term commitment to provide food, water, shelter, affection, toys, veterinary care. That puppy's going to grow and change, but it needs you every step of the way. So with OER, once you've put it out in the world and students and professors and courses are relying on it, it really needs your ongoing commitment to doing things like checking for broken links, resolving accessibility issues, removing outdated content and adding new material and iterating and improving. So it can be unclear whose responsibility that is. So as part of the publication process, I recommend working that out with whoever you're working with to publish your OER. But for us, it's the author responsibility to do this ongoing care.
And I'll say that Pressbooks, which is what we use, has added some really nice tools in the past year to help with these tasks, the broken link checker, the accessibility reviewers. And so that's made those tasks much less time-consuming. And we want to be transparent about when we have made revisions to our books. And so we adapted this versioning history from other great examples at other institutions. And so it just tracks when the change was made, what the change was. When we do minor changes, we consider these version changes. But for significant changes, we would do a second edition as Meggie shared.
And then updating your dossier and documenting your impact in terms of promotion and tenure and annual reviews. So whether OER counts a scholarship may vary from institution to institution. At the University of Arizona, it definitely does, but it's up to faculty to make the case for their impact. If you received a grant or a stipend that may count in the award section or under the grant section. There are lots of different ways to document your impact. You can start with cost savings. Do you know the amount the previous commercial textbook that the OER replaced sold for or the Open Education network has a standard figure of $100 per student? So you can do those estimated cost savings to demonstrate impact.
Has it been adopted or adapted by other institutions? And I love Meggie's example of asking people to reach out and report adoptions and to send on letterhead. That's just a fabulous example. Have you gotten awards? I know one of our OER authors talked about her OER projects and got a really prestigious teaching award. So that's great to highlight in a dossier.
Is there praise from peer reviewers or users or reviewers in the Open Textbook Library? Is there praise from students if you do the student surveys? How is your OER aligned with institutional goals and values and its mission statements? Things that are common in institutional goals might be innovation and access and affordability. And as a land grant institution, we're tasked with sharing expertise with the world. So tying your project into those institutional goals and missions and values can be a good way to communicate with administrators in particular. And then tracking how many visitors and views you got.
There's another framework for kind of looking at impact that I wanted to share from the Open Education Group, and this is called the COUP framework. So you can look at C, the cost, O, the outcomes, U, the usage, and P, the perceptions. And those perceptions, especially if you're using student stories, can be really powerful. We have gotten some really great student quotes about the impact of an open pedagogy assignment or the impact of OER and textbook cost savings. And sharing those in presentations can be really impactful and powerful.
This is a screenshot of our Pressbooks statistics and on the right side, you can see that most of our site traffic for culinary medicine ... Or no, sorry, this was humans or social media, came from our learning management system, D2L, Brightspace. Number two though was open.umn.edu, which is the Open Textbook Library. And then we can go down through and see other EDU sites and have a pretty safe assumption that these books are being used at those institutions. So number 10 is Pima Community College. And our author actually reached out to Colorado, University of Colorado Boulder when she learned that they were using it, and that led to a new edition collaboration. So having this information can be really powerful. And you can also see from the Pressbooks statistics, which are the most popular sections.
And lastly, I mentioned that DOERS had a couple of resources for demonstrating impact. The first is a tenure and promotion matrix. Some states have adapted these to make their own state matrix. So that's something you might look for. I know Oregon and Iowa are two that have done that. And then there's a book of case studies valuing OER in the tenure promotion and reappointment process. I have a case study in there about how I wrote about my OER work in my promotion to full librarian. There's lots of other examples if you're looking for inspiration on how to talk about this in a dossier in a candidate statement.
All right. Well, that was the end of our prepared remarks. Now I'll pass things back to you, Melissa.
Melissa: Oh, yeah. Thank you so much, Cheryl and Meggie. This is really great for me because as a librarian, I work with my faculty authors. So this is a great way to show them that, "Oh, after publication, things actually still do happen." There are things you can still do after your book is published.
