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Speakers:
Karen: Hi everybody. Welcome to our Pub101 finale. Before we get started with our session today, I would like to share with you two requests. One is I will put the link in the chat for our OEN Engage!, which is coming up in July, and all of you are invited to attend. It's really great for beginners. We cover a lot of introductory content on adoption programs, publishing programs, open pedagogy, and it would be great to see you there. So I'll put the link in the chat for that.
And also, since this is our final session, the Pub101 committee and I are very interested in your feedback. I will also send an email with the link, but please do take two or three minutes just to let us know how it went. We will be revising the curriculum and the experience for you for the next session in spring 2025, as well as for faculty. So your input really matters to us, and I thank you in advance. So without further ado, I will hand things over to Amanda.
Amanda: Hi everybody. Welcome to today's session. This is the Open Education Network's Pub101. If you are not supposed to be here, you're welcome anyways. If you have found us after this long, we welcome you. If you have stuck through the whole series, hooray, huzzah, we love that. And we are going. I'm Amanda Larson. I'm the Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant at the Ohio State University. I'll be your host and facilitator for today. Today we are going to talk about working with authors. And we have the fantastic Abbey Elder here from Iowa State University to chat with us about that and give us some lived experience. As always, there will be time for your questions. We encourage you to have active conversation in the chat. There may be some of you who have experience with this topic and we would love to hear from you. We hope that you'll share your experiences and resources with all of us.
And I'm going to go ahead and just get the housekeeping details out of the way. So we have an orientation document that includes our schedule, links to the session, slides and recordings. So if you couldn't make a session, you missed one, you can still go and get that content. There is the companion resource, the Pub101 curriculum, and you'll find resources there and templates. We're also recording this session and it will be added to our YouTube Pub101 Spring 2024 playlist. We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. Please join us in creating a safe and constructive space. And finally, all of those resources I just mentioned can be found in one space and that is our ever popular linktree, Pub101 link. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Abbey.
Abbey: All right. First things first, let me pull up my slides. Can everyone see my slides?
Amanda: Yes, we can.
Abbey: Wonderful. Okay, so everyone, as Amanda said a little bit ago, I'm going to be talking a little bit about working with authors, really grounding it in a few examples of people that I've worked with, experiences I've had, and then tips that you can use in your own publishing work, whether you're starting out or doing something more in depth or grounded in experiences you've had yourselves.
So to start with, I want to give a little bit of background on where I'm coming from with this. My name is Abbey Elder. I'm the Open Access and Scholarly Communication Librarian for Iowa State University and the Statewide Open Education Coordinator with the Iowa Open Education Action Team. In these roles, I lead Iowa State's open education program, supporting faculty in identifying OER for their courses, supporting the publication of OER from our authors, training instructors and open pedagogy and other things.
And through the Iowa Open Education Action Team, I work with folks across the state to consult on their OER work, assess and support the growth of their programs, and work with a bunch of really great people, some of whom are in the room today, to talk about ways we can support other people as they develop their OER programs. But what's my context for actually publishing things? So our OER Publishing program, Iowa State, really started out in 2018 with the launch of our Mini-Grant Program. The first thing I said was, "We need funding to help people." And then after I got that funding, I said, "Oh, they're going to make things. We have to help them do that." So the publishing really came second, and that is often the case with OER programs that are really just running and setting the wheels in motion before they think about where the road is.
But luckily, we have a wonderful digital press launched in 2019 under Harrison Inefuku, our Scholarly Publishing Services Librarian, which also manages journals and monograph publishing. So through Harrison, we have some infrastructure and support for publishing generally, and I was able to work with him to help our OER Publishing program go from frantically trying to help people create something to being more of an established program. The Digital Press has one staff member, that's Harrison, and I help with OER production unofficially, not in my job description, not something I'm necessarily supposed to be doing. However, we are currently in the process on Friday of hosting a new second full-time staff member, an Open Publishing Production Editor that we'll be hiring as an entry level position. So it will not just be me and Harrison soon.
But okay, so I've generally talked about, we started out pretty small, now we have some more entrenched experience in actual publishing knowhow in what we're doing. It's been one, two, six years now. Oh my. So I'm going to share a little bit about specific authors we've worked with and how working with different people as individuals changes the way that your actual publishing process might go. So the first person I like to call the self-starter, this is a person who really just went into it, got their work done, got out. I trained them early on, "Hey, what is an open education resource? What is an instructional material? What are the best practices for making these resources?" They responded to check-ins at key points throughout their publication timeline based on a timeline that we set up early on in their progress. They put together their content in Pressbooks directly, edited it themselves, and after training, improved their material's accessibility.
So I said, "Here's some key things you need to watch out for and make sure you fix as you go along," and they handled that themselves. Everything came together on time and it was a very seamless experience. Not everyone's going to be like this. The second person I like to call the collaborator. I worked with them over the course of two years. They explained early on that their project needed a little bit more help, that they would take some time to figure out what the actual structure would look like and what we could do. So I worked with them to draft H5P exercises to complement their content. I helped them import and format their materials, and I made edits for design, accessibility and inclusion. We really worked together on this as a team and they relied on me heavily during the editing and refining phase of their project.
Now the final project is excellent, but that is a lot of work that went into this specific project. And the final example I call the unhurried. So this author worked with me during their projects onboarding. We really just talked about, "Hey, what is it that this needs to be?" They're going to retire soon. They wanted to just get this out and share materials they've developed over time. They adapted lecture notes and slides they've been using over 20 years. So some of the images, they didn't remember where it came from. Some of the examples, they're not sure if they pulled it from a book. So we had to do a lot of backtracking to just get it to the point where most projects start. The author completed their work over time on their own section by section, but they had a flexible schedule because they're not doing this on a grant. They're just trying to get things out.
And finally, chapters were individually reviewed, imported into our publishing platform, and formatted for accessibility by me. But we did finally publish it this spring. So although it took five years, it eventually got done. Now these are three very different examples as you've seen, going from someone who over one year just knocked something out to someone who needed a little bit more time, maybe a little bit of handholding to get things done, and then someone who really just wanted to work on this project and then we had to check in with them to make sure it got done at the end of the day. There are pros and cons to each of these examples. The self-starter was low maintenance, but they developed kind of uncreative, unattractive and inaccessible materials until we went in and said, "Here's the things that need to get fixed."
The collaborator's energy led to a great OER, but they were high maintenance and the way that we work together led to some not-so-great boundaries. It's hard to say, "I'm sorry, our team will not work with you on this when you're not talking to someone as if you're a member of a team, you're talking to them as a partner and collaborator." And the unhurried author was reliable. They listened to our advice, they got work done, but because they weren't actively teaching with their materials, they weren't thinking about the student audience, they were just thinking about getting it out there.
