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Speakers:
Heather: Hi everyone, welcome to the sixth Pub101 meeting on Memorandums of Understanding. My name's Heather Caprette, I'm a Senior Instructional Designer at Cleveland State University, and I will be your host today. Today, our presenter is Carla Myers, the Assistant Librarian and Coordinator of Scholarly Communications at Miami University Libraries where she gives consultations on copyright and Creative Commons.
As always, we are going to leave time for your questions at the end of the presentation. We also invite you to share your experiences and resources regarding MOUs in the chat. Today's session is being recorded, and you will see a popup notification in which you'll say, I think you say, click on Got It or something to continue. And then later, you'll see the recording added to the 2022 Pub101 YouTube playlist with transcripts and caption.
And we are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. We'll paste a link to those community norms and chat for you to review. So please join us in creating both a safe and welcoming constructive space. And now I'm going to turn things over to Carla.
Carla: Hi everybody, I am so excited to be here today to talk about MOUs. I realize that it's probably a very nerdy thing to say, but if you know me, I tend to nerd out over things that have to do with copyright or managing rights or that help us facilitate this process of publication. So I'm going to kick off by sharing my screen, and thumbs up Heather if you can see my screen and hear me okay. Okay, awesome. Thanks so much.
So what I want to talk about today is how MOUs come into our work in managing the publication of open educational resources. So to summarize a little bit about what we've talked about so far and set the stage, so we've talked about putting out a call for proposals. How do we communicate to our campus community that we have this publishing program we're seeking projects for?
Authors respond based on their understanding of what the program is, and if they think it might be a good fit, the book they're looking to write for your publishing program, you select projects based on your capacity and what work can be done by your program. And then this is a time where it can be very helpful to bring into your process, a memorandum of understanding to help communicate expectations and lay out what is the work and what are our contributions going to look like moving forward.
So what is an MOU? A Memorandum of Understanding. It is a formal, although not necessarily legally binding document that outlines an agreement between two or more parties about how they are going to proceed through a project generally after some negotiation. It can be as short or as long as you need it to be based off a particular project or your needs. I have seen MOUs that are just barely a page long.
I've seen MOUs for publishing that are almost 20 pages long. It just tends to depend on how many parties you have involved, what different types of scopes of work or needs or requirements that you are discussing and how specifically you want to outline things. So why have an MOU? Why go through this work in order to have this particular document or to do this when you know you already have a ton of work in front of you, both as the project manager or the author as you proceed with the publishing program.
So I think my biggest recommendation is that it can set the tone for moving forward and what is expected out of everybody involved. It also provides a source document that anybody involved can go back and consult whether the question is, "Hey, wait a minute, let me remember again, what am I responsible for? With what I'm responsible for, what did I agree to do? Or what did they agree to do?" And also, it can help clear up that confusion, but also serve as a reminder for timelines or to help hold people accountable when particular goals are not being met.
So who is the agreement between? Generally it's going to be between those parties creating the open educational resources. It can be the library if that's where the publishing program is held. Although some MOUs are based from the perspective of the institution and the authors. So on one side, you're generally going to have the publishing program. On the other side, you're going to have the author or authors.
I know some folks believe whether there's two authors or 25, if there's multiple authors, getting them all involved in participating in the creation and the agreement of the MOU. Some programs, when there's multiple authors, ask that they identify a corresponding author or a primary author who most of these communications are going to go through. And there's pros and cons of both. Certainly with bringing in all of the authors, it's a great way to ensure transparency, to get everybody involved and to have everybody having a voice in the crafting of the MOU.
That said, it can be difficult when you get over five or six authors to get everybody involved, to get responses from everybody. Also there's times where you might be working with a class. More and more I am seeing professors step forward who want to work with a class in authoring an MOU. I have a really fun group that I'm working with right now. It's a professor who's working with a class to create a textbook that is Spanish for medical professionals.
I believe he has about 20 students in his class. We kind of talked about all of this ahead of time because we didn't know if it was exactly the most appropriate conversation to wait to have until the class started and then to try to bring all the students into that, but part of that was, "Okay, if we're having this discussion together, how are you going to then going to communicate expectations to your students?" So there was still that consideration of them knowing what was expected.
So for transparency, for engagement, it can be great talking to everybody, but there are some challenges with that. Whether you have a single author that you're working with on the... on the OER, I'm getting too many acronyms here, MOU and OER. Whether there's a single author on the OER, or whether you ask them to identify a corresponding author who you will discuss things back and forth with, and then they will take things back to the other author, it can be easier sometimes just to work with one individual so you know who communications are coming to, who those should be going to, and also, then you're just waiting for a response or an answer from one person instead of trying to get an answer from multiple people which will be challenging.
If you are going to use MOUs for your program, this is probably something that you want to talk with upfront. Maybe with administrators in your library about how this is going to be handled or other people who are supporting the work you are going to be doing. Are we going to have one representative from our office and one corresponding author, or is everybody who's going to be involved with this project be involved with the MOU as well? So what is in your MOU?
This will vary based on projects, based off publishing programs, based off institutional as well. One of the key things is deliverables. What are the different parties going to bring to this project? Generally, of course, from the authors, that is going to involve the text of the textbook. Often they are the ones who are going to be responsible for finding images to include in the book, for the creation of figures that they might be using in the books. A key thing is clearing permissions.
Something we kind of talked about in previous sessions is sometimes there can be confusion about who's doing what work, and I see this a lot around permissions, especially because I'm the copyright librarian. They will go out and find a bunch of images and charts and figure some graphs and be like, "Oh, but you're the copyright librarian. We thought you were going to clear all that for us." As versus letting them know upfront that we expect them, that if they're using images to track where they got from, to track what an associated Creative Commons license might be, and if appropriate, to go secure permission or license before the reuse, and I'm going to mute for one second.
I'm so sorry, I don't know where you are, but here, seasonal allergies are horrific, and so I'm just really fighting that right now. The library or institutional or publishing program side, generally, some things that we will see them talk about is, are they going to help the author find contributors or peer reviewers for the manuscript? What are they going to provide in terms of copy editing of layout of formatting? Are they going to be doing that work? Are they going to, as we talked about in a previous session, rather be letting the author know, "Here is a group that you can go work with, Scribe, to have some of this done." And then the actual publication itself, what are we bringing to the table?
Are we going to offer up a platform like Pressbooks? Are we offering money so that they can pursue this project in the way that they wish or are we going to be doing all of that in house to help get that final textbook? So laying out what each group is bringing to this particular project. What is your timeline? What are the creator's due dates for deliverables? Again, this can really vary based on institution, based on project.
If you're working with a class, that could be a semester or maybe two semesters to get it done. Generally, I think most of these projects tend to have a timeline of about a half a year to a year, maybe to a year and a half. I will say one thing though. I have been working in publishing with various capacities, OER publishing and journal publishing for about six years now. And what I tell people is however long you think it's going to take you, double that, and that will most likely be a more realistic timeline.
And that's because life happens. Very rarely I think do we come across professors who are getting like buyouts for a semester or have a time off unless maybe they're on a sabbatical to do nothing, but write this book. Instead, they are teaching at the same time, they are advising students. So they have professional things that come up that can impact their ability to work on their manuscript. Of course, we all have our own lives too. Things come up personally, things come up with family and friends that really impact the time we think we might have had to work on a particular project.
Something interesting I learned from a book editor is that realistically, only about 20% of authors actually hit their original timelines established for turning in manuscripts or other deliverables. So come up with a date that's realistic, but realize some flexibility may need to be in there. So you also want to think about what are your due dates for deliverables as well. So we might have due dates in there for when they are going to submit certain chapters or their final manuscript, but then we also want to have due dates for, "Okay, what is the time period for copy editing? What is the time period for layout? If we, as the publishing program are sending this out to peer reviewers, what do we expect the turnaround or timeline for that to be as well?"
So you want to think about timelines on both sides of the project. (Again, excuse me.) How will materials be submitted? This is something to really clarify up front. The manuscript file format. A lot of folks I know choose to have manuscript submitted in Word which is just fine. Some have their authors creating in Pressbooks. Some people I know have been surprised when their authors submit in a totally alternative file format. So maybe like an open word processing program that they are not familiar with.
So you want to be really clear upfront. Here is the expected file format that we want for the text itself. For image and graphic files, it's really important to be clear upfront with your authors about how those are going to be submitted too. Very often for publishing, we want to have certain types of file formats. Maybe we want everything submitted in JPEG or something else. There also tends to be certain resolutions that we need for images in order for them to show up well in publishing projects.
How do we communicate that to the authors and what are we communicating to them? Some publishing programs say, "You need to submit all your images as JPEGs at 300 dpi." Others will say submit your images to us, and we will do the conversion what we need in order to be able to publish this at a high format. Something else related to images can be...accessibility considerations.
Something might also be alternative text for those images and graphics and charts. When you're in the production phase of an OER, generally on our end, or if you're working with somebody like Scribe, it can be fairly easy for them to go on and apply headers and things like that to help support accessibility considerations. But when it comes to images, charts, and graphs, it is important for me to have the authors come up with alternative texts. What do they want readers to get out of those?
So making it clear upfront, that for your images, charts, and graphs, we need you to create alternative texts, and here's what that needs to look like. And here's how that is submitted alongside those images, charts, and graphs, and of course, citations. Some institutions decide it's okay if we have a different citation format for every single project. Some publishing programs say, "We are just publishing an APA or MLA and everything has to be submitted in that capacity." But how do we want those citations crafted and how do we want those submitted?
Making sure that information is in there as well. Copyright considerations is one of my favorite things to talk about. Of course, when there's a single author, generally, we're talking about their copyright in the work and how we are going to manage that. When we have multiple authors, of course, now we're talking about a work of joint authorship. Do they understand what that means? That they are all generally going to own the copyright in the work as a collective and having a discussion about licensing of their work so they're all comfortable with the Creative Commons license that was selected, and more about that in a minute.