END OF VIDEO
Our Pub101 for Authors 2026 series concludes with smart steps authors might consider for their newly published works. Join Cheryl Casey (University of Arizona) and Meggie Mapes (University of Kansas) as they share their comprehensive knowledge and hands-on experience helping authors promote OER with different audiences, track reader engagement, address sustainability and ongoing maintenance, plan for subsequent editions, and much more. Hosted by Melissa Chim (Excelsior University).
Watch the video recording of this May 13, 2026, session or keep reading for a full transcript.
Audio Transcript
Speakers:
- Cheryl Casey (Open Education Librarian, University of Arizona)
- Melissa Chim (Scholarly Communications Librarian, Excelsior University)
- Meggie Mapes (Introductory Course Director, Associate Specialist, University of Kansas)
Melissa: Hello and welcome to the Open Education's Pub101 for Authors. Today is our last session, if you can believe it. Two months goes by really quick.
Thank you for joining us today for today's session. My name is Melissa Chim, and I'm the Scholarly Communications Librarian at Excelsior University and I'll be your host and facilitator today. Soon I'll be handing it over to Cheryl Casey, Open Education Librarian at the University of Arizona, and Meggie Mapes, Introductory Course Director at the University of Kansas. And we're going to talk about, now you're published so what happens next?
We'll leave time for questions and conversation. In addition, there may be many of you who have experience with this topic in addition to our guests. And we invite you to share your experiences and resources as well.
Here's a few housekeeping details. We have an orientation document that includes our schedule and links to session slides and recordings. If you can make it to a session and want to know what you missed, please check the orientation document that we could put in the chat in a moment. Slides, session, recordings, and curriculum connections are included in that document. And we are committed to providing a friendly and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. Please join us in creating a constructive space.
And to kick off today's conversation, we have a brief reflective question for everybody, and that is, how do you discover newly published works in your field? It's a good one, right? I could speak to that really quickly, just as a librarian. We do have kind of lists with the publishers that we have relationships with databases. And sometimes they come out with these lists that they send out or that we could log in and see, and it'll show new publications in the field. Oh, Christopher writes, "Listservs that send out information and emails." Oh, there's a lot coming in. Oh, it's moving my screen. "From professional organizations that talk about new publications." Oh, that's a really good one. "Oh, the blogosphere, various publisher and publication websites."
And Christine writes, "I'm on many mailing lists that helps me identify new publications that I then explore to determine if they're a good fit or not." Oh yeah, these listservs, they're big ones, especially in librarian world. Oh, this is a great one too. Justin wrote, "Word of mouth. Always inspiring to talk to someone who recommends something relevant." That is a great one, especially if you're in a conference or something like that and you get to talking with different people, they probably know about certain titles coming out that maybe you would never come across. And Courtney writes, "Before being a librarian, I was trained as a folklorist." Very cool. "I keep up to date with the professional org that tends to let us know what is being published. If you go to professional conferences, they usually have all the publishers there either soliciting or selling new stuff." That is very true.
Yeah. So it seems like the big theme here is definitely networking, whether it's online or in person in conferences. It seems that's how everyone is getting to know those new publications in their fields. All right. And so now I will hand things over to Cheryl and Meggie and we can get started. Thank you.
Meggie: Thank you so much, Melissa. Cheryl and I know, I won't speak for Cheryl, but I will speak for myself, I'm really happy to get to chat with you all today. I know these kinds of series that happen through the OEN are really, really important, especially if you're feeling a little bit alone as you think about publishing.
So Cheryl and I are excited to really help walk through and answer the question, "Now what?" And we've organized it into first, myself, which is the author perspective. And then Cheryl's going to talk through a more kind of open education librarian perspective. So there might be a slight amount of overlap, but we're really going to be talking about things like what do you do to promote the book, to keep track of it for promotion, for example, and really think about some big and broad questions.
So we're going to start on my end by really giving you a little bit of context. So I appreciate that introduction, Melissa. I'm a faculty member and Introductory course director at the University of Kansas. And what that means is I oversee all of our public speaking and professional public speaking classes. When I began in 2017, I was really popular very quickly with publishers because of the amount of students who circulate through the course. And in early 2019, I convened a textbook selection committee, where we reviewed a lot of public speaking textbooks. And that committee opted to recommend that we adopt an open book. And then after looking at the open books within public speaking, it wasn't really meeting the needs that we had for our students.