So why do I give these examples? It's not just to say there's all sorts of different people, but also to say authors are people. They are not a monolith. When you work with them, they're going to have different sorts of issues and challenges and peculiarities to both the projects they're working on and how they like to work on things. These issues we faced didn't stem from them alone either. Some of them were my fault. I did not set boundaries properly with the collaborator. I did not say, "Here's a timeline we need to work with," for the unhurried. And for the person who was the self-starter and got things done on their own, if I had more expectations early on of, "Hey, you send this to me and we'll do remediation or review," before we get to the point where I say, "You need to fix this for accessibility," then we wouldn't have to come back and ask them to do edits later.
There are things that I could have done to put breaks in there as well. So what can you learn from my experiences? Well, working with authors has a lot of different peculiarities to it. It's about respect. You need to respect them as people who are doing this work and they need to respect your time and experience as someone who's helping them pull together their publications. It's about managing expectations. So what are they going to be responsible for and what are you going to be responsible for, and how do you make sure that both of you understand where those breaks are. It's about communicating enough, and this varies based on person. I have some people that I'll check in with at the beginning of their project and then two months later, two months later, two months later. And I have one author that I've been talking to weekly for a couple of years now. Different people have different needs. Again, sometimes you don't need to go too far.
And finally, there's developing shared goals for their project. So when you're talking to an author about something they're developing, you need to understand what they want this to be and what that's going to take. So are they going to want something that is a book that is published and out? Or do they want something that is an interactive experience for their students, something that is more exciting, something that looks really interesting? And can you meet those needs? Or is there something that you're going to have to address with them about are their expectations too high or too out there for what you're actually developing?
So some questions to ask as you're working through these questions and ideas and projects. First, what does the author want? As I said, it might be just a book or it might be something more weird or different than that. But also not just what it is, ask about the purpose of the project. Is this project something that will be an ancillary sort of review material? "Oh, I want the students to have something they can go back to and understand the key exercises or understand the properties of specific materials." What do they want their timeline to look like? Do they really want to have this done by fall 2025, or do they just want to have it out at some point in the next couple of years? What are their preferences for technology, art, licenses? So some people might say, "Oh, I really want to make sure that we get standard graphics across the piece."
Okay, that's wonderful, but do you have funding to support a graphic designer in developing those materials? Because for our press, we're not going to allow them to just use AI to develop those materials. What can the author do? So coming back to what they want, do they have the time to develop the materials that they want to create? What is their teaching load like? Do they have funds available to them for their technology that they want to create? "Oh, I want to make something that's more interactive, that's 3D, that's VR maybe." Well, do they have the proficiencies in the technology that it would take to develop those materials? And finally, do they have support from their department to make that work? So some institutions might have individual departments with 3D scanners, with labs, with TAs available that can support them in developing this and others might not have any of that. So figuring out what your institution has, what individual departments have access to will help you figure out if something is feasible for an author to even pursue.
And finally, what can you do? So you are an individual. You might be a member of a team. You might be someone who has publishing as part of your job title, or you might be someone like me who is just doing it because no one else can. And thinking about what you can do, what you have the time to do will help you make a better experience for your authors and yourself. So think about what you can set in place, managing workflows, systems and platforms.
Okay, here is the process we go through. First I'm going to talk to the author and make sure that they understand their project. We're going to talk through what's possible on the platforms and systems we have access to so they understand what they can make use of. We're going to talk about whether they have access to those platforms themselves or whether it's mediated through me or another member of our team of two people. And finally, we're going to talk about what the timelines are for working through those systems. Flushing out that timeline is an important part of the process because it helps you set guardrails in place so things can be flexible. You can say, "Hey, we'll change this timeline later if we need to." But having a set timeline to begin with helps keep people in check so that they have check in times they're expecting, they have deadlines they're trying to meet, and they're not going to just forget that this project is happening.
Finally, communicating expectations. As I've said throughout this, the hardest thing about talking to authors is setting those expectations for yourself and for them. Who does what? What can be delegated? Do you need to be the person that goes in and makes certain changes for them, or can you trust your authors to make certain changes after being trained on a process? So headings, how do those work? Alt text, how is that developed? Working with other folks on your campus that might be experts in these fields like IT, accessibility services, the dean of students office, whoever it might be that might be a good partner for you in this work. And really I want you to ask what expectations are actually reasonable for you to be doing as someone with limited time to contribute toward this work, and for them as authors who, again, have a lot of teaching load time and potentially no funds available to support their work.
So as you're thinking about, okay, what can I do? What can they do? Also think about what can you not do? What can you say no to? If someone comes to you and says, "Well, I think it would be really great if you could do custom CSS for this entire book so that all of the buttons are blue and all of the links are pink, and all of the text boxes have really big words that are just popping out of the page." You can say no to that because that's either inaccessible, does not match your style guide, doesn't make sense for the book. There's a lot of reasons why you might say no to something.
Another thing you might consider are the actual services that they're asking for, something that you don't offer or projects you won't take on. So we don't offer copy editing through us because we do not have the time or expertise to offer that. But we do say, "If you want to find a copy editor, we can help you find one and pay them with any funds you might have available through your department."
Can you support an author with their specific platform that they prefer? They say, "Oh, I really want to make something in LaTeX or with Overleaf or through InDesign specifically." And we'll say, "Well, we really want to make something that is accessible, that uses the platforms that we pay for, that makes use of the tools that we support." Those are things that you need to discuss with authors upfront as non-negotiables so that they understand what's expected of them. If there's certain fonts or color choices, again, set those expectations early and think about what things you really, really want to say no to. For example, for us, we do not have closed access projects. We only do open access publications through our digital press. And as OER publishers, I think that's the case for most of us.
I added this slide in this year because I think it's a good thing to question and ask yourself whenever you're thinking about, "Okay, I'll make this expectation for this author, but maybe I'll change them for this one. These people seem like they really need help." There's a problem when you make exceptions based on, as I say, vibes. You can't just say, "Well, I think they need more help, so I'm going to give them more help." Well, when you're making these exceptions, you have to ask, are you certain that you aren't limiting or extending that support based on unconscious bias? You say, "Well, they seem like they need more help." Well, why doesn't someone else seem like they need more help? Why might someone else not be given that extra support? So sometimes it's best to have strong guidelines of, we will not do this. Not just because it's bad for your workload to do extra work, but also because when you extend support to one person, you might be doing it just because they're like you or you see yourself in them and not because they actually need or deserve extra support.