With student authors, FERPA considerations may come into play. This is something where you may want to talk with your institution's office of general counsel because I've learned that office of general counsels tend to interpret FERPA in different ways. Some will say FERPA is only the student's educational record, and that is generally grades, and that's it. Others will say FERPA can include homework and other classroom projects. And if that's the case at your institution, you may need to get a FERPA release from students who are author and works that are going to be included in an open educational resource.
Other authorship considerations coming into play can include works made for hire. Maybe as part of the funds, we are giving to an author for creating an OER, they decide to hire a graduate student to write some of the text, to create some of the charts and graphs. In that work made for hire situation, who is going to hold the copyright in the works being created? How are you going to make sure that is effectively managed and considered is part of the project?
And one interesting situation... I worked with an author who, her husband had actually created a bunch of the images that were being used in the texts that they were looking to make an OER out of. And so she said, "Oh, it's my husband. I know he doesn't care." And I was like, "Well, but still we want to make sure he understands that these are now going to be released under Creative Commons licenses and talk with him about copyrights." So I gave her some information in an email to have her husband read through and respond that he understood everything we were looking to do.
Certifications and indemnities. Some institutions include these in MOUs; some don't. So certification is generally just saying, "I created this work, that I am the author of it, and that I can enter into this agreement with you." Indemnifications can take a couple different forms. I think with open educational resources, if indemnifications are included, it's usually that there is no libelist or obscene materials being included in the OER.
Some institutions will include language asking the author to indemnify the institution on the off chance they are sued in any capacity as the publisher of the OER. I understand where institutions are coming from in that capacity, but that is a lot for any individual to take on. So I always try to push back a little bit in including that language in the MOUs. Instead, just talking with the author about, do they understand about what we're looking for? Proper citations so we're not committing plagiarism? Tracking rights for images and things like that.
All considerations that help lower our risk. If there are questions from some rights holder about how their work was incorporated into an OER. And of course, there is a copyright consideration of what open license are we going to attach to the OER. As we talked about, I think it was last week in Karen's fabulous presentation. Some programs say all of our OER are going to published under a specific license. Maybe it's CC BY.
Some publishing programs will say you may choose any CC license. I think what I'm seeing more and more is that you can choose one of the few licenses. So like CC BY, CC BY-NC so by give attribution and your purpose has to be non-commercial are the two that I'm seeing them to allow more to choose from. So here, first off, of course, your program has to decide what open license options are you going to make available and then clearly explaining, "Do you understand what this open license means? Do you understand what it means to be an open educational resource?"
If there's multiple authors, what are they most comfortable choosing as a group to attach to their open educational resource? Budget considerations. How much is being paid for a particular project? Here at Miami University, the amount of money we make available for each project is a little bit different. And that's because we are often engaging with Scribe as our publishing partner. And of course, depending on the length and format of the OER, the services that they provide are going to vary.
So as part of our budget, we have taken into account what are the costs for the services that Scribe's going to be providing. We include a small amount of money for the professor as well. They can use that as an honorarium for their time. More frequently what we see them doing is using that money to pay for licenses, for things they want to include to hire a student who can help them out with the OER. So how is the budget, or how are the funds going to be distributed?
For that money that's for the instructor or the authors, is that being transferred to their department? Are they going to send their bills to the Miami University Libraries to pay? Excuse me, and what type of expenses can be written off or can be put underneath this? So for example, it's okay to use the money to pay for licensing where appropriate. If there's images that you can't find that are covered by a Creative Commons license, or might not fall within the scope of fair use, but the money cannot be used to pay for a third party to go out and create something like an external vendor because then that gets really complicated for the university and how we pay for that.
So being very clear upfront, how much money is available for the project, how it's going to be distributed and what type of expenses can be included in the project. Contingency and planning. I think we've talked about this in a lot of different places. I am sure that this is going to come up in other presentations. Issues will arise and you know what? That's okay. What I tell our authors is, life happens, being a professional happens. Just talk to me, stay in constant communication, and if something comes up, let me know, that's okay.
Generally we can shift our timelines or work or plan in order to be able to accommodate whatever comes up. If needed, we can look at revising the MOU in order to support whatever changes might need to happen. There have been professors who we've gotten a little ways down the road, and then they had to back out of projects for a variety of reasons. One had some family considerations come up and they said, "You know, with what I have going on, this just needs to go in the back burner. And if you're okay, we can revisit this in a year or two, but I don't have the bandwidth to do this now."
And I was more than happy to say, "No problem at all. Come back to me when you're ready and we'll revisit this." I think the biggest thing, and I know this has been talked about before is really setting the tone for communication, ensuring open communication. I believe last week, Karen talked a little bit about, "Are you going to have scheduled check-ins every month? Is there just going to be one check-in at the start?" And then constant communication as needed initiated by both parties. I've had different things with different professors.
One of my professors said, "Please reach out to me every two weeks, that is going to help keep me on schedule." Another professor was like, "Hey Carla, I'm really okay. I'll reach out to you if you need everything. You don't have to keep checking in every month." And they could support that. And this was with an article I was publishing. I had an author who just dropped off the radar and they wouldn't respond to my emails, I couldn't get any answer out of them.
So finally, I decided to call their office on my cellphone, and I'm like, "Okay, they probably know what my area code is for where my office is located, but the area code for my cell phone is a little different. Maybe they won't recognize that, maybe they'll pick up the phone and they did." And I said, "Hey, so and so, it's Carla, how's it going?" And I heard a panic silence on the other end. And they were like, "Hey, I'm so sorry. I know I haven't been getting back to you."
And I said, "That's okay, let's talk about what's been going on. How is your project?" And they had a lot of personal things come up as well. And what they told me was I was just so embarrassed that I wasn't getting things done. I wasn't getting things done on time. And then I was so embarrassed that I hadn't responded to you for a month and a half that I was just kind of avoiding you out of embarrassment and feeling guilty. And I said, "There's no need for that." Again, things happen.
If we have those open lines of communication, I am more than happy to shift timelines or provide other resources in order to support that, but I can't accommodate your needs if I don't know what they are. So just keep those open lines of communication and make sure they feel comfortable knowing that they can reach out to you at anytime. So drafting your MOU. A few recommendations is be aware of any institutional policies and considerations that you need to think of before drafting this.
At some institutions, we as employees aren't really able to draft contracts on behalf of the institution. Instead, those need to come out of human resources or the office of general counsel. A lot of times at institutions, informal agreements are just fine. After all, a syllabus is kind of an informal agreement between an instructor and students and how the semester is going to progress, but it's good to talk with your office of general counsel first just to get some feedback from them. Who knows? They may have a template that you could start to work from that is commonly used for MOUs at your institution.
Do you want to start drafting your own from the ground up? This may be a good choice if you have connections in the office of general counsel who you can work closely with MS, but not a lot of us do, or even if we have those connections, they might not necessarily have something like this high on their priority list. So it could take months and months to get done. Instead, what I encourage you to do is swipe somebody else's.
For example, Karen Bjork at Portland State shared her wonderful MOU as part of the publishing curriculum. You can go locate it there. That template is a fantastic resource to get an idea of what a publishing MOU looks like, and to start to draft your own. Use it as a template, begin to customize it with the needs of your institution. If needed, or if appropriate, share with your administrators or office of general counsel so they can provide feedback on it.
And Karen, if you're here, something she can talk a little bit about or put some notes about in the chat is, I know they've gone through multiple drafts of their MOU. And we have here too at Miami University. We often modify ours based on a particular project, but as we've gone along each semester, each year, we've thought, "You know what? We don't necessarily need that language in there anymore. We're going to take that out." Or after a particular project, "Hmm. Maybe we should have had something in our MOU addressing this particular aspect of the publishing process." So we put that in. So that draft version can change as well too.
Tips and recommendations. (I'm so sorry, my allergies are so bad and I didn't want to cancel. So this is the result, I'm just sneezing and stuffy.) So where possible, use plain language. There may end up being some words like indemnifications or certifications that are in the MOU, and that's fine as long as we help explain to our authors what those mean. But as much as possible, use plain forthright language so it's clear and easy for everybody to understand.
Organize the document logically. Very often with a lot of MOUs, you will have author responsibilities, publishing program responsibilities, due dates. So people can go through easily see what's needed or if you need to reference the document again, you can quickly find the section you need where that information is. And then thinking about what are key areas that you need covered and making sure they're integrated in there. So setting expectations.
I believe Karen talked about this as well, but when we are putting out our call for proposals and people express some interest or just information that we have online, we'll talk about a memorandum of understanding between the publishing program and the authors, being a part of the structure of our publishing programs. So they're not blindsided by it. We make it available for people to review so if they have questions or concerns about something in the MOU, they can ask about those ahead of time.
We schedule a meeting. Once people are accepted into our program to go through the MOU line by line and answer questions, or make sure they understand what is expected or to fill in the blanks in terms of things like timelines. I think this is critically important, and I once had somebody say to me, "Carla, isn't that treating them like an infant? You want to sit there and read the document line by line?"
And I said, "That is not my intent whatsoever. My intent is, number one, where there is legal language I want to make sure they really understand what I'm asking them to sign on. And number two, you never know where confusion is going to leak in." So again, I think it's really important to go through everything and make sure they understand what you are both trying to achieve.
So for example, we had one person who was accepted into our publishing program, and I was so excited for their MOU because it was in the area of music. I had never seen an OER, anything like it before on that particular subject. They got accepted, we sat down to start going through the MOU, and when I got to talking about an open license, he's like, "Wait a minute. What do you mean open, freely available online?" "Well, I wanted to talk about my royalties for the book, when can I expect those?" And I was like, "Oh wait, well, actually open educational resource as we talk about freely available online, there are no royalties associated with this program that you will get this small amount of money is part of it."