So I was lucky to receive a University of Kansas Libraries grant. And in 2019, I hunkered down, did a little bit of adaptation from one of those books, but it resulted, as you see here, in the fall of 2019 with Speak Out, Call In: Public Speaking as Advocacy. And what I'm really going to talk you through the next 10, 15 minutes or so is what I learned about promoting the book, about using instructor resources strategically, about tracking output and impact, and then when I decided to revise and how I decided to revise. What were some of those key courses? And along the way, I'm really going to help focus on what I did, but also what I would change and the things that I would do differently before transitioning over to Cheryl to provide you with what will be her brilliance. I joke every time I present with Cheryl, which is pretty regularly, I learn something new. So I'm excited for you all to be on the journey with us today.
So now that you have a little bit of context about that book, on the next slide, I want to talk you through some things I initially did to promote the book. Now, there's a question though that I want us to ruminate on as you are an author or maybe close to being an author. And it's a question I didn't consider, which is, "If I promote this work, do I have the capacity to maintain accessible access?" I had actually no idea the widespread adoption that would happen with Speak Out, Call In. And this question is something I really, really sit with now. And I'll talk you through again how I answered this question or how I navigated it when I realized I was a little bit unprepared.
Initially though, I did a few things and continue to do a few things to promote the book, and these are really specific to my discipline. So I used social media, not only my personal social media page, but importantly, really looked at discipline-specific groups. So what were, for example, communication groups that were not only around public speaking, but also around communication in general. And I just posted it, available in there free once it was initially ready. I also looked at repositories. So KU is really lucky to have what's called KU ScholarWorks as an open repository where they help in managing, and also the Open Textbook Library. So where can I go and where can I put the work where I know folks are already searching for open kinds of resources?
And then I also did really, really targeted feedback and promotion. So as an introductory course director and course coordinator, I just sent emails out to everyone I knew in my field who had that similar title and invited them to take a look. Because I'd already been doing some presenting with the Open Education Network, I knew that sometimes when we think about promoting, we think about wholesale promotion of a book. And instead what I did is, sure, shared a link to the specific book, but I also sent specific teasers about chapters. So I said, "You might not be interested in adopting a whole book, but there is a chapter on online public speaking and digital public speaking, which is an area in my discipline which is highly, highly underdeveloped." So I was able to, not only by emailing them directly, but also posting on discipline specific listservs, to say, "Here's an open book and also here are a few chapters that might pique your interest if you're not ready to fully adopt but want to supplement."
And then I also looked at conferences. So I did a few things at conferences. The first thing I did is I just started submitting panels as all over the place where I could talk about Open Education and used those conversations as a partial vehicle. I brought hard copies of the book. I'm really lucky that our bookstore is incredibly supportive, so much so that they will print for free open books for desk copies for all of our GTAs and lectures. So having that, I was able to again really show that physical book and physical copy. And then I shamelessly printed some Canva flyers. I just had flyers around as you are networking or thinking. And those were some of the things that I really began to do as I was promoting.
Now again, when I think back to this opening question, if I promote the book, do I have the capacity to maintain access? I realized pretty quickly that I needed to develop a system to track adoption, to make connections because I care and needed feedback from people within my own discipline so that I could honor the expertise of folks who were really applying this in their own courses. Because of my 2/2 load, I'm not teaching public speaking on a regular basis, so I really do rely on other folks in order to do so.
And that means what I did is think about instructor resources. So instructor resources as a huge part of the system that I developed as an author. And so here are a couple of things that I did to not just create instructor resources, but some of the intention and motivation that I created around writing them. So we know, of course, as a director in critical pedagogue, I was always aware how central instructor resources are for graduate teaching assistants and for adjuncts in particular. So when I got the grant from KU Libraries, I quickly allocated funds to support graduate teaching assistant creation of those instructor resources. I used it as an opportunity not only to pay them, but also to have conversations about creating instructor resources.So I had two assistants who did the majority of the creation of those resources.