Of course, there might be some that do need extra support, but you need to have a reason why you're offering that in order for you to be not extending biases into the conversation. For example, we might offer extended deadlines for people who are adjunct professors because adjuncts have limited time due to the extended teaching loads. That's a reasonable expectation and something that we can set in as a policy that we support people for these reasons. And remember, this is a team effort. So yes, OER publishing does not have to be just you and an author. It can also be other people on campus. As I mentioned earlier, technology experts and accessibility experts are people you can reach out to, but also instructional designers, librarians and other people who can help during the production process.
I especially want to highlight instructional designers here as people you should be reaching out to because they're the types of people who know how instructional design works, how course development works. And the best time to get in touch with an instructor about developing a new OER is when they're considering a redesign of their course. Because this process of thinking, what are my learning objectives? What do I want my students to learn? How do I address that in my course directly? That's the time when thinking about, actually, I want to make this something open that I can share with them, that I can adapt over time. It comes into play and makes a lot of sense.
So how do you onboard new authors then? We talked a little bit about my experience with specific types of authors, tips for working with authors, but if you have someone new coming in, how do you get them onboarded? First for us, we have a planning meeting. "Okay, let's talk about your project. What do you want to do?" This may include a discussion about the general structure of their OER. Okay. It's going to have introduction. It's going to have five chapters with three subsections each. And at the end of each chapter, there's going to be a key questions. Okay. We're going to talk about the production process. What is the timeline? What are the steps that they're going to go through? What is the peer review process? Talk about generally the project, things that might be tricky about it.
So is this going to require a lot of complex tables, mathematical formula, different languages, and can we adjust for that? And expectations for other production like peer review or copy editing. Again, make it clear to them if you do or do not offer that support and where else they can get support on campus or elsewhere to meet those needs. That planning meeting is really where you set the stage for what the entire conversation with your author is going to look like. So is this going to be a partnership where you're talking to each other as equals? Is this going to be a service partnership where you're pitching the things that you can offer to them? There are different ways that this can come out, but in general, you really want to make expectations clear.
As I said, set expectations. So when you think about your workflows, as I mentioned earlier, you want to think about what platforms you support on your campus. Will your authors draft their content in Word, with LaTeX, with Pressbooks, LibreTexts or another platform? Will they draft one place and import it somewhere else? Should they prepare a sample chapter for your review? I highly recommend that, especially if they're preparing content for ingest into another platform, because that way you can catch early on if they're doing something incorrectly. For example, you can say, ooh, when you have their headings like this where it's H2 and then H5, not going to work really well, here's what that means and why it works this way. And think about as you're developing this workflow, who is responsible for reviewing for accessibility, formatting the final work and cover art design or other pieces like that that might be extra?
A lot of the time, you want to make sure if you have a whole publishing program that cover art specifically is consistent and isn't coming from the authors because they don't necessarily have experience in that. And it can be best to have someone who can set a clear template for ongoing work. It can be very simple, just a big image, a block of color, your logo and the title. I recommend checking out the Oregon State University covers, for example, as a good basic example. But there are a lot of different ways it can come out. So expectations, we talk about expectations for platforms, expectations for the authors, who's doing what. But generally your guidelines you set should be things you're expecting from all the authors you're working with to prevent scope creep.
And for those who don't know, scope creep is when as you're working on something, what you're responsible for starts getting taken over by additional expectations. "Oh, well, you said that you might be able to help with this, so why don't you do that too?" "Well, I don't really know how to do this, so why don't you help with that and explain it to me?" Even just training someone on a process as you go down the line might add on to the scope of the work that you're expected to handle in a publishing process. Now when you're working with authors, in addition to that initial planning meeting, you'll also want to set up communication throughout their project. It does not have to be weekly. It should not be weekly, but find the best mode of communication for you and how often check-in should happen, whether it's monthly, bimonthly, or over specific set of time.
For example, you might check in at the end of every academic semester or quarter, depends on your institution.
Another important question is what's the best mode of communication for you and what do you use on your campus? Do you use phone, email? Do you meet in person? Do you use Slack, Teams or something else? A project management tool like Trello or Jiro? Really think about what you have access to and what makes sense for the way that you're communicating with your authors.
If you're communicating with your authors as someone who is just developing content for publication, maybe a quick email or phone call is all you need. But if you're talking to them as someone who is developing a proof of concept, for a first chapter, for a larger publication, then maybe you do want to check in with them in person to just see how things are going or to work through something like a Teams call for them and other members of their team if they have, for example, five different authors working on the material with them. Thinking about how many people are part of the project will really change the expectations of how you're working with someone with their OER.
All right. So tips for ambitious authors. This is a hard one. Okay. We talked a little bit earlier about people that like to do work slowly, that they're not really in a hurry, they just want to get stuff done eventually. But there are also people who think big who say, "Actually, I wanted to just do one book, but now I think this is three books, so I'm only going to do the first part in the first publication, and then I'll make two more books." OER projects can grow and change over time, but it's important that when you're talking to authors who are excited about doing more and more and more, you reinforce what you worked on in the beginning. What was that planning meeting about? What were the expectations you hit?
A resource that isn't published as I say here, isn't doing anyone any good. So if someone says, "I'll get that out later, but I really want to add more H5P exercises. I really want to add better images. I want to go get a 3D scan of the entire area we're talking about." You do not need to do that. We can get something out now and develop updates over time, or we can get out a portion of it now and finish the rest later. When you're talking to an author who's suddenly decided that they want to do something entirely different, it's best to go back to early planning notes also and ground them in that discussion. "Hey, you said that you needed this for your students in this class for this specific purpose. I know you're excited about all these other possibilities of what we can do, but maybe let's get this bit done now and then we can look into those updates down the line."
So what is my process now after looking back on all those other examples? As I said, I've worked with a lot of different people and different expectations and some of my processes have been quite bad, but nowadays, we have a fairly new process for working with authors that I think has helped us have a more reasonable expectation for how we work with them and get their publications out the door. So first we have that meeting about their project, the scope, the timeline, and the needs. We discuss the capability of our tools, specifically Pressbooks. "Hey, you can add text boxes, you can add videos. Here's things that you can implement." We train authors on accessibility, formatting, and share content from our campus partners who can offer additional support. That way we're not having to come back later and say, "You got this completely wrong," hopefully.
We share our formatting guidelines and instructions on sharing image files. So rather than having people draft content directly in Pressbooks, we say, "Hey, draft the materials using basic accessibility features, headings, alt text, other materials like that." And then say, "Here's where something should be in a text box," or "Here's where an image should go and send us those files separately." That way we can import the materials ourselves. And if they have peer review requested, reviews are completed with those Word files prior to importing the material to allow for easier editing.