And I think at the time that was like $1,000 or $1,500, but other than that, there's no royalties coming afterwards. And he was under the impression that $1,500 was an upfront payment, and then the royalties would come after. And he said, "Carla, I have children who are getting ready to go to college. I was looking at this book as an additional source of income to help pay my kid's tuition. I'm not interested in publishing if there's no royalties."
And I was disappointed, of course, because I thought this could be a really unique and useful OER, but I also understood where he was coming from and seeking those royalties. And if we wouldn't have had that conversation upfront, the whole thing could have got published. It's freely available online, and now he's not getting any royalties from it, and there could have been a ton of frustration. That's why I sit down and go through everything very carefully in the MOU to help clear up any potential confusion ahead of time.
And I think it's also important to be available to answer questions at any time whether it's, "Hey, I wanted to double check about what information you're looking for in the permission spreadsheet when I'm finding images and charts and graphs that I want to use." Whether it's about a format of a particular chapter or a style guide. Or, "Hey, I was reading back through the MOU and now I have a question again about this line. Can you answer that?" Always make yourself available to answer their questions.
As I said before, in terms of project management, communicate, communicate, communicate. Ask them upfront how often do you want them to check in? If it's not that often, still check in from time to time, "Hey, I'm just checking you to see how it's going. How is writing going? I know it's been a busy semester for everybody. Do you feel like you're still on track for our next due date that's coming up?" Here in the MOU are some of the due dates that we identify.
Do you feel like you're still on track to meet those? When questions and problems arise, one thing you want to think about is what parts of the MOU can be ratified or renegotiated. MOUs are generally negotiable to a point. Timelines can be negotiable. Maybe the professor says, or the author says, "I need two years to get this done. I think two years is reasonable with my teaching and research load and all of that." Okay, that's negotiable. Maybe the original time quality we put forward is a year, but we're comfortable with two years because we know we have other projects coming down the pike, that'll let us manage it a little bit more.
Some things may be non-negotiable. For example, maybe your publishing program uses Pressbooks. You need them to use that and they decide they want to use another publishing program. Maybe your publishing program chooses to use a certain style like APA or MLA, because you have somebody on staff who is an expert in that, and can really focus on that formatting. So you can't negotiate to use MLA if they really want to use APA.
So what you want to do with your MOUs is identify areas where you can be flexible and those where you can't. Budget may be flexible, it may not. The cap budget may be $5,000 for our project, letting them know we cannot go beyond that any capacity because then there's going to be frustrations if they come back with expenses of $7,500. Where you can be flexible, making sure that you are being as flexible as you can without really pushing the boundaries or being a doormat in providing those accommodations or flexibility where it is needed.
So I think the biggest thing I've learned with publishing is, flexibility is key. There are sometimes where you do have to say we've reached the end where we can no longer provide any flexibility or additional accommodations for your project, and that can often be very frustrating. I once worked with an author who was really communicative up front, but then as we got closer to publishing, "Well, I want to go in and add these new chapters." But this has already been through peer review.
We would have to go back and repeat peer review, that would put us back down the road an additional nine months and asking more of these people who've already contributed their times, we have serious issues with that. We've had authors who submitted, we've asked for one citation style and I think they ended up using 18 different citation styles when they submitted their references or their format and manuscript to us. And they said, "Well, I don't have time to deal with that. If you want to publish my work, you need to go back and reformat all of that."
That was one of the instances where I was able to go back to an MOU and say, "But as we agreed to in the MOU, that you would submit your manuscript and references in this formatting. We agreed about this upfront that unfortunately we don't have the capacity to backtrack and do this either. There are also questions and making sure we're maintaining your structure and things like that, so we really need you to go do this."
There have been times where we have disengaged projects amicably like with the one professor. "We understand that you wanted to go with more of a commercial route, you were seeking these royalties. We're disappointed this didn't work out, but you know what? We understand if you want to go pursue that option instead." There have been some situations where just due to lack of communication or communication, but not honoring agreements or coming to an understanding in what was needed from both parties.
We've had to say, "Unfortunately, we're going to step back from this project too." The MOU can be a great document to hold people to expectations. I think the MOU can also help support us in managing our capacity. I think as librarians, there's a lot of time where we want to be overly helpful, or I know many people here are in this conversation today. And many of these people I know take on extra work because we want to be helpful. I think it's just in the librarian's nature, but in doing that, people aren't upholding their end of the agreement, or we're not able to focus on self-care or we get overwhelmed because we're now doing more work than we expected.
So the MOU can be a great document to say, "Here's where we agreed to meet in the middle. Here's what we need from you. Here's additional time I can give you in order to meet this, but this is what we need in order to meet halfway to get this project done." So I hope this has been helpful. I think we have a little bit of time. If we do, then what we can do is take a look at the MOU from Portland State.
I was trying to find my MOU from Miami University. Ours has actually expanded significantly in conjunction with office of general counsel and putting some more information in there. The story of how our MOU expanded is I was talking with them about our publishing MOU, and they actually asked a question, "Well, if somebody was publishing a book, what would normally be in that?" And I said, "Oh, I have a book publishing contract I can share with you if you want to see, and it's like an 18-page agreement." And they said, "This is great. Let's put all of this in the MOU."
And I was like, "No, number one, that's super duper long." Yes. There could be things in that publication agreement that could be beneficial to have in our MOU like more of a focus on adhering to the style guide, file formats because that continues to be an issue for us. But I don't want to overwhelm people with this document because that can set a poor tone for the rest of the project. So if I can find where I put that, I will share that out with the group later. But again, just how these can evolve and change over time, depending on the needs of your program or maybe who you're working with at your institution and what information they want to see in that.
So I hope this presentation has been helpful. I have thrown a ton of information at you today. If you're like me, sometimes you're sitting in a webinar, you're taking everything in and then a day or two down the road, you're like, "Oh, wait a minute. She said that one thing. Now I have a question about that." If you can't tell, I love talking about this and I love working with the OEN to support this work we're doing at all these institutions to help get more OERs out there. So we have some time now for questions, but if your questions come up down the road, I'm also happy to answer those as well.
Heather: Thank you Carla for your expertise and all these wonderful recommendations for MOUs. Feel free to either type your questions into the chat and I can read those out or if you'd like to use the reactions button at the bottom of the screen and raise your hand, I can call on you and you can unmute your mic and ask your question also.
Carla: I'll just say thank you to everybody in the chat who understands about my allergies. I took two prescription pills last night and two this morning and this is still how I am. I love the green. I love the flowers. I could do without the sneezing.
Heather: So we have a comment from Mary Ann. "I think this is great. I've been involved in two projects where the faculty's expectations of me were totally out of line with what I have to offer. One, they acted like I was a subject matter expert giving me whole chapters to write, and the other gave me all the grunt work like backwards searching all the images and remix texts. They didn't keep citations or CC license info for. We'll have an MOU from now on."
And we also shared our template, it's an editable, downloadable template in Google that anyone can borrow and adapt to their institution. There's a link to that in chat, and Karen, put the link to the one from Portland State University.
Carla: I am so sorry you had to go through that, Mary Ann. Number one, just any human treating another like that, putting off work, expecting you to do what they consider to be the grunt work. I've had a little bit of that myself, not to that extent. Most of the time, people are just overwhelmed. They know deadlines are coming up, they want to get stuff done, they're like, "I'm so sorry. I know this isn't in the proper format, I'm just going to send it to you anyway. If you can help me out, that would be great."
I did have one situation once where somebody was like, "Well, if you're the publisher, that's your job." And it was like, I wrote a response to them. I didn't send it. I went home; I went for a run; I went to sleep. I woke up the next morning and I rewrote the email because I felt like they were really looking down on me and my role, and what our publishing program was there to do.
And so my kind response was that as the publisher, I am here to help support you in this work, and we're excited for your project. Nevertheless, as was documented in the call for proposals, as we discussed via email and as was included in the MOU, here are the expectations for you in your role as the author. And it includes this particular work, and it was some work with images. And in the end, we came to a middle ground that some of the images they didn't track where they came from or the associated licenses, that we were just going to cut some of those out. But those can be really frustrating situations. And again, having that MOU was the great document to go back, "But here's what we agreed to."
Heather: Okay. We have a question from Michele Behr. "If you require the authors to get permissions for images, what are the best resources for them to understand what they need to know?"
Carla: Sure, that's a great question. So generally we encourage people to, as much as possible, just create their own images, charts or graphs because that just takes a lot of the guesswork out of permissions. We do also encourage them to use Creative Commons images. Now, what I tell them is, if you are doing a Google Creative Commons search and using their little tool to bring back Creative Commons works, don't just do a screen cut or screen clip and grab that and use that.
Number one, follow it to where it's hosted. For example, like Flickr. And then number two, do a little bit of research on it to make sure you have a strong reason to believe the person who made it available online is actually the copyright holder. So for example, one of my favorite examples to use here is, I once had somebody send me an image of the Grinch and it was straight from the movie and they said, "Oh look, this is a Creative Commons image of the Grinch. I'm so excited to use it."
And I don't remember the name of the person who posted it, but it was something like Tim Smith from North Dakota. And I was like, "I promise you, Tim Smith does not hold the copyright on that image that he could lawfully put the Creative Commons license on it." I actually got a really great chart from my book publisher to use in tracking permissions. And so I've made something similar to that to use for our authors, and Karen, I can dig that up and share that with you.