When I did it, I didn't do anything fancy. I made a Dropbox file. And in the text of the book on page 1, I said, "If you're interested in instructor resources, here is my email." I also included that in all the places where I was promoting, because again, in many ways that was, not the page turner, but it was the motivating factor. It really helped a lot of folks to know that there were some instructor resources. Not perfect, but there were some. So having contact information was helpful.
The other thing about having folks contact me directly for instructor resources was that as soon as they began contacting me, I would say, "Absolutely. Here's a link to those instructor resources. I'm happy to add you. Would you mind, on letterhead for your institution, provide me a letter of verification of adoption and just let me know how many classes you have and how many students per class so that I could begin to file away those for promotion, for tracking, and for tenure files?" But I added that into my system right away.
The second is I realized that getting that contact information and having a list of folks who had adopted was going to be really, really helpful in the future if I wanted to solicit feedback surveys for revision purposes. Especially in 2019, I wasn't aware, I don't think any of us were, about some of the huge changes in requirements that would start to overhaul many of the things that we had taken for granted in terms of censorships, shall we say. And so those feedback surveys in the future became really instrumental for me making strategic revision decisions where I could make sure I wasn't eliminating access for a book for folks in states that might have additional concerns that I wanted to be aware of.
And then I also added those folks to a communication open pedagogy listserv that I created. And my goal there was, in hopes to motivate other folks who'd be interested in writing open or if we wanted to create new resources in the future, that we would have a bit of a community here. So again, I used instructor resources to push the door open and think about the creation of a system that could support me, help and connect other instructors within my discipline, and also make sure that I was getting resources to folks who really needed it. Now, one thing I would change in terms of instructor resources, and this might sound simple, but I wasn't that thoughtful or strategic about the slides. And I mean very basic things like contrast, accessibility requirements, thinking about using alt text. Some of those things, we did very basic bare bones kind of presentation slides. So I would've thought a little bit more strategically, which we'd do in the second round of revisions.
The other thing I would've changed, and kind of did, you'll see here on the next slide, is I was lucky to work with the OEN on a Manifold grant. And what I realized is this is a kind of double-edged sword because on the one hand, I really wanted to make those instructor resources openly licensed. I didn't want to have to be the gatekeeper for folks to have access to those instructor resources, one, because of just my own time. Again, the amount of labor that's required. It's part of my value to have the resources openly licensed along with the textbook.
So what I did in my graduate pedagogy class is worked with graduate students to create additional instructor resources. And we called it, you see here, the Public Speaking Open Pedagogy Project. That was in, I want to say, 2022 or 2023. Since then, I've had a graduate student who is in my initial cohort return to me this year and say, "I want to expand this. This was so great, so interesting to me. Can we do more work to create additional resources here?" So we'll actually begin to do that this fall.
One difficulty though, however, is if I'm not the kind of gatekeeper, it's a little bit more difficult to track adoption. So you have to think there about strategy. Of course, if folks can go and have access to those resources, I lose a little bit of clarity about how many people have adopted the specific kind of instructor. So just keep that in your mind or aware. Now, what I do when folks email me to access instructor resources is, I both add them to the Dropbox file and I share this resource with them so that they still have access to it and I'm still able to apply the system that I had talked through a little bit with you.
So that's a little bit about the kind of promoting phase. The next phase for me was really the tracking phase. How do I keep track of what's happening with this book? Why do I want to keep track? And I did a kind of very basic Google Analytics and Pressbooks initially. I know Pressbooks now is really great at really showing analytics. One thing that was helpful for me in using the Google Analytics was that it showed not just how many people were using or accessing the book or certain chapters, but it gave me an idea of where. So geographically, it showed me how significant the readership truly, truly was.
This actually, this example is from quite a few years ago. We are now within readership up to oftentimes around 20 to 30,000 per month. And so this really helped again, not only to see the amount, but also where. And again, it really provided evidence for me about the claim that we make around open being more accessible beyond a Western perspective, and those analytics absolutely demonstrated truth. So when we think about widespread impact, that kind of geographic insight was really, really important for me when I not only went up for promotion, but also when I was, for example, trying to apply for an award.