The formatting, importing and publication work is handled by our team. That way we don't have to worry about again, going in and having to make changes later down the line if the author does something wrong in the importing process or if something breaks. If we're doing it, we know we're doing it the correct way. Now that does add a lot onto our process. It might seem like actually you're doing a lot of work, aren't you? But in the long run, doing a little bit of extra work at the end means I'm not having to do a lot of work over time coming back to authors explaining things, giving them the process, training them on importing, coming back and fixing the imports when they're broken. That little bit at the end is actually not too bad in the long run.
Now, you might also be thinking about, okay, so I have an expectation. I know what I'm doing, but what about the roadblocks that you don't expect? There's always going to be something that goes wrong even if you do everything right from the beginning. This might include communication issues with authors or collaborators. "Oh, you didn't actually talk to us about this." "The accessibility office is busy this week, so we can't review your materials." Schedule changes might happen, whether they're teaching two classes this semester when they weren't supposed to teach any, or things just happen on our end where we suddenly have five books working down the timeline at the same time. Maybe grant payouts are stalled, and so authors can't even get started on their work because they can't pay a TA to help them with their development or review process.
Sometimes personal emergencies happen to you or to them, and staffing changes can also really affect the publication timeline, especially if it's someone on your publishing team. So these all happen, it's okay. It's important to remember that the issues you encounter in the publishing process are not all going to be personal or expected or things that you can account for. Sometimes they just happen, and understanding that and being prepared for it is useful, but you're not going to be prepared for everything. So think about ways you can navigate roadblocks when they do occur. You can evaluate and edit your schedule as necessary. Be ready to be flexible. Refer back to earlier discussions again about setting expectations. "I know you wanted to do this differently, but we need to get this done on time."
Reflect on what you can finish now or work on later and be transparent about where issues are arising and how long it might take. For example, you might say, "Hey, I want you to know I did see your email that you have chapters three, four, and five ready for import, but right now we have three other books that are finishing up that need to be done for the summer semester. So we have to give those priority." Just letting an author know that there's work being done, that you recognize that they're talking to you and that you're not forgetting them can be a good way to help keep up communication lines, to help keep up that relationship without, again, infringing on that question of are you being too familiar? Are you letting those guidelines break down?
And if you encounter a roadblock that really shouldn't have been there, that's a problem on your end because of communication issues or missed expectations, you can take notes on how you can avoid that same problem in the future. In general, it's best to just remember we can't account for everything. Sometimes things just happen.
But if you feel like you're stuck, you can ask a couple of questions as well. So first, are you the one who's stuck or is the author the one who's stuck? And based on that answer, you can figure out who you need to talk to. Make sure you're in agreement on how to proceed before you get started on something. So if the author says, "Oh, I really want to fix this." Don't just fix it the way that you think you should, ask them what they think fixing means so you're not doing something the author doesn't want.
And remember, if you set a bad example early on, a bad example in this case meaning, "Ooh, I did something that I shouldn't have, and now they expect me to keep doing it." You can always enforce boundaries again as a new workflow or a new change in your process. So say, "Oh, I know that you saw before that I was handling the copy editing process for your chapter. We've decided as a publishing unit that we are not going to do this anymore and instead we're going to refer you to the English department's copy editing team," blah, blah, blah, whatever the case may be. In general, avoid setting those expectations. But sometimes you can't help what you've done in the past.
So reflecting and moving on. There are a lot of different things you can do after a project goes bad, very badly. You might think, okay, well, I'm going to set new standards and expectations for my work. Like I just said, we're going to say, "We don't do this anymore. These are our expectations." You could maybe take a step back, say, "We're not going to publish anything for the next year. That was just a bad time. I need to take a break." Or you might just refuse to work with a particular author in the future because that wasn't your fault, that was just a bad time. But as you think through, how you can handle these issues, you should think about your standards, what do you want out of your publications and the needs of the authors, or the standards that your authors have and the needs of you as a person who is doing this work with them.
Now, your standards might mean, "Hey, I want to help make this material look good, but my author's not a graphic designer so I'm going to help with that." Or your standards might be, "Well, I want to get this book out and our author wants to make it really great. We need to talk about how we can meet in the middle and make it as good as it can be." But in general, as we like to say, perfect is the enemy of good. And sometimes you just need to say, "Well, this is good enough. We're going to get it out there and publish this thing." And if it's not great right now, that's what second editions are for. That's what updates are for. And because it's an OER, that's what adaptation is for, making something better through other means to meet your different communities needs.
We say this a lot throughout the Pub101 curriculum. I'm sure you've seen it a lot of times, but self-care is really a part of the publishing process and really any services you offer in a university environment. Sometimes when you're thinking about what support you offer, you can say, "Well, maybe I want to offer the support, but I don't want to give it myself. I do not have time for this right now. I do not have time for this at all. This is not in my job description so we're not going to do this." No one is entitled to your labor, especially if it's not in your job description. And when you can leverage support that's available across your campus system or state, there might be services available you don't even know about that you can get in touch with for help.
Okay, that was a lot of very little distributed tips, ideas, examples. So I want to chat with you about what your processes and practices have been like. Have you published any materials before? What's the process been like for you? And what roadblocks have you gotten snagged on in the process? I'm going to stop sharing because we don't need the rest of that.
Amanda: Thank you, Abbey. That was fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing those recommendations and tips and tricks with us. Before we transition to questions and chatting, I am going to point people to our Padlet activity. There's my mouse, and I'm going to drop the link specifically for the Padlet. Oh, that doesn't look right. That looked like my consultation link. Let's try getting the Padlet link. Copy link address, yes, please.
Abbey: Having copy issues?
Amanda: Always. As much as I don't mind anyone using my consultation link, that's not particularly helpful in this context right now. If you've never used Padlet before, it is pretty easy. Once you click that link, there is a plus sign next to today's session or at the very bottom of the page and it will open a sticky for you to write on. You add your comment, and then click publish to share it with us. So this week we're thinking about what would you want your authors to know about working with you? And feel free to take some time and do that really quick, or you can do it as we're facilitating these questions and chatting. And I'm going to spare some time for Karen at the very end of the session for us to remind you about some links again.
I had a question, Abbey, to get us started. You said you added the vibe check slide this year. And so I was wondering, do you have an example of where you made a decision based on vibes that didn't work out that you could share with us? I know I've made lots of those bad decisions myself.