Basically, it's what is the name of the image? Where did you find it from? What's the URL? Who is the rights holder? What is the associated right? Did you track permissions? Did you pay a license fee? All of that. And it is a little tedious, but I tell them, "If you do this as you find each image or as you create each image, it'll take you an extra two or three minutes to go fill the spreadsheet out. If you wait till the end, I promise you, it's going to take weeks and weeks and weeks to try to go back and find all of this."
And we all know the image that pops up at the top of our Google results today may not be the same image that pops up two months from now. So we can't do reverse image searches online. But it can be hard to go back and find something. So take those extra few minutes to document that information as it is found, or as you create images, and that pays off big dividends ahead of time.
Heather: Okay, we have a question from Travis. How do you handle cover images? Do you allow authors to select those or is that something you maintain control of?
Carla: I don't know we've had any cover images so far. They've basically just been what we've talked about, plain here's the title of the book and it's a certain color. If somebody wanted to use the cover image, I am flexible. If they want to create something, that's completely fine with me generally. If they want a Creative Commons image on the cover, I think those conversations would be very similar to what we have for other images that are used in the book.
Heather: We have another one from Michele. Can you share what your budget per book for working with... What is your budget per book for working with Scribe?
Carla: For working with Scribe, I think our lowest quote has been about $3,000. I'm trying to think of what some of our other quotes are. I want to say maybe around $5,000 - $6,000. It's a lot of money. Now, one thing I will say is when I first started doing this work, I had a conversation. So our OER programs were reported by the library in the provost office, and they were very excited about OER publication. But we have this committee who needs to guide everything, but I'm the primary on-the-ground person, and I manage the publishing program on my own.
And I said, "I need you to pick. I can either be the copyright librarian and provide all these services on campus halftime and support affordable learning on campus halftime, or it can be the OER publishing librarian full time." If you want me to do this on my own, because I had gone through the training through the OEM with Scribe on how to do a lot of this work. And what they decided is that as an individual, my time was better spent doing both instead of just focusing on one thing.
And I said, "In that case, I need you to back this up with funding so that we can pay companies like Scribe to do all this work that would otherwise take all of my time to do on my own. If you can go through the full publishing program with the OEM, it is fantastic, you will learn a lot, it's well presented, but I think it's really eye opening to see how much work goes into publishing a book."
And I said, "These projects are going to cost us, and so I need the commitment from the library and the provost office to help make sure there's funding when these projects come up." And they have both been fantastic. It's negotiated on a project by project basis who's going to cover the cost. I've gotten to present about our affordable learning work, and we have even gotten donations from our alumni to help support this program. So we've gotten some funds that way too.
The one thing great thing about Scribe is whenever they give us a quote, they will give us a breakdown. Here's all the different things involved with publishing and here's what those will cost. So that also allows me to pick and choose within the scope of our budget. Okay, it doesn't necessarily have this much money for a particular project, but I can get Scribe to have these few things done. So they are really great if you go to them and say, "Here's a budget that we have." Of saying what services can they provide within the scope of those funds? So if you're thinking about using them, reach out to them, and I know they'll be able to provide you some options.
Heather: Next, we have a comment from Mary Ann who says, "Also suggest stipulating if you will be included in any presentations or publications about the project that could be part of the MOU." And Beth says, "Keeping track of where stuff came from is what Zotero is for, that's a tip. My comment was in regards to tracking down the source of images." Another resource. And Amanda shared a link to a spreadsheet that she uses with authors to track where they curate information from.
Carla: Yes, that is a great spreadsheet. It's simple, but it gets you all the information you need. Thank you Amanda.
Heather: Yeah, thank you for that. Okay, does anybody have any other questions? You can feel free to raise your hand or if you want to unmute at this time. Okay, so if there's no further questions, I'd like to be respectful of people's time. I just want to say thank you again to Carla for sharing her expertise today and thank you to our audience for attending and sharing their experience and resources.
If you have more questions about today's session and topic, or if you'd like to chat with others about it, please use our class notes which I'll share link to in chat. We'll check that later and answer questions and comments there. I'll go ahead and put that in chat right now.
Carla: And while you are doing that, I would say thank you so much Heather for hosting and thank you to everybody, great questions, for sharing your experience and resource and thanks to the OEN for having me present. I always love being part of this program.
Heather: Okay. So our next Wednesday's presentation is on working with authors. We will have a panel discussion by five individuals from four different institutions. We'll have Anita Walz from Virginia Tech, Mandi Goodsett, and Barb Loomis from Cleveland State University, Annie Johnson from University of Delaware Library and Press, and Apurva Ashok from the Rebus Foundation. And I shall put a link to those people in chat too in case you're interested there. Would love if you can join us next week. So let me just scan. I think I caught all the questions and thank you again for attending and please everybody, enjoy the rest of your day.
Carla: Thanks everybody.
END OF VIDEO
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Pub101 is a free, informal, online orientation to open textbook publishing. This May 11, 2022, session is hosted by Heather Caprette of Cleveland State University. Heather is joined by guest speaker Carla Myers from Miami University Libraries who talks about memorandums of understanding as communication tools in OER publication management.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Audio Transcript
Speakers:
- Heather Caprette (Sr. Media Developer/Instructional Designer, Cleveland State University)
- Carla Myers (Assistant Librarian & Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, Miami University Libraries)
Heather: Hi everyone, welcome to the sixth Pub101 meeting on Memorandums of Understanding. My name's Heather Caprette, I'm a Senior Instructional Designer at Cleveland State University, and I will be your host today. Today, our presenter is Carla Myers, the Assistant Librarian and Coordinator of Scholarly Communications at Miami University Libraries where she gives consultations on copyright and Creative Commons.
As always, we are going to leave time for your questions at the end of the presentation. We also invite you to share your experiences and resources regarding MOUs in the chat. Today's session is being recorded, and you will see a popup notification in which you'll say, I think you say, click on Got It or something to continue. And then later, you'll see the recording added to the 2022 Pub101 YouTube playlist with transcripts and caption.
And we are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. We'll paste a link to those community norms and chat for you to review. So please join us in creating both a safe and welcoming constructive space. And now I'm going to turn things over to Carla.
Carla: Hi everybody, I am so excited to be here today to talk about MOUs. I realize that it's probably a very nerdy thing to say, but if you know me, I tend to nerd out over things that have to do with copyright or managing rights or that help us facilitate this process of publication. So I'm going to kick off by sharing my screen, and thumbs up Heather if you can see my screen and hear me okay. Okay, awesome. Thanks so much.
So what I want to talk about today is how MOUs come into our work in managing the publication of open educational resources. So to summarize a little bit about what we've talked about so far and set the stage, so we've talked about putting out a call for proposals. How do we communicate to our campus community that we have this publishing program we're seeking projects for?
Authors respond based on their understanding of what the program is, and if they think it might be a good fit, the book they're looking to write for your publishing program, you select projects based on your capacity and what work can be done by your program. And then this is a time where it can be very helpful to bring into your process, a memorandum of understanding to help communicate expectations and lay out what is the work and what are our contributions going to look like moving forward.
So what is an MOU? A Memorandum of Understanding. It is a formal, although not necessarily legally binding document that outlines an agreement between two or more parties about how they are going to proceed through a project generally after some negotiation. It can be as short or as long as you need it to be based off a particular project or your needs. I have seen MOUs that are just barely a page long.
I've seen MOUs for publishing that are almost 20 pages long. It just tends to depend on how many parties you have involved, what different types of scopes of work or needs or requirements that you are discussing and how specifically you want to outline things. So why have an MOU? Why go through this work in order to have this particular document or to do this when you know you already have a ton of work in front of you, both as the project manager or the author as you proceed with the publishing program.
So I think my biggest recommendation is that it can set the tone for moving forward and what is expected out of everybody involved. It also provides a source document that anybody involved can go back and consult whether the question is, "Hey, wait a minute, let me remember again, what am I responsible for? With what I'm responsible for, what did I agree to do? Or what did they agree to do?" And also, it can help clear up that confusion, but also serve as a reminder for timelines or to help hold people accountable when particular goals are not being met.
So who is the agreement between? Generally it's going to be between those parties creating the open educational resources. It can be the library if that's where the publishing program is held. Although some MOUs are based from the perspective of the institution and the authors. So on one side, you're generally going to have the publishing program. On the other side, you're going to have the author or authors.
I know some folks believe whether there's two authors or 25, if there's multiple authors, getting them all involved in participating in the creation and the agreement of the MOU. Some programs, when there's multiple authors, ask that they identify a corresponding author or a primary author who most of these communications are going to go through. And there's pros and cons of both. Certainly with bringing in all of the authors, it's a great way to ensure transparency, to get everybody involved and to have everybody having a voice in the crafting of the MOU.
That said, it can be difficult when you get over five or six authors to get everybody involved, to get responses from everybody. Also there's times where you might be working with a class. More and more I am seeing professors step forward who want to work with a class in authoring an MOU. I have a really fun group that I'm working with right now. It's a professor who's working with a class to create a textbook that is Spanish for medical professionals.
I believe he has about 20 students in his class. We kind of talked about all of this ahead of time because we didn't know if it was exactly the most appropriate conversation to wait to have until the class started and then to try to bring all the students into that, but part of that was, "Okay, if we're having this discussion together, how are you going to then going to communicate expectations to your students?" So there was still that consideration of them knowing what was expected.
So for transparency, for engagement, it can be great talking to everybody, but there are some challenges with that. Whether you have a single author that you're working with on the... on the OER, I'm getting too many acronyms here, MOU and OER. Whether there's a single author on the OER, or whether you ask them to identify a corresponding author who you will discuss things back and forth with, and then they will take things back to the other author, it can be easier sometimes just to work with one individual so you know who communications are coming to, who those should be going to, and also, then you're just waiting for a response or an answer from one person instead of trying to get an answer from multiple people which will be challenging.