So on that next slide, we'll see how in addition to tracking from that perspective, I also use, like I'd mentioned, that letterhead adoption verification from folks who had adopted. I used repository tracking, so KU ScholarWorks, where again, we have an incredible team over at KU Libraries who I think once every six months they send me a readership update for folks who have downloaded the PDF.
I also look in disciplinary publications. This might be specific to communication. Our introductory courses in public speaking, we have so many, so many students and courses across the United States that one of our main journal publications every around two to three years will publish a kind of ranking of adoption for textbooks. So that's another place that you can look to see around Impact. Don't forget about your own student use or folks that you know are working and tracking. I have solicited, for example... in anonymous feedback and surveys of my own students, I've added a question specifically about the textbook so that I can also use that data. And I've used this not only for promotion, but applied for an award. So I was lucky that our National Communication Association organization recognized the Speak Out, Call In as a textbook of the year a few years ago using all of these data.
And then finally, of course, I used the Open Textbook Library reviews. So on the next slide, you'll see that I'm actually able to go and look at the reviews that have been completed and get a sense of not just the beautiful, amazing feeling 5 stars there, but also the content that really is solicited from more of a qualitative perspective.
Importantly, when I use those reviews, it's not just for promotion. That feedback is also really, really meaningful when we ask ourselves this question about revising or revision. So I published the first edition of Speak Out, Call In in 2019. After about five years, I was thinking, "Okay, it might be time to revise."
So if I think here about how do we identify as authors, when it might be time to revise, especially for an entirely new second edition, and then how do we keep track, here's a few things that I really ruminated on. So like I had mentioned, I solicited those instructors who had adopted and created a feedback survey. I asked them questions like, "What chapters do you use the most? What's missing from those chapters?" And then I asked them, "Would you be willing to review new content? Would you be willing to participate in peer review circles of content if I was interested in doing a second revision?" And if I'm honest, I really thought nobody was going to fill this survey out, and that was not the case. I had such incredible colleagues and folks who had adopted give feedback. And of course they did because folks are invested in having quality materials in their own courses.
So I used that feedback. I used the Open Textbook Library, excuse me, reviews. And I also looked at changes within the discipline and changes in requirements. And here's what I mean. In public speaking, there are shifts and changes, of course, in how we talk about what public speaking is. I'd mentioned online public speaking before. The Kansas Board of Regents a few years ago just made some big changes again to our introductory and general education core requirements. So being able to have and scan to see what's happening within the discipline and what changing requirements are occurring can help me determine whether or not I need to, in fact, have a revision.
I also am having my ear to the ground because you'll notice that in the title of the book is the word "advocacy." And never did I think when I was going to be writing this book that the word advocacy might be a word on a federal list, but it is. So that's a kind of question to be considering for me, is whether or not I would receive feedback in that survey from folks who were nervous about the language in the book. And I received none actually, which is why I didn't change the title of the book itself. So those were helpful.
The other thing I'll mention is that in many of the introductory courses, I got feedback from instructors that they're required to have a book within five years of its publication. So that they were worried that if I didn't have a new second revision, that they wouldn't be able to keep the first edition because of certain requirements they have. I had overwhelming feedback that they wanted more about AI in public speaking and more about online public speaking. I also wanted to, of course, update examples, et cetera, throughout. And so I kept track by doing word change tracking.
Pressbooks for me was so easy to have a change-per-word document that I just uploaded. And because I had that document, I just did tracked changes. And then within those, I provided those tracked changes to folks who volunteered for peer review circles and said, "Here's the book, here are the changes," and gave them a bit of a rubric to provide that feedback. Once I made the changes in the revision, I worked with a graphic designer to make a new front, a new cover page. And then I put a revision overview in the second edition of the text. I also updated and created an entirely new list of instructor resources.
So what you'll see on this kind of next slide is that second edition. It is similar in nature, but the front is a bit different. I still have folks... One difficulty or downside is not every person reaches out to me to get instructor resources. And so I realized I had a lot of folks who had adopted that I wasn't aware of, which also meant they weren't aware of the second edition because I struggled to figure out how to make contact and communicate with folks. If there are ideas or folks have ideas, I would love that. But really, of course, it doesn't prohibit folks from using the first edition. It just enables others, if they're interested, to adopt based on the overview of the revision that I was really able to provide. So those are just a few things around my post-author experience. I hope they're helpful for you. I'm going to transition over to Cheryl now.