Abbey: Actually, no. I think more than that, I was just realizing there are times when I might in the future accidentally do something where I feel bad about it. So in the past it's mostly been, oh, I just give people the benefit of the doubt across the board and offer extra things. But I realized now that we're setting more expectations and roadblocks in place and saying, "Hey, here's where we're not going to do this." If I continue to make concessions for some authors, either because of prior experiences with them or because they seem nice, then that could lead into very obvious breaches of, am I actually not being inclusive for my authors? Am I not taking their needs into account? Am I just doing this because of some other biases that I have? So I wanted to hedge that off early before it became a problem.
Amanda: That's excellent. We had a situation here at Ohio State where we had worked with one particular author several times and she always is difficult. And so we ignored the vibe there of maybe we should go our separate ways. And this year when she applied for a syllabus review grant, we were like, "You know what? You've had a couple grants. We're not going to work with you this time." We have to let other people get an option to do this work. But it took us a long time to get the vibe check to where we were like, "We should do something about that rather than just struggle."
Abbey: Yeah, we have blacklisted someone before due to just bad experiences with them saying, "Oh, well, you should change this for me. You should put this here. Oh, I know we said we already published this, but we need to make edits now." Or, "Actually, can I take this to a commercial publisher? They said they'd offer me money for it after it was published." So that's happened before. But what I'm more concerned about is potentially not giving someone support because of whatever biases I might have built in that I'm not aware of. I don't want to say, "Ooh, you remind me of this author I had a bad experience with, so I'm not going to offer you the support," even if that's not going to be the case. Questions, experiences, who wants to share? It can be positive sharing too. If you've done something with your publishing that you say, "I'm really proud that we made this change," I would love to hear it.
Evangeline Reid: I guess I'll share from a different perspective. We don't have an existing publishing set up at my university, but we have applied for a state grant that we are hopeful we will get. And so we're putting the pieces in place to make that happen. And it's interesting because I'm coming to this as an instructional librarian who this is an additional role that I'm taking on, and I'm very aware of how difficult it can be to communicate with faculty in that relationship because I find that they're often unresponsive or they respond to only what is important to them and not what I need from them. And so I'm going into this very cognizant of that and also things that people have written about ad nauseam about the power dynamic or the relationship dynamic between faculty and librarians, maybe not always being the way we might want it to be. And so I guess I'm just reflecting on the context that I'm existing in it with instruction in relation to this. And I guess I was wondering if anyone here could speak to that relational dynamic in the context of publishing. Is there anything unique to that that you might be able to add on to?
Abbey: I'll wait and see if anyone else has a comment first. But I'm happy to jump in if you don't. Okay, I'll start and then if anyone else has comments, feel free to put them in the chat or hop in. In general, even if you do have an official, I can say, "Oh, our digital press offers these services." I am not in the digital press. I am a librarian. And they might not take it seriously because it's not a university press, it's a library publishing outfit. So even with an actual publishing program, there are places where a faculty member, an author might say, I don't really take this seriously. Issues, for example, where they'll say, "Here's a manuscript, can you put it up?" Seeing it as a posting process rather than a publishing process. "Oh, you just put it up on the internet, right? And then it's published, whatever you call that." And then you say, "No, there's peer review. There are other checks and balances we need to go through, sir, ma'am." So it can be really hard to get past those expectations.
I think it helps, especially you have a grant coming in potentially, hoping for you, but it can help to say there are certain expectations we need to meet. There are things that we need to account for in reporting. There are things we need to account for in our process to give back to someone else who's in charge. So I can say, "Hey, for this material that we're giving you a grant for, then we need to report back to our provost and say how it came out by this time. So I need to have some sort of outcome from you, and I need to be able to say that this is how it went, and I need you to give me these specific details." For you it might be, "We got a grant to develop these publishing supports, so in order for us to meet our expectations, I need you to."
Even if it's just worded that way, in order for us to meet these expectations, that can help set up the exclamation points over their head so they say, "Oh, this is important. This is a grant reporting thing. I'm used to that." So talking as if you're not just coming in as librarian but as a grant manager, as a publisher can help broach those expectations and the experiences that you're used to running into. But I can relate. Have others have anything they'd like to share or ask about or complain about? That's fine too.
Micah Gjeltema: This is Micah Gjeltema from Minnesota. I think just to echo, I think a lot of the things that you've been saying, Abbey, I am very fortunate that my position is very open education focused and a lot of it is just trying to get the projects. And I'm often just so grateful that somebody would approach us with something or talk to me at all that it is sometimes hard to do those boundaries, and it is hard to have that plan at the beginning and be very upfront about how much work it's going to take. Otherwise, I might put them off and things like that. So even your recent session at the Library Publishing Forum, I was just thinking about that peer review element of before you even accept a project, asking authors to provide peer reviews where we'd struggled with that so much and that hadn't occurred to us where I think sometimes not enough occurs to us to ask for initially.
That ends up being a real problem at the end, and that ends up making people disappointed with us, I think. And it's not the magical hands-free automatic experience that they expected. And sometimes maybe they won't come back. And so I think there is something to be said too for that strength of boundary and scope. In the beginning it might turn off some projects, but not establishing those things and having a lackluster relationship I think also can turn off people for future publishing elements. And so yeah, this has all been very helpful for me to just hear from you again and just to be a little bit stronger and be more confident in our asks upfront because we are the ones providing a service.
Abbey: Absolutely. I think it's hard with these conversations to say no to things when you're just so happy someone's coming to you and willing to work with you. I recently did an audit of how many projects we're currently helping publish through our press. We have 20. We have 20 that we're in the middle of right now, which I think helped put into perspective, "Ooh, we need to have some more expectations put in place at this moment." But yeah, I think it can be hard to say no to something if it's a good project, if it's a good idea, even if you can say, "Well, we are very busy right now, but I love this. I want this to happen. And I know it might not if we hold you back another year." Absolutely. So learn from my mistakes. Say no when you have 10 plus projects in the pipeline.
Amanda: Start small. Don't start with 10 projects in the pipeline. Start with one to three and then scaffold up from there. And you can test the waters of what you as one person oftentimes can support. It gets different once you can have extra hands doing the work. But even then, you have to think then about everybody's individual bucket of capacity. But yeah, 20 is a lot, Abbey.