If you are going to use MOUs for your program, this is probably something that you want to talk with upfront. Maybe with administrators in your library about how this is going to be handled or other people who are supporting the work you are going to be doing. Are we going to have one representative from our office and one corresponding author, or is everybody who's going to be involved with this project be involved with the MOU as well? So what is in your MOU?
This will vary based on projects, based off publishing programs, based off institutional as well. One of the key things is deliverables. What are the different parties going to bring to this project? Generally, of course, from the authors, that is going to involve the text of the textbook. Often they are the ones who are going to be responsible for finding images to include in the book, for the creation of figures that they might be using in the books. A key thing is clearing permissions.
Something we kind of talked about in previous sessions is sometimes there can be confusion about who's doing what work, and I see this a lot around permissions, especially because I'm the copyright librarian. They will go out and find a bunch of images and charts and figure some graphs and be like, "Oh, but you're the copyright librarian. We thought you were going to clear all that for us." As versus letting them know upfront that we expect them, that if they're using images to track where they got from, to track what an associated Creative Commons license might be, and if appropriate, to go secure permission or license before the reuse, and I'm going to mute for one second.
I'm so sorry, I don't know where you are, but here, seasonal allergies are horrific, and so I'm just really fighting that right now. The library or institutional or publishing program side, generally, some things that we will see them talk about is, are they going to help the author find contributors or peer reviewers for the manuscript? What are they going to provide in terms of copy editing of layout of formatting? Are they going to be doing that work? Are they going to, as we talked about in a previous session, rather be letting the author know, "Here is a group that you can go work with, Scribe, to have some of this done." And then the actual publication itself, what are we bringing to the table?
Are we going to offer up a platform like Pressbooks? Are we offering money so that they can pursue this project in the way that they wish or are we going to be doing all of that in house to help get that final textbook? So laying out what each group is bringing to this particular project. What is your timeline? What are the creator's due dates for deliverables? Again, this can really vary based on institution, based on project.
If you're working with a class, that could be a semester or maybe two semesters to get it done. Generally, I think most of these projects tend to have a timeline of about a half a year to a year, maybe to a year and a half. I will say one thing though. I have been working in publishing with various capacities, OER publishing and journal publishing for about six years now. And what I tell people is however long you think it's going to take you, double that, and that will most likely be a more realistic timeline.
And that's because life happens. Very rarely I think do we come across professors who are getting like buyouts for a semester or have a time off unless maybe they're on a sabbatical to do nothing, but write this book. Instead, they are teaching at the same time, they are advising students. So they have professional things that come up that can impact their ability to work on their manuscript. Of course, we all have our own lives too. Things come up personally, things come up with family and friends that really impact the time we think we might have had to work on a particular project.
Something interesting I learned from a book editor is that realistically, only about 20% of authors actually hit their original timelines established for turning in manuscripts or other deliverables. So come up with a date that's realistic, but realize some flexibility may need to be in there. So you also want to think about what are your due dates for deliverables as well. So we might have due dates in there for when they are going to submit certain chapters or their final manuscript, but then we also want to have due dates for, "Okay, what is the time period for copy editing? What is the time period for layout? If we, as the publishing program are sending this out to peer reviewers, what do we expect the turnaround or timeline for that to be as well?"
So you want to think about timelines on both sides of the project. (Again, excuse me.) How will materials be submitted? This is something to really clarify up front. The manuscript file format. A lot of folks I know choose to have manuscript submitted in Word which is just fine. Some have their authors creating in Pressbooks. Some people I know have been surprised when their authors submit in a totally alternative file format. So maybe like an open word processing program that they are not familiar with.
So you want to be really clear upfront. Here is the expected file format that we want for the text itself. For image and graphic files, it's really important to be clear upfront with your authors about how those are going to be submitted too. Very often for publishing, we want to have certain types of file formats. Maybe we want everything submitted in JPEG or something else. There also tends to be certain resolutions that we need for images in order for them to show up well in publishing projects.
How do we communicate that to the authors and what are we communicating to them? Some publishing programs say, "You need to submit all your images as JPEGs at 300 dpi." Others will say submit your images to us, and we will do the conversion what we need in order to be able to publish this at a high format. Something else related to images can be...accessibility considerations.
Something might also be alternative text for those images and graphics and charts. When you're in the production phase of an OER, generally on our end, or if you're working with somebody like Scribe, it can be fairly easy for them to go on and apply headers and things like that to help support accessibility considerations. But when it comes to images, charts, and graphs, it is important for me to have the authors come up with alternative texts. What do they want readers to get out of those?
So making it clear upfront, that for your images, charts, and graphs, we need you to create alternative texts, and here's what that needs to look like. And here's how that is submitted alongside those images, charts, and graphs, and of course, citations. Some institutions decide it's okay if we have a different citation format for every single project. Some publishing programs say, "We are just publishing an APA or MLA and everything has to be submitted in that capacity." But how do we want those citations crafted and how do we want those submitted?
Making sure that information is in there as well. Copyright considerations is one of my favorite things to talk about. Of course, when there's a single author, generally, we're talking about their copyright in the work and how we are going to manage that. When we have multiple authors, of course, now we're talking about a work of joint authorship. Do they understand what that means? That they are all generally going to own the copyright in the work as a collective and having a discussion about licensing of their work so they're all comfortable with the Creative Commons license that was selected, and more about that in a minute.
With student authors, FERPA considerations may come into play. This is something where you may want to talk with your institution's office of general counsel because I've learned that office of general counsels tend to interpret FERPA in different ways. Some will say FERPA is only the student's educational record, and that is generally grades, and that's it. Others will say FERPA can include homework and other classroom projects. And if that's the case at your institution, you may need to get a FERPA release from students who are author and works that are going to be included in an open educational resource.
Other authorship considerations coming into play can include works made for hire. Maybe as part of the funds, we are giving to an author for creating an OER, they decide to hire a graduate student to write some of the text, to create some of the charts and graphs. In that work made for hire situation, who is going to hold the copyright in the works being created? How are you going to make sure that is effectively managed and considered is part of the project?
And one interesting situation... I worked with an author who, her husband had actually created a bunch of the images that were being used in the texts that they were looking to make an OER out of. And so she said, "Oh, it's my husband. I know he doesn't care." And I was like, "Well, but still we want to make sure he understands that these are now going to be released under Creative Commons licenses and talk with him about copyrights." So I gave her some information in an email to have her husband read through and respond that he understood everything we were looking to do.
Certifications and indemnities. Some institutions include these in MOUs; some don't. So certification is generally just saying, "I created this work, that I am the author of it, and that I can enter into this agreement with you." Indemnifications can take a couple different forms. I think with open educational resources, if indemnifications are included, it's usually that there is no libelist or obscene materials being included in the OER.
Some institutions will include language asking the author to indemnify the institution on the off chance they are sued in any capacity as the publisher of the OER. I understand where institutions are coming from in that capacity, but that is a lot for any individual to take on. So I always try to push back a little bit in including that language in the MOUs. Instead, just talking with the author about, do they understand about what we're looking for? Proper citations so we're not committing plagiarism? Tracking rights for images and things like that.
All considerations that help lower our risk. If there are questions from some rights holder about how their work was incorporated into an OER. And of course, there is a copyright consideration of what open license are we going to attach to the OER. As we talked about, I think it was last week in Karen's fabulous presentation. Some programs say all of our OER are going to published under a specific license. Maybe it's CC BY.
Some publishing programs will say you may choose any CC license. I think what I'm seeing more and more is that you can choose one of the few licenses. So like CC BY, CC BY-NC so by give attribution and your purpose has to be non-commercial are the two that I'm seeing them to allow more to choose from. So here, first off, of course, your program has to decide what open license options are you going to make available and then clearly explaining, "Do you understand what this open license means? Do you understand what it means to be an open educational resource?"
If there's multiple authors, what are they most comfortable choosing as a group to attach to their open educational resource? Budget considerations. How much is being paid for a particular project? Here at Miami University, the amount of money we make available for each project is a little bit different. And that's because we are often engaging with Scribe as our publishing partner. And of course, depending on the length and format of the OER, the services that they provide are going to vary.
So as part of our budget, we have taken into account what are the costs for the services that Scribe's going to be providing. We include a small amount of money for the professor as well. They can use that as an honorarium for their time. More frequently what we see them doing is using that money to pay for licenses, for things they want to include to hire a student who can help them out with the OER. So how is the budget, or how are the funds going to be distributed?
For that money that's for the instructor or the authors, is that being transferred to their department? Are they going to send their bills to the Miami University Libraries to pay? Excuse me, and what type of expenses can be written off or can be put underneath this? So for example, it's okay to use the money to pay for licensing where appropriate. If there's images that you can't find that are covered by a Creative Commons license, or might not fall within the scope of fair use, but the money cannot be used to pay for a third party to go out and create something like an external vendor because then that gets really complicated for the university and how we pay for that.
So being very clear upfront, how much money is available for the project, how it's going to be distributed and what type of expenses can be included in the project. Contingency and planning. I think we've talked about this in a lot of different places. I am sure that this is going to come up in other presentations. Issues will arise and you know what? That's okay. What I tell our authors is, life happens, being a professional happens. Just talk to me, stay in constant communication, and if something comes up, let me know, that's okay.
Generally we can shift our timelines or work or plan in order to be able to accommodate whatever comes up. If needed, we can look at revising the MOU in order to support whatever changes might need to happen. There have been professors who we've gotten a little ways down the road, and then they had to back out of projects for a variety of reasons. One had some family considerations come up and they said, "You know, with what I have going on, this just needs to go in the back burner. And if you're okay, we can revisit this in a year or two, but I don't have the bandwidth to do this now."