Cheryl: Thanks so much, Meggie. It's super helpful to hear your experience. And as far as diverting people or alerting people to the second edition, you might consider putting a note in the first edition, this area, sharing a link to the second.
Okay. Now we'd like to get some feedback from you. And what I'd like to try is a chat waterfall. And if you haven't done this before, I'd like you to consider this question and type your answer in the chat, but wait to hit send until I say go. And that way you're not trying to read and write at the same time. Okay. So thinking about the various aspects of post-publication ... Oh no, I lost my screen. Uh-oh. Okay. Where am I?
Meggie: That's okay. I'll read it. I'll read it while you find it, Cheryl.
Cheryl: Thank you.
Meggie: How about that? Yes.
Cheryl: Thank you. That would be helpful.
Meggie: All good. Yes. So "Thinking about the various aspects of post-publication, promotion, analytics, assessment, maintenance, and promotion and tenure, which seems most challenging and why?"
Cheryl: So go ahead and write your response in the chat and I'll give you a few seconds to do that. And then I'll give you a signal to hit send. Thank you, Meggie. All right, ready? On the count of three, hit send. One, two, three. And there it goes. I love the chat waterfall. Excellent.
So Matthew says, "Promoting seems hard as it feels like punching into waves." I like that analogy. Yeah. Christine says, "Promotion and tenure. How do you convince others that this type of publication is as valuable as traditional publishing?" Love that question. I'm going to get into that a little bit and share some resources that have been developed by the DOERS Network to demonstrate impact for promotion and tenure or your annual reviews.
Justin says, "Maintenance." Yes. "Finding the time and energy to solicit feedback and make edits." Yeah.
Gary says, "Promotion. And second, promotion and tenure." Yeah, that feeling of self-promotion always makes me feel a little ... It can be hard to self-promote. It does feel uncomfortable sometimes. So we'll talk about strategies for that. You can use other people's words to promote your book and use their praise and highlight the 5-star reviews of Meggie's book. So yeah, I love that comment. Another vote for promotion and tenure. Another vote for maintenance.
Jessica mentions that the book she's working on is on health policy and it's ever-changing. Oh yes, definitely. And Amanda mentions assessment of use. So thank you all for those comments. Okay. Now I'm going to try and get out of this chat screen again. Let's see if this will work. Okay, cool. The next question I had, and the second part, is that if we had a magic wand or unlimited resources and funding, what help or resources would you want either from an organization like the Open Education Network or from your library or your department or your institution?
"Infrastructure for peer review." Oh, yes. I love that suggestion. I know that the Rebus community has a little bit of infrastructure around that, but yeah, we could ...Yes. "A grant program for authors." Agreed, Melissa. "Either institutional or nationally or statewide." Jessica, "A course release for writing." Yep, some places have that. We do not. It's really tough to find that time to carve out. Gary says in his field of math, it's difficult to come up with a lot of homework problems and a homework platform that supports them. Yeah. So open math, I assume you've tried and found that a little bit lacking maybe. And through OpenStax, there are some lower cost courseware and homework platforms that you can partner with, but we frequently hear that, that that's an area of support that we could use help with.
Oh, "Listservs send out information." Yes. I'll be talking about three big ones that I recommend highly. Matthew says, "Blogosphere LI." I'm not sure what LI is, sorry. "Various publisher and publication websites." Christine mentions being on a mailing list.
All right. So you have done all the work to complete your book, you've published it, and now it's important to get that word out to the world. And because there is no central repository for OER, I really recommend doing a combination of what I call the fire hose approach, which is blasting out the word to as wide an audience as possible, and the dartboard approach, which is being more targeted and specific in your audience.
So with the fire hose approach and promoting widely and wildly, the first thing is to possibly work with your marketing department on an article or a blog post or a press release. Different institutions have different procedures for how these get released. And so knowing what your internal procedures and who your partners would be is good to find out in advance and to plan for. I know some of our press releases took months to develop, so getting started on those early as they go through their various levels of approval can be helpful. Sharing on social media like LinkedIn or X or Facebook or BlueSky or Mastodon. If you have that network of colleagues, they can help repost and reshare and really amplify your message.