Abbey: I will say to counter the, oh, it's a shame when someone gets excited about working with you and then they're disappointed. In the opposite vein, I like to start off communications by first saying, what do you expect this to be and what can we really do? Because maybe that person would be disappointed if they came in thinking, "I'm going to do specifically these sorts of things that I want to do." But then if they find out other things you can do, they're even more excited. So again, we're going to go back to the horrible, "I'm making a VR experience," where they think, "I need to buy all this equipment. I need to buy a 3D scanner. I need to buy goggles. I want to build a whole room in our department to account for making these cool interactive materials." And I say, "Okay, that's wonderful, but do you need that for your students or would it be more useful for them to have some images from different directions that they can look at in a general model that we can build in H5P?" It's built into our systems. You don't have to pay extra for it. You don't have to use your grant funds on it. You can hire a TA to help compile those materials and images and help you pull this together. You have limited funds and time. Let's think about how you can use those smart by leveraging the tools we already have. And by just reigning that in a little bit and saying, "Actually, here's some cool things we can do. It's not what you're thinking, but it might work really well." And sharing some examples of other OER that have done similar things. People will be more excited and also more reasonable in their expectations.
Amanda: I'd also just like to reiterate that it's also not the end of the world if you have to say no to something and say not right now. That's one thing that's really nice. Once you've set your program up, if you have a grant cycle and you can say, "Oh, your project sounds really great, but we only accept projects in the fall, here's when the call will come out. I'm more than happy to put you on our mailing list so that you get first access to that. I would love to encourage you to apply, but our publishing schedule works this way."
Abbey: And if you don't have funds, I know a lot of you don't have money at all, it doesn't have to be there's a grant process. It can also just be there's a call for publications. So you have a specific timeline when you take on new projects that you can enforce as, "Hey, this is when we're starting up new things. If you missed it, please feel free to talk to us about your project. We can meet over the summer and talk about what you want to do so you're ready to submit a proposal that's good in the fall, but you don't have to start it right now. We don't have time to accommodate that right now. Let's come back to it later." It doesn't have to be tied to money. If you don't have money, that's okay.
Amanda: That's very true, and I will tell you that in my first grant program, the money hardly mattered to the instructors that we were working with. We had lots of really engaged folks who just wanted to make course materials for their students.
Abbey: I have some people who haven't used their money and I said, "It went away last year." And they said, "Oh, I just forgot. I've been doing other things." But yeah, sometimes they just get the grant so they can put, "I got a grant on my CV." The actual amount is less of interest, which is a shame because other people really need the money. That's a toss up. Okay, we've got five minutes. Does anyone have final questions, comments, things they'd like to share with the group?
Amanda: While you're thinking about those final questions, I'm going to go ahead and put the links that Karen shared earlier in the chat again. Want to invite you to OEN Engage! this summer, and the other is for the Pub101 facilitated experience survey. We would love to get your feedback so that we could make this better.
Abbey: All right. Well, thank you everyone for your time. I will say also my final tip. If you've realized that you've put a lot of time into helping someone with their project, feel free to assert that you should be listed as a collaborator or even a co-author on that material because sometimes you really deserve it and you might as well ask. All right. Thank you everyone.
END OF VIDEO
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The May 29 session is our 2024 Pub101 series finale. Hosted by Amanda Larson of Ohio State University, today's discussion features Abbey Elder of Iowa State University who offers practical guidance for working with faculty authors.
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:
- Abbey Elder (Open Access & Scholarly Communication Librarian, Iowa State University)
- Amanda Larson (Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant, Ohio State University)
- Karen Lauritsen (Senior Director, Publishing; Open Education Network)
Karen: Hi everybody. Welcome to our Pub101 finale. Before we get started with our session today, I would like to share with you two requests. One is I will put the link in the chat for our OEN Engage!, which is coming up in July, and all of you are invited to attend. It's really great for beginners. We cover a lot of introductory content on adoption programs, publishing programs, open pedagogy, and it would be great to see you there. So I'll put the link in the chat for that.
And also, since this is our final session, the Pub101 committee and I are very interested in your feedback. I will also send an email with the link, but please do take two or three minutes just to let us know how it went. We will be revising the curriculum and the experience for you for the next session in spring 2025, as well as for faculty. So your input really matters to us, and I thank you in advance. So without further ado, I will hand things over to Amanda.
Amanda: Hi everybody. Welcome to today's session. This is the Open Education Network's Pub101. If you are not supposed to be here, you're welcome anyways. If you have found us after this long, we welcome you. If you have stuck through the whole series, hooray, huzzah, we love that. And we are going. I'm Amanda Larson. I'm the Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant at the Ohio State University. I'll be your host and facilitator for today. Today we are going to talk about working with authors. And we have the fantastic Abbey Elder here from Iowa State University to chat with us about that and give us some lived experience. As always, there will be time for your questions. We encourage you to have active conversation in the chat. There may be some of you who have experience with this topic and we would love to hear from you. We hope that you'll share your experiences and resources with all of us.
And I'm going to go ahead and just get the housekeeping details out of the way. So we have an orientation document that includes our schedule, links to the session, slides and recordings. So if you couldn't make a session, you missed one, you can still go and get that content. There is the companion resource, the Pub101 curriculum, and you'll find resources there and templates. We're also recording this session and it will be added to our YouTube Pub101 Spring 2024 playlist. We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. Please join us in creating a safe and constructive space. And finally, all of those resources I just mentioned can be found in one space and that is our ever popular linktree, Pub101 link. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Abbey.
Abbey: All right. First things first, let me pull up my slides. Can everyone see my slides?
Amanda: Yes, we can.
Abbey: Wonderful. Okay, so everyone, as Amanda said a little bit ago, I'm going to be talking a little bit about working with authors, really grounding it in a few examples of people that I've worked with, experiences I've had, and then tips that you can use in your own publishing work, whether you're starting out or doing something more in depth or grounded in experiences you've had yourselves.
So to start with, I want to give a little bit of background on where I'm coming from with this. My name is Abbey Elder. I'm the Open Access and Scholarly Communication Librarian for Iowa State University and the Statewide Open Education Coordinator with the Iowa Open Education Action Team. In these roles, I lead Iowa State's open education program, supporting faculty in identifying OER for their courses, supporting the publication of OER from our authors, training instructors and open pedagogy and other things.
And through the Iowa Open Education Action Team, I work with folks across the state to consult on their OER work, assess and support the growth of their programs, and work with a bunch of really great people, some of whom are in the room today, to talk about ways we can support other people as they develop their OER programs. But what's my context for actually publishing things? So our OER Publishing program, Iowa State, really started out in 2018 with the launch of our Mini-Grant Program. The first thing I said was, "We need funding to help people." And then after I got that funding, I said, "Oh, they're going to make things. We have to help them do that." So the publishing really came second, and that is often the case with OER programs that are really just running and setting the wheels in motion before they think about where the road is.