And I was more than happy to say, "No problem at all. Come back to me when you're ready and we'll revisit this." I think the biggest thing, and I know this has been talked about before is really setting the tone for communication, ensuring open communication. I believe last week, Karen talked a little bit about, "Are you going to have scheduled check-ins every month? Is there just going to be one check-in at the start?" And then constant communication as needed initiated by both parties. I've had different things with different professors.
One of my professors said, "Please reach out to me every two weeks, that is going to help keep me on schedule." Another professor was like, "Hey Carla, I'm really okay. I'll reach out to you if you need everything. You don't have to keep checking in every month." And they could support that. And this was with an article I was publishing. I had an author who just dropped off the radar and they wouldn't respond to my emails, I couldn't get any answer out of them.
So finally, I decided to call their office on my cellphone, and I'm like, "Okay, they probably know what my area code is for where my office is located, but the area code for my cell phone is a little different. Maybe they won't recognize that, maybe they'll pick up the phone and they did." And I said, "Hey, so and so, it's Carla, how's it going?" And I heard a panic silence on the other end. And they were like, "Hey, I'm so sorry. I know I haven't been getting back to you."
And I said, "That's okay, let's talk about what's been going on. How is your project?" And they had a lot of personal things come up as well. And what they told me was I was just so embarrassed that I wasn't getting things done. I wasn't getting things done on time. And then I was so embarrassed that I hadn't responded to you for a month and a half that I was just kind of avoiding you out of embarrassment and feeling guilty. And I said, "There's no need for that." Again, things happen.
If we have those open lines of communication, I am more than happy to shift timelines or provide other resources in order to support that, but I can't accommodate your needs if I don't know what they are. So just keep those open lines of communication and make sure they feel comfortable knowing that they can reach out to you at anytime. So drafting your MOU. A few recommendations is be aware of any institutional policies and considerations that you need to think of before drafting this.
At some institutions, we as employees aren't really able to draft contracts on behalf of the institution. Instead, those need to come out of human resources or the office of general counsel. A lot of times at institutions, informal agreements are just fine. After all, a syllabus is kind of an informal agreement between an instructor and students and how the semester is going to progress, but it's good to talk with your office of general counsel first just to get some feedback from them. Who knows? They may have a template that you could start to work from that is commonly used for MOUs at your institution.
Do you want to start drafting your own from the ground up? This may be a good choice if you have connections in the office of general counsel who you can work closely with MS, but not a lot of us do, or even if we have those connections, they might not necessarily have something like this high on their priority list. So it could take months and months to get done. Instead, what I encourage you to do is swipe somebody else's.
For example, Karen Bjork at Portland State shared her wonderful MOU as part of the publishing curriculum. You can go locate it there. That template is a fantastic resource to get an idea of what a publishing MOU looks like, and to start to draft your own. Use it as a template, begin to customize it with the needs of your institution. If needed, or if appropriate, share with your administrators or office of general counsel so they can provide feedback on it.
And Karen, if you're here, something she can talk a little bit about or put some notes about in the chat is, I know they've gone through multiple drafts of their MOU. And we have here too at Miami University. We often modify ours based on a particular project, but as we've gone along each semester, each year, we've thought, "You know what? We don't necessarily need that language in there anymore. We're going to take that out." Or after a particular project, "Hmm. Maybe we should have had something in our MOU addressing this particular aspect of the publishing process." So we put that in. So that draft version can change as well too.
Tips and recommendations. (I'm so sorry, my allergies are so bad and I didn't want to cancel. So this is the result, I'm just sneezing and stuffy.) So where possible, use plain language. There may end up being some words like indemnifications or certifications that are in the MOU, and that's fine as long as we help explain to our authors what those mean. But as much as possible, use plain forthright language so it's clear and easy for everybody to understand.
Organize the document logically. Very often with a lot of MOUs, you will have author responsibilities, publishing program responsibilities, due dates. So people can go through easily see what's needed or if you need to reference the document again, you can quickly find the section you need where that information is. And then thinking about what are key areas that you need covered and making sure they're integrated in there. So setting expectations.
I believe Karen talked about this as well, but when we are putting out our call for proposals and people express some interest or just information that we have online, we'll talk about a memorandum of understanding between the publishing program and the authors, being a part of the structure of our publishing programs. So they're not blindsided by it. We make it available for people to review so if they have questions or concerns about something in the MOU, they can ask about those ahead of time.
We schedule a meeting. Once people are accepted into our program to go through the MOU line by line and answer questions, or make sure they understand what is expected or to fill in the blanks in terms of things like timelines. I think this is critically important, and I once had somebody say to me, "Carla, isn't that treating them like an infant? You want to sit there and read the document line by line?"
And I said, "That is not my intent whatsoever. My intent is, number one, where there is legal language I want to make sure they really understand what I'm asking them to sign on. And number two, you never know where confusion is going to leak in." So again, I think it's really important to go through everything and make sure they understand what you are both trying to achieve.
So for example, we had one person who was accepted into our publishing program, and I was so excited for their MOU because it was in the area of music. I had never seen an OER, anything like it before on that particular subject. They got accepted, we sat down to start going through the MOU, and when I got to talking about an open license, he's like, "Wait a minute. What do you mean open, freely available online?" "Well, I wanted to talk about my royalties for the book, when can I expect those?" And I was like, "Oh wait, well, actually open educational resource as we talk about freely available online, there are no royalties associated with this program that you will get this small amount of money is part of it."
And I think at the time that was like $1,000 or $1,500, but other than that, there's no royalties coming afterwards. And he was under the impression that $1,500 was an upfront payment, and then the royalties would come after. And he said, "Carla, I have children who are getting ready to go to college. I was looking at this book as an additional source of income to help pay my kid's tuition. I'm not interested in publishing if there's no royalties."
And I was disappointed, of course, because I thought this could be a really unique and useful OER, but I also understood where he was coming from and seeking those royalties. And if we wouldn't have had that conversation upfront, the whole thing could have got published. It's freely available online, and now he's not getting any royalties from it, and there could have been a ton of frustration. That's why I sit down and go through everything very carefully in the MOU to help clear up any potential confusion ahead of time.
And I think it's also important to be available to answer questions at any time whether it's, "Hey, I wanted to double check about what information you're looking for in the permission spreadsheet when I'm finding images and charts and graphs that I want to use." Whether it's about a format of a particular chapter or a style guide. Or, "Hey, I was reading back through the MOU and now I have a question again about this line. Can you answer that?" Always make yourself available to answer their questions.
As I said before, in terms of project management, communicate, communicate, communicate. Ask them upfront how often do you want them to check in? If it's not that often, still check in from time to time, "Hey, I'm just checking you to see how it's going. How is writing going? I know it's been a busy semester for everybody. Do you feel like you're still on track for our next due date that's coming up?" Here in the MOU are some of the due dates that we identify.
Do you feel like you're still on track to meet those? When questions and problems arise, one thing you want to think about is what parts of the MOU can be ratified or renegotiated. MOUs are generally negotiable to a point. Timelines can be negotiable. Maybe the professor says, or the author says, "I need two years to get this done. I think two years is reasonable with my teaching and research load and all of that." Okay, that's negotiable. Maybe the original time quality we put forward is a year, but we're comfortable with two years because we know we have other projects coming down the pike, that'll let us manage it a little bit more.
Some things may be non-negotiable. For example, maybe your publishing program uses Pressbooks. You need them to use that and they decide they want to use another publishing program. Maybe your publishing program chooses to use a certain style like APA or MLA, because you have somebody on staff who is an expert in that, and can really focus on that formatting. So you can't negotiate to use MLA if they really want to use APA.
So what you want to do with your MOUs is identify areas where you can be flexible and those where you can't. Budget may be flexible, it may not. The cap budget may be $5,000 for our project, letting them know we cannot go beyond that any capacity because then there's going to be frustrations if they come back with expenses of $7,500. Where you can be flexible, making sure that you are being as flexible as you can without really pushing the boundaries or being a doormat in providing those accommodations or flexibility where it is needed.
So I think the biggest thing I've learned with publishing is, flexibility is key. There are sometimes where you do have to say we've reached the end where we can no longer provide any flexibility or additional accommodations for your project, and that can often be very frustrating. I once worked with an author who was really communicative up front, but then as we got closer to publishing, "Well, I want to go in and add these new chapters." But this has already been through peer review.
We would have to go back and repeat peer review, that would put us back down the road an additional nine months and asking more of these people who've already contributed their times, we have serious issues with that. We've had authors who submitted, we've asked for one citation style and I think they ended up using 18 different citation styles when they submitted their references or their format and manuscript to us. And they said, "Well, I don't have time to deal with that. If you want to publish my work, you need to go back and reformat all of that."
That was one of the instances where I was able to go back to an MOU and say, "But as we agreed to in the MOU, that you would submit your manuscript and references in this formatting. We agreed about this upfront that unfortunately we don't have the capacity to backtrack and do this either. There are also questions and making sure we're maintaining your structure and things like that, so we really need you to go do this."
There have been times where we have disengaged projects amicably like with the one professor. "We understand that you wanted to go with more of a commercial route, you were seeking these royalties. We're disappointed this didn't work out, but you know what? We understand if you want to go pursue that option instead." There have been some situations where just due to lack of communication or communication, but not honoring agreements or coming to an understanding in what was needed from both parties.
We've had to say, "Unfortunately, we're going to step back from this project too." The MOU can be a great document to hold people to expectations. I think the MOU can also help support us in managing our capacity. I think as librarians, there's a lot of time where we want to be overly helpful, or I know many people here are in this conversation today. And many of these people I know take on extra work because we want to be helpful. I think it's just in the librarian's nature, but in doing that, people aren't upholding their end of the agreement, or we're not able to focus on self-care or we get overwhelmed because we're now doing more work than we expected.