And then sharing on OER listservs. And so the Open Education Network has one that's really great. Spark has another one that reaches a wide audience. And then CCCOER, which is the Community College Consortium for OER, and anyone can join that, also has a wide-reaching Listserv. And so when I'm publicizing a book, I send out a message to all three listservs. And I know that there's duplication, but I want to reach as wide an audience as possible.
I also want to expand my book's discoverability. Meggie touched on some of these, but submitting to the Open Textbook Library. There's a place on the Open Textbook Library website where if they don't discover it before you recommend that they add it to the library, you can suggest that they add it to the library. With Merlot and OER Commons, you just have to create free accounts and you'll be able to upload the book and all of the metadata so people can sort and search and find your book. Yes, thank you, Karen, for sharing the link for suggestions for the Open Textbook Library.
And if you are publishing in Pressbooks, working with your network administrator to make sure that it's added to the network catalog so that it automatically gets pulled into the Pressbooks directory and is findable there. And then from all of these spots, they get pulled into mega search tools like OASIS or the Mason OER MetaFinder. And so that just amplifies discovery even more.
I do want to share a couple of examples. This is a press release that we released for the Culinary Medicine project that we did a few years ago. So we listed all of the campus partners. We had a website, project website, where we could post updates and direct people to. And this was coordinated by one of the college partners. These are some examples from LinkedIn. The first one is by a professor promoting her own textbook. And the second is from an OER program coordinator, Abbey Elder, the fabulous Abbey Elder at Iowa State University, where she's promoting one of their network's new publications. And we were really surprised with Culinary Medicine, how effective sharing on LinkedIn was when we started checking the network site traffic in Pressbooks. I was surprised how much traffic was coming from LinkedIn. And that hadn't been top of mind before.
So with the dartboard approach, you're more focused and targeted. Oh, Amanda notes, "Yes, LinkedIn has really picked up now that... Yes, Twitter." There used to be a fabulous OER community on Twitter. And when it transitioned to X, many, many people left, and that was a big loss. And now it's kind of scattered around, like Amanda said, some on LinkedIn, Mastodon, BlueSky. But yeah, I really miss the old Twitter.
Okay. So the dartboard approach, it is, as Meggie said, sharing on your disciplinary listservs, reaching out to colleagues. And Meggie gave really good examples of how she did that in her network. And I would also recommend sharing with your administration, making sure that your department heads, your college dean, your director, your provost, whatever infrastructure is at your institution, making sure that they're aware that this is out there and is supporting institutional goals and making an impact.
And Meggie gave some great examples of presenting at conferences. There are a wide range of OER conferences. Some of the big ones globally are OER Global and the Open Education Conference in October. There are lots and lots of regional and statewide conferences that are often free to attend. They often accept proposals from people outside their state. So you can go present to Florida or Arizona or other states and get word out about your project. So these are great ways to raise awareness about OER in general, but also about your book in particular.
And then piloting the book. And I'll just add on to what Meggie has already shared. Surveys can be a really great tool. And there are existing surveys out there that you can adapt so you don't have to start from scratch or reinvent the wheel. We have found it helpful to offer a few points of extra credit to the students or even time during class to fill out the survey just to make sure that the completion rates are higher. Focus groups can be super helpful. Meggie already shared the contact me note in the book, asking users to report adoptions or to email about issues found. And so there's some great examples already out there that you can duplicate on how to solicit that user feedback.
And then you can also choose to do post publication peer review. I know in our tenure and promotion process, anything that's peer-reviewed counts more when it comes to scholarships. So that can be a really great thing to add to your book. And of course you can name your peer reviewers in your publication, but you can ask them to even follow the 10 category review rubric that the Open Textbook Library uses for its textbook reviews, look for new content in ever-changing fields. Are there gaps that they teach to you? And maybe this book doesn't include. As Meggie said, these are great ideas for revisions.