But luckily, we have a wonderful digital press launched in 2019 under Harrison Inefuku, our Scholarly Publishing Services Librarian, which also manages journals and monograph publishing. So through Harrison, we have some infrastructure and support for publishing generally, and I was able to work with him to help our OER Publishing program go from frantically trying to help people create something to being more of an established program. The Digital Press has one staff member, that's Harrison, and I help with OER production unofficially, not in my job description, not something I'm necessarily supposed to be doing. However, we are currently in the process on Friday of hosting a new second full-time staff member, an Open Publishing Production Editor that we'll be hiring as an entry level position. So it will not just be me and Harrison soon.
But okay, so I've generally talked about, we started out pretty small, now we have some more entrenched experience in actual publishing knowhow in what we're doing. It's been one, two, six years now. Oh my. So I'm going to share a little bit about specific authors we've worked with and how working with different people as individuals changes the way that your actual publishing process might go. So the first person I like to call the self-starter, this is a person who really just went into it, got their work done, got out. I trained them early on, "Hey, what is an open education resource? What is an instructional material? What are the best practices for making these resources?" They responded to check-ins at key points throughout their publication timeline based on a timeline that we set up early on in their progress. They put together their content in Pressbooks directly, edited it themselves, and after training, improved their material's accessibility.
So I said, "Here's some key things you need to watch out for and make sure you fix as you go along," and they handled that themselves. Everything came together on time and it was a very seamless experience. Not everyone's going to be like this. The second person I like to call the collaborator. I worked with them over the course of two years. They explained early on that their project needed a little bit more help, that they would take some time to figure out what the actual structure would look like and what we could do. So I worked with them to draft H5P exercises to complement their content. I helped them import and format their materials, and I made edits for design, accessibility and inclusion. We really worked together on this as a team and they relied on me heavily during the editing and refining phase of their project.
Now the final project is excellent, but that is a lot of work that went into this specific project. And the final example I call the unhurried. So this author worked with me during their projects onboarding. We really just talked about, "Hey, what is it that this needs to be?" They're going to retire soon. They wanted to just get this out and share materials they've developed over time. They adapted lecture notes and slides they've been using over 20 years. So some of the images, they didn't remember where it came from. Some of the examples, they're not sure if they pulled it from a book. So we had to do a lot of backtracking to just get it to the point where most projects start. The author completed their work over time on their own section by section, but they had a flexible schedule because they're not doing this on a grant. They're just trying to get things out.
And finally, chapters were individually reviewed, imported into our publishing platform, and formatted for accessibility by me. But we did finally publish it this spring. So although it took five years, it eventually got done. Now these are three very different examples as you've seen, going from someone who over one year just knocked something out to someone who needed a little bit more time, maybe a little bit of handholding to get things done, and then someone who really just wanted to work on this project and then we had to check in with them to make sure it got done at the end of the day. There are pros and cons to each of these examples. The self-starter was low maintenance, but they developed kind of uncreative, unattractive and inaccessible materials until we went in and said, "Here's the things that need to get fixed."
The collaborator's energy led to a great OER, but they were high maintenance and the way that we work together led to some not-so-great boundaries. It's hard to say, "I'm sorry, our team will not work with you on this when you're not talking to someone as if you're a member of a team, you're talking to them as a partner and collaborator." And the unhurried author was reliable. They listened to our advice, they got work done, but because they weren't actively teaching with their materials, they weren't thinking about the student audience, they were just thinking about getting it out there.
So why do I give these examples? It's not just to say there's all sorts of different people, but also to say authors are people. They are not a monolith. When you work with them, they're going to have different sorts of issues and challenges and peculiarities to both the projects they're working on and how they like to work on things. These issues we faced didn't stem from them alone either. Some of them were my fault. I did not set boundaries properly with the collaborator. I did not say, "Here's a timeline we need to work with," for the unhurried. And for the person who was the self-starter and got things done on their own, if I had more expectations early on of, "Hey, you send this to me and we'll do remediation or review," before we get to the point where I say, "You need to fix this for accessibility," then we wouldn't have to come back and ask them to do edits later.
There are things that I could have done to put breaks in there as well. So what can you learn from my experiences? Well, working with authors has a lot of different peculiarities to it. It's about respect. You need to respect them as people who are doing this work and they need to respect your time and experience as someone who's helping them pull together their publications. It's about managing expectations. So what are they going to be responsible for and what are you going to be responsible for, and how do you make sure that both of you understand where those breaks are. It's about communicating enough, and this varies based on person. I have some people that I'll check in with at the beginning of their project and then two months later, two months later, two months later. And I have one author that I've been talking to weekly for a couple of years now. Different people have different needs. Again, sometimes you don't need to go too far.
And finally, there's developing shared goals for their project. So when you're talking to an author about something they're developing, you need to understand what they want this to be and what that's going to take. So are they going to want something that is a book that is published and out? Or do they want something that is an interactive experience for their students, something that is more exciting, something that looks really interesting? And can you meet those needs? Or is there something that you're going to have to address with them about are their expectations too high or too out there for what you're actually developing?
So some questions to ask as you're working through these questions and ideas and projects. First, what does the author want? As I said, it might be just a book or it might be something more weird or different than that. But also not just what it is, ask about the purpose of the project. Is this project something that will be an ancillary sort of review material? "Oh, I want the students to have something they can go back to and understand the key exercises or understand the properties of specific materials." What do they want their timeline to look like? Do they really want to have this done by fall 2025, or do they just want to have it out at some point in the next couple of years? What are their preferences for technology, art, licenses? So some people might say, "Oh, I really want to make sure that we get standard graphics across the piece."
Okay, that's wonderful, but do you have funding to support a graphic designer in developing those materials? Because for our press, we're not going to allow them to just use AI to develop those materials. What can the author do? So coming back to what they want, do they have the time to develop the materials that they want to create? What is their teaching load like? Do they have funds available to them for their technology that they want to create? "Oh, I want to make something that's more interactive, that's 3D, that's VR maybe." Well, do they have the proficiencies in the technology that it would take to develop those materials? And finally, do they have support from their department to make that work? So some institutions might have individual departments with 3D scanners, with labs, with TAs available that can support them in developing this and others might not have any of that. So figuring out what your institution has, what individual departments have access to will help you figure out if something is feasible for an author to even pursue.
And finally, what can you do? So you are an individual. You might be a member of a team. You might be someone who has publishing as part of your job title, or you might be someone like me who is just doing it because no one else can. And thinking about what you can do, what you have the time to do will help you make a better experience for your authors and yourself. So think about what you can set in place, managing workflows, systems and platforms.