So the MOU can be a great document to say, "Here's where we agreed to meet in the middle. Here's what we need from you. Here's additional time I can give you in order to meet this, but this is what we need in order to meet halfway to get this project done." So I hope this has been helpful. I think we have a little bit of time. If we do, then what we can do is take a look at the MOU from Portland State.
I was trying to find my MOU from Miami University. Ours has actually expanded significantly in conjunction with office of general counsel and putting some more information in there. The story of how our MOU expanded is I was talking with them about our publishing MOU, and they actually asked a question, "Well, if somebody was publishing a book, what would normally be in that?" And I said, "Oh, I have a book publishing contract I can share with you if you want to see, and it's like an 18-page agreement." And they said, "This is great. Let's put all of this in the MOU."
And I was like, "No, number one, that's super duper long." Yes. There could be things in that publication agreement that could be beneficial to have in our MOU like more of a focus on adhering to the style guide, file formats because that continues to be an issue for us. But I don't want to overwhelm people with this document because that can set a poor tone for the rest of the project. So if I can find where I put that, I will share that out with the group later. But again, just how these can evolve and change over time, depending on the needs of your program or maybe who you're working with at your institution and what information they want to see in that.
So I hope this presentation has been helpful. I have thrown a ton of information at you today. If you're like me, sometimes you're sitting in a webinar, you're taking everything in and then a day or two down the road, you're like, "Oh, wait a minute. She said that one thing. Now I have a question about that." If you can't tell, I love talking about this and I love working with the OEN to support this work we're doing at all these institutions to help get more OERs out there. So we have some time now for questions, but if your questions come up down the road, I'm also happy to answer those as well.
Heather: Thank you Carla for your expertise and all these wonderful recommendations for MOUs. Feel free to either type your questions into the chat and I can read those out or if you'd like to use the reactions button at the bottom of the screen and raise your hand, I can call on you and you can unmute your mic and ask your question also.
Carla: I'll just say thank you to everybody in the chat who understands about my allergies. I took two prescription pills last night and two this morning and this is still how I am. I love the green. I love the flowers. I could do without the sneezing.
Heather: So we have a comment from Mary Ann. "I think this is great. I've been involved in two projects where the faculty's expectations of me were totally out of line with what I have to offer. One, they acted like I was a subject matter expert giving me whole chapters to write, and the other gave me all the grunt work like backwards searching all the images and remix texts. They didn't keep citations or CC license info for. We'll have an MOU from now on."
And we also shared our template, it's an editable, downloadable template in Google that anyone can borrow and adapt to their institution. There's a link to that in chat, and Karen, put the link to the one from Portland State University.
Carla: I am so sorry you had to go through that, Mary Ann. Number one, just any human treating another like that, putting off work, expecting you to do what they consider to be the grunt work. I've had a little bit of that myself, not to that extent. Most of the time, people are just overwhelmed. They know deadlines are coming up, they want to get stuff done, they're like, "I'm so sorry. I know this isn't in the proper format, I'm just going to send it to you anyway. If you can help me out, that would be great."
I did have one situation once where somebody was like, "Well, if you're the publisher, that's your job." And it was like, I wrote a response to them. I didn't send it. I went home; I went for a run; I went to sleep. I woke up the next morning and I rewrote the email because I felt like they were really looking down on me and my role, and what our publishing program was there to do.
And so my kind response was that as the publisher, I am here to help support you in this work, and we're excited for your project. Nevertheless, as was documented in the call for proposals, as we discussed via email and as was included in the MOU, here are the expectations for you in your role as the author. And it includes this particular work, and it was some work with images. And in the end, we came to a middle ground that some of the images they didn't track where they came from or the associated licenses, that we were just going to cut some of those out. But those can be really frustrating situations. And again, having that MOU was the great document to go back, "But here's what we agreed to."
Heather: Okay. We have a question from Michele Behr. "If you require the authors to get permissions for images, what are the best resources for them to understand what they need to know?"
Carla: Sure, that's a great question. So generally we encourage people to, as much as possible, just create their own images, charts or graphs because that just takes a lot of the guesswork out of permissions. We do also encourage them to use Creative Commons images. Now, what I tell them is, if you are doing a Google Creative Commons search and using their little tool to bring back Creative Commons works, don't just do a screen cut or screen clip and grab that and use that.
Number one, follow it to where it's hosted. For example, like Flickr. And then number two, do a little bit of research on it to make sure you have a strong reason to believe the person who made it available online is actually the copyright holder. So for example, one of my favorite examples to use here is, I once had somebody send me an image of the Grinch and it was straight from the movie and they said, "Oh look, this is a Creative Commons image of the Grinch. I'm so excited to use it."
And I don't remember the name of the person who posted it, but it was something like Tim Smith from North Dakota. And I was like, "I promise you, Tim Smith does not hold the copyright on that image that he could lawfully put the Creative Commons license on it." I actually got a really great chart from my book publisher to use in tracking permissions. And so I've made something similar to that to use for our authors, and Karen, I can dig that up and share that with you.
Basically, it's what is the name of the image? Where did you find it from? What's the URL? Who is the rights holder? What is the associated right? Did you track permissions? Did you pay a license fee? All of that. And it is a little tedious, but I tell them, "If you do this as you find each image or as you create each image, it'll take you an extra two or three minutes to go fill the spreadsheet out. If you wait till the end, I promise you, it's going to take weeks and weeks and weeks to try to go back and find all of this."
And we all know the image that pops up at the top of our Google results today may not be the same image that pops up two months from now. So we can't do reverse image searches online. But it can be hard to go back and find something. So take those extra few minutes to document that information as it is found, or as you create images, and that pays off big dividends ahead of time.
Heather: Okay, we have a question from Travis. How do you handle cover images? Do you allow authors to select those or is that something you maintain control of?
Carla: I don't know we've had any cover images so far. They've basically just been what we've talked about, plain here's the title of the book and it's a certain color. If somebody wanted to use the cover image, I am flexible. If they want to create something, that's completely fine with me generally. If they want a Creative Commons image on the cover, I think those conversations would be very similar to what we have for other images that are used in the book.
Heather: We have another one from Michele. Can you share what your budget per book for working with... What is your budget per book for working with Scribe?
Carla: For working with Scribe, I think our lowest quote has been about $3,000. I'm trying to think of what some of our other quotes are. I want to say maybe around $5,000 - $6,000. It's a lot of money. Now, one thing I will say is when I first started doing this work, I had a conversation. So our OER programs were reported by the library in the provost office, and they were very excited about OER publication. But we have this committee who needs to guide everything, but I'm the primary on-the-ground person, and I manage the publishing program on my own.
And I said, "I need you to pick. I can either be the copyright librarian and provide all these services on campus halftime and support affordable learning on campus halftime, or it can be the OER publishing librarian full time." If you want me to do this on my own, because I had gone through the training through the OEM with Scribe on how to do a lot of this work. And what they decided is that as an individual, my time was better spent doing both instead of just focusing on one thing.
And I said, "In that case, I need you to back this up with funding so that we can pay companies like Scribe to do all this work that would otherwise take all of my time to do on my own. If you can go through the full publishing program with the OEM, it is fantastic, you will learn a lot, it's well presented, but I think it's really eye opening to see how much work goes into publishing a book."
And I said, "These projects are going to cost us, and so I need the commitment from the library and the provost office to help make sure there's funding when these projects come up." And they have both been fantastic. It's negotiated on a project by project basis who's going to cover the cost. I've gotten to present about our affordable learning work, and we have even gotten donations from our alumni to help support this program. So we've gotten some funds that way too.
The one thing great thing about Scribe is whenever they give us a quote, they will give us a breakdown. Here's all the different things involved with publishing and here's what those will cost. So that also allows me to pick and choose within the scope of our budget. Okay, it doesn't necessarily have this much money for a particular project, but I can get Scribe to have these few things done. So they are really great if you go to them and say, "Here's a budget that we have." Of saying what services can they provide within the scope of those funds? So if you're thinking about using them, reach out to them, and I know they'll be able to provide you some options.
Heather: Next, we have a comment from Mary Ann who says, "Also suggest stipulating if you will be included in any presentations or publications about the project that could be part of the MOU." And Beth says, "Keeping track of where stuff came from is what Zotero is for, that's a tip. My comment was in regards to tracking down the source of images." Another resource. And Amanda shared a link to a spreadsheet that she uses with authors to track where they curate information from.
Carla: Yes, that is a great spreadsheet. It's simple, but it gets you all the information you need. Thank you Amanda.
Heather: Yeah, thank you for that. Okay, does anybody have any other questions? You can feel free to raise your hand or if you want to unmute at this time. Okay, so if there's no further questions, I'd like to be respectful of people's time. I just want to say thank you again to Carla for sharing her expertise today and thank you to our audience for attending and sharing their experience and resources.
If you have more questions about today's session and topic, or if you'd like to chat with others about it, please use our class notes which I'll share link to in chat. We'll check that later and answer questions and comments there. I'll go ahead and put that in chat right now.
Carla: And while you are doing that, I would say thank you so much Heather for hosting and thank you to everybody, great questions, for sharing your experience and resource and thanks to the OEN for having me present. I always love being part of this program.
Heather: Okay. So our next Wednesday's presentation is on working with authors. We will have a panel discussion by five individuals from four different institutions. We'll have Anita Walz from Virginia Tech, Mandi Goodsett, and Barb Loomis from Cleveland State University, Annie Johnson from University of Delaware Library and Press, and Apurva Ashok from the Rebus Foundation. And I shall put a link to those people in chat too in case you're interested there. Would love if you can join us next week. So let me just scan. I think I caught all the questions and thank you again for attending and please everybody, enjoy the rest of your day.