And then maintaining the book. And Meggie made a great point about the importance of that long-term commitment. I'm starting to use the analogy with authors of it's kind of like adopting a puppy. You're making a long-term commitment to provide food, water, shelter, affection, toys, veterinary care. That puppy's going to grow and change, but it needs you every step of the way. So with OER, once you've put it out in the world and students and professors and courses are relying on it, it really needs your ongoing commitment to doing things like checking for broken links, resolving accessibility issues, removing outdated content and adding new material and iterating and improving. So it can be unclear whose responsibility that is. So as part of the publication process, I recommend working that out with whoever you're working with to publish your OER. But for us, it's the author responsibility to do this ongoing care.
And I'll say that Pressbooks, which is what we use, has added some really nice tools in the past year to help with these tasks, the broken link checker, the accessibility reviewers. And so that's made those tasks much less time-consuming. And we want to be transparent about when we have made revisions to our books. And so we adapted this versioning history from other great examples at other institutions. And so it just tracks when the change was made, what the change was. When we do minor changes, we consider these version changes. But for significant changes, we would do a second edition as Meggie shared.
And then updating your dossier and documenting your impact in terms of promotion and tenure and annual reviews. So whether OER counts a scholarship may vary from institution to institution. At the University of Arizona, it definitely does, but it's up to faculty to make the case for their impact. If you received a grant or a stipend that may count in the award section or under the grant section. There are lots of different ways to document your impact. You can start with cost savings. Do you know the amount the previous commercial textbook that the OER replaced sold for or the Open Education network has a standard figure of $100 per student? So you can do those estimated cost savings to demonstrate impact.
Has it been adopted or adapted by other institutions? And I love Meggie's example of asking people to reach out and report adoptions and to send on letterhead. That's just a fabulous example. Have you gotten awards? I know one of our OER authors talked about her OER projects and got a really prestigious teaching award. So that's great to highlight in a dossier.
Is there praise from peer reviewers or users or reviewers in the Open Textbook Library? Is there praise from students if you do the student surveys? How is your OER aligned with institutional goals and values and its mission statements? Things that are common in institutional goals might be innovation and access and affordability. And as a land grant institution, we're tasked with sharing expertise with the world. So tying your project into those institutional goals and missions and values can be a good way to communicate with administrators in particular. And then tracking how many visitors and views you got.
There's another framework for kind of looking at impact that I wanted to share from the Open Education Group, and this is called the COUP framework. So you can look at C, the cost, O, the outcomes, U, the usage, and P, the perceptions. And those perceptions, especially if you're using student stories, can be really powerful. We have gotten some really great student quotes about the impact of an open pedagogy assignment or the impact of OER and textbook cost savings. And sharing those in presentations can be really impactful and powerful.
This is a screenshot of our Pressbooks statistics and on the right side, you can see that most of our site traffic for culinary medicine ... Or no, sorry, this was humans or social media, came from our learning management system, D2L, Brightspace. Number two though was open.umn.edu, which is the Open Textbook Library. And then we can go down through and see other EDU sites and have a pretty safe assumption that these books are being used at those institutions. So number 10 is Pima Community College. And our author actually reached out to Colorado, University of Colorado Boulder when she learned that they were using it, and that led to a new edition collaboration. So having this information can be really powerful. And you can also see from the Pressbooks statistics, which are the most popular sections.
And lastly, I mentioned that DOERS had a couple of resources for demonstrating impact. The first is a tenure and promotion matrix. Some states have adapted these to make their own state matrix. So that's something you might look for. I know Oregon and Iowa are two that have done that. And then there's a book of case studies valuing OER in the tenure promotion and reappointment process. I have a case study in there about how I wrote about my OER work in my promotion to full librarian. There's lots of other examples if you're looking for inspiration on how to talk about this in a dossier in a candidate statement.
All right. Well, that was the end of our prepared remarks. Now I'll pass things back to you, Melissa.
Melissa: Oh, yeah. Thank you so much, Cheryl and Meggie. This is really great for me because as a librarian, I work with my faculty authors. So this is a great way to show them that, "Oh, after publication, things actually still do happen." There are things you can still do after your book is published.
END OF VIDEO