Okay, here is the process we go through. First I'm going to talk to the author and make sure that they understand their project. We're going to talk through what's possible on the platforms and systems we have access to so they understand what they can make use of. We're going to talk about whether they have access to those platforms themselves or whether it's mediated through me or another member of our team of two people. And finally, we're going to talk about what the timelines are for working through those systems. Flushing out that timeline is an important part of the process because it helps you set guardrails in place so things can be flexible. You can say, "Hey, we'll change this timeline later if we need to." But having a set timeline to begin with helps keep people in check so that they have check in times they're expecting, they have deadlines they're trying to meet, and they're not going to just forget that this project is happening.
Finally, communicating expectations. As I've said throughout this, the hardest thing about talking to authors is setting those expectations for yourself and for them. Who does what? What can be delegated? Do you need to be the person that goes in and makes certain changes for them, or can you trust your authors to make certain changes after being trained on a process? So headings, how do those work? Alt text, how is that developed? Working with other folks on your campus that might be experts in these fields like IT, accessibility services, the dean of students office, whoever it might be that might be a good partner for you in this work. And really I want you to ask what expectations are actually reasonable for you to be doing as someone with limited time to contribute toward this work, and for them as authors who, again, have a lot of teaching load time and potentially no funds available to support their work.
So as you're thinking about, okay, what can I do? What can they do? Also think about what can you not do? What can you say no to? If someone comes to you and says, "Well, I think it would be really great if you could do custom CSS for this entire book so that all of the buttons are blue and all of the links are pink, and all of the text boxes have really big words that are just popping out of the page." You can say no to that because that's either inaccessible, does not match your style guide, doesn't make sense for the book. There's a lot of reasons why you might say no to something.
Another thing you might consider are the actual services that they're asking for, something that you don't offer or projects you won't take on. So we don't offer copy editing through us because we do not have the time or expertise to offer that. But we do say, "If you want to find a copy editor, we can help you find one and pay them with any funds you might have available through your department."
Can you support an author with their specific platform that they prefer? They say, "Oh, I really want to make something in LaTeX or with Overleaf or through InDesign specifically." And we'll say, "Well, we really want to make something that is accessible, that uses the platforms that we pay for, that makes use of the tools that we support." Those are things that you need to discuss with authors upfront as non-negotiables so that they understand what's expected of them. If there's certain fonts or color choices, again, set those expectations early and think about what things you really, really want to say no to. For example, for us, we do not have closed access projects. We only do open access publications through our digital press. And as OER publishers, I think that's the case for most of us.
I added this slide in this year because I think it's a good thing to question and ask yourself whenever you're thinking about, "Okay, I'll make this expectation for this author, but maybe I'll change them for this one. These people seem like they really need help." There's a problem when you make exceptions based on, as I say, vibes. You can't just say, "Well, I think they need more help, so I'm going to give them more help." Well, when you're making these exceptions, you have to ask, are you certain that you aren't limiting or extending that support based on unconscious bias? You say, "Well, they seem like they need more help." Well, why doesn't someone else seem like they need more help? Why might someone else not be given that extra support? So sometimes it's best to have strong guidelines of, we will not do this. Not just because it's bad for your workload to do extra work, but also because when you extend support to one person, you might be doing it just because they're like you or you see yourself in them and not because they actually need or deserve extra support.
Of course, there might be some that do need extra support, but you need to have a reason why you're offering that in order for you to be not extending biases into the conversation. For example, we might offer extended deadlines for people who are adjunct professors because adjuncts have limited time due to the extended teaching loads. That's a reasonable expectation and something that we can set in as a policy that we support people for these reasons. And remember, this is a team effort. So yes, OER publishing does not have to be just you and an author. It can also be other people on campus. As I mentioned earlier, technology experts and accessibility experts are people you can reach out to, but also instructional designers, librarians and other people who can help during the production process.
I especially want to highlight instructional designers here as people you should be reaching out to because they're the types of people who know how instructional design works, how course development works. And the best time to get in touch with an instructor about developing a new OER is when they're considering a redesign of their course. Because this process of thinking, what are my learning objectives? What do I want my students to learn? How do I address that in my course directly? That's the time when thinking about, actually, I want to make this something open that I can share with them, that I can adapt over time. It comes into play and makes a lot of sense.
So how do you onboard new authors then? We talked a little bit about my experience with specific types of authors, tips for working with authors, but if you have someone new coming in, how do you get them onboarded? First for us, we have a planning meeting. "Okay, let's talk about your project. What do you want to do?" This may include a discussion about the general structure of their OER. Okay. It's going to have introduction. It's going to have five chapters with three subsections each. And at the end of each chapter, there's going to be a key questions. Okay. We're going to talk about the production process. What is the timeline? What are the steps that they're going to go through? What is the peer review process? Talk about generally the project, things that might be tricky about it.
So is this going to require a lot of complex tables, mathematical formula, different languages, and can we adjust for that? And expectations for other production like peer review or copy editing. Again, make it clear to them if you do or do not offer that support and where else they can get support on campus or elsewhere to meet those needs. That planning meeting is really where you set the stage for what the entire conversation with your author is going to look like. So is this going to be a partnership where you're talking to each other as equals? Is this going to be a service partnership where you're pitching the things that you can offer to them? There are different ways that this can come out, but in general, you really want to make expectations clear.
As I said, set expectations. So when you think about your workflows, as I mentioned earlier, you want to think about what platforms you support on your campus. Will your authors draft their content in Word, with LaTeX, with Pressbooks, LibreTexts or another platform? Will they draft one place and import it somewhere else? Should they prepare a sample chapter for your review? I highly recommend that, especially if they're preparing content for ingest into another platform, because that way you can catch early on if they're doing something incorrectly. For example, you can say, ooh, when you have their headings like this where it's H2 and then H5, not going to work really well, here's what that means and why it works this way. And think about as you're developing this workflow, who is responsible for reviewing for accessibility, formatting the final work and cover art design or other pieces like that that might be extra?
A lot of the time, you want to make sure if you have a whole publishing program that cover art specifically is consistent and isn't coming from the authors because they don't necessarily have experience in that. And it can be best to have someone who can set a clear template for ongoing work. It can be very simple, just a big image, a block of color, your logo and the title. I recommend checking out the Oregon State University covers, for example, as a good basic example. But there are a lot of different ways it can come out. So expectations, we talk about expectations for platforms, expectations for the authors, who's doing what. But generally your guidelines you set should be things you're expecting from all the authors you're working with to prevent scope creep.
And for those who don't know, scope creep is