Carla: Thanks everybody.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:15:56 Heather Caprette: Community Norms: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YY66Fnp0iBhlZ9Rd8qOv3Av8u3rGNja1Cj5epO1YRyk/edit#heading=h.oymdzx9d30td
00:23:44 Heather Caprette: LOL! Me too.
00:23:51 Karen Lauritsen: Me three!
00:39:02 Kelly Smith: That's funny.
00:40:52 Heather Caprette: Optional (customize): Modify MOU template for your publishing program. Customizing the template will help you think through the structure of your program.
00:41:15 Heather Caprette: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HHf0GKoSLlNt1IgFurRwZxLiPfoI9NAE16VynhUpXmA/edit
00:42:09 Karen Lauritsen: Karen Bjork isn't here, but I am! Here's where you'll find the Portland State MOU and other examples: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/106630/pages/author-agreements-mous-and-contracts
00:42:41 Kelly Smith: Please don't worry about the sneezing! This is so helpful.
00:43:00 Sara Dustin: No worries, Carla- lots of us have allergies and/or other medical issues. Hope you find relief soon! You're doing great!
00:53:58 Amanda Larson: I've doubled up on allergy meds! Zyrtec before bed and Flonase in the morning! :D
00:53:59 Heather Caprette: myersc2@miamioh.edu
00:54:46 Mary Ann Cullen: (Comment) I think this is great. I've been involved in two projects where the faculty's expectations of me were totally out of line with what I have to offer - One they acted like I was an SME, giving me whole chapters to write, and the other gave me all the grunt work like backwards searching all the images and remixed text they didn't keep citations or CC license info for. Will have an MOU from now on!
00:54:53 Arenthia Herren: I hear ya! Nasal sprays are my BFF.
00:55:19 Michele Behr: If you require the authors to get permissions for images, what are the best resources for them to understand what they need to know?
00:55:39 Amanda Larson: Yikes Mary Ann!
00:55:45 Laura Edwards: +1 michele
00:56:02 Mary Ann Cullen: Lesson learned the hard way! LOL
00:56:23 Amanda Larson: I've definitely have folks expect me to do production work!
00:56:32 TRAVIS Dolence: How do you handle "cover" images? Do you allow authors to select those, or is that something you maintain control of?
00:56:52 Michele Behr: Can you share what you budget per book for working with Scribe?
00:57:39 Mary Ann Cullen: Also suggest stipulating if you will be included in any presentations or publications about the project.
01:00:17 Beth Daniel Lindsay (she/her) | Wabash College: Keeping track of where stuff came from is what Zotero is for! :)
01:00:37 Beth Daniel Lindsay (she/her) | Wabash College: (My comment was in regards to tracking down the source of images)
01:00:48 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18ml97hC9uDWyMt4TsBe878VZNnjy-xISBpOcUYke7R8/edit?usp=drive_web&ouid=106186374970027169228
01:01:07 Amanda Larson: The spreadsheet I use with authors for them to track where they curate information from
01:03:23 Mary Ann Cullen: Thanks, Amanda!
01:05:19 Carla Myers: I'm here...sneezing
01:05:31 Beth Daniel Lindsay (she/her) | Wabash College: Thank you so much Carla!
01:05:39 Leanne Urasaki: Thank you, Carla! This was super helpful!
01:05:42 Cathy Germano: Thank you Carla feel better!
01:05:45 Amanda Larson: Thanks Carla! <3
01:05:48 Megan Heiman: Thank you, Carla! Very informative!
01:05:50 Debbie Herman: Thank you!
01:05:57 Karen Lauritsen: Thanks to everyone! Look forward to being together again next week.
01:05:57 Heather Caprette: Our shared class notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wc9mwttZCPl7kV0WU6-DS37hmh7MJhldVUNBmAyPKCY/edit#heading=h.esmv09kvuc5k
01:05:58 Laura Edwards: this has been very helpful. thank you Carla!
01:06:01 Mary Ann Cullen: Thank you Carla! I hope you feel better!
01:06:02 Susan Whitmer: Thank you Carla, this information is so helpful. I like your lessons learned experiences.
01:06:07 Arenthia Herren: Thank you Carla! We appreciate you speaking with us even though the flowers are trying to do you in!
01:06:18 Cliff Smith: Thanks all for sharing your experience!
01:06:20 Regina Hierholzer: thank you!
01:06:38 TRAVIS Dolence: Thank you!
01:06:43 Alexander Rodriguez: Thank you!
01:06:47 Heather Caprette: 1. Anita Walz, Assistant Director for Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Virginia Tech 2. Mandi Goodsett, the Performing Arts & Humanities Librarian and OER & Copyright advisor at Cleveland State University. 3. Mandi will be presenting with Barbara Loomis, Digital Scholarly Publications and Programs Administrator at CSU. 4. Annie Johnson, Associate University Librarian for Publishing, Preservation, Research, and Digital Access at the University of Delaware Library and Press 5. Apurva Ashok, Assistant Director and Director of Open Education for The Rebus Foundation
00:23:44 Heather Caprette: LOL! Me too.
00:23:51 Karen Lauritsen: Me three!
00:39:02 Kelly Smith: That's funny.
00:40:52 Heather Caprette: Optional (customize): Modify MOU template for your publishing program. Customizing the template will help you think through the structure of your program.
00:41:15 Heather Caprette: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HHf0GKoSLlNt1IgFurRwZxLiPfoI9NAE16VynhUpXmA/edit
00:42:09 Karen Lauritsen: Karen Bjork isn't here, but I am! Here's where you'll find the Portland State MOU and other examples: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/106630/pages/author-agreements-mous-and-contracts
00:42:41 Kelly Smith: Please don't worry about the sneezing! This is so helpful.
00:43:00 Sara Dustin: No worries, Carla- lots of us have allergies and/or other medical issues. Hope you find relief soon! You're doing great!
00:53:58 Amanda Larson: I've doubled up on allergy meds! Zyrtec before bed and Flonase in the morning! :D
00:53:59 Heather Caprette: myersc2@miamioh.edu
00:54:46 Mary Ann Cullen: (Comment) I think this is great. I've been involved in two projects where the faculty's expectations of me were totally out of line with what I have to offer - One they acted like I was an SME, giving me whole chapters to write, and the other gave me all the grunt work like backwards searching all the images and remixed text they didn't keep citations or CC license info for. Will have an MOU from now on!
00:54:53 Arenthia Herren: I hear ya! Nasal sprays are my BFF.
00:55:19 Michele Behr: If you require the authors to get permissions for images, what are the best resources for them to understand what they need to know?
00:55:39 Amanda Larson: Yikes Mary Ann!
00:55:45 Laura Edwards: +1 michele
00:56:02 Mary Ann Cullen: Lesson learned the hard way! LOL
00:56:23 Amanda Larson: I've definitely have folks expect me to do production work!
00:56:32 TRAVIS Dolence: How do you handle "cover" images? Do you allow authors to select those, or is that something you maintain control of?
00:56:52 Michele Behr: Can you share what you budget per book for working with Scribe?
00:57:39 Mary Ann Cullen: Also suggest stipulating if you will be included in any presentations or publications about the project.
01:00:17 Beth Daniel Lindsay (she/her) | Wabash College: Keeping track of where stuff came from is what Zotero is for! :)
01:00:37 Beth Daniel Lindsay (she/her) | Wabash College: (My comment was in regards to tracking down the source of images)
01:00:48 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18ml97hC9uDWyMt4TsBe878VZNnjy-xISBpOcUYke7R8/edit?usp=drive_web&ouid=106186374970027169228
01:01:07 Amanda Larson: The spreadsheet I use with authors for them to track where they curate information from
01:03:23 Mary Ann Cullen: Thanks, Amanda!
01:05:19 Carla Myers: I'm here...sneezing
01:05:31 Beth Daniel Lindsay (she/her) | Wabash College: Thank you so much Carla!
01:05:39 Leanne Urasaki: Thank you, Carla! This was super helpful!
01:05:42 Cathy Germano: Thank you Carla feel better!
01:05:45 Amanda Larson: Thanks Carla! <3
01:05:48 Megan Heiman: Thank you, Carla! Very informative!
01:05:50 Debbie Herman: Thank you!
01:05:57 Karen Lauritsen: Thanks to everyone! Look forward to being together again next week.
01:05:57 Heather Caprette: Our shared class notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wc9mwttZCPl7kV0WU6-DS37hmh7MJhldVUNBmAyPKCY/edit#heading=h.esmv09kvuc5k
01:05:58 Laura Edwards: this has been very helpful. thank you Carla!
01:06:01 Mary Ann Cullen: Thank you Carla! I hope you feel better!
01:06:02 Susan Whitmer: Thank you Carla, this information is so helpful. I like your lessons learned experiences.
01:06:07 Arenthia Herren: Thank you Carla! We appreciate you speaking with us even though the flowers are trying to do you in!
01:06:18 Cliff Smith: Thanks all for sharing your experience!
01:06:20 Regina Hierholzer: thank you!
01:06:38 TRAVIS Dolence: Thank you!
01:06:43 Alexander Rodriguez: Thank you!
01:06:47 Heather Caprette: 1. Anita Walz, Assistant Director for Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Virginia Tech 2. Mandi Goodsett, the Performing Arts & Humanities Librarian and OER & Copyright advisor at Cleveland State University. 3. Mandi will be presenting with Barbara Loomis, Digital Scholarly Publications and Programs Administrator at CSU. 4. Annie Johnson, Associate University Librarian for Publishing, Preservation, Research, and Digital Access at the University of Delaware Library and Press 5. Apurva Ashok, Assistant Director and Director of Open Education for The Rebus Foundation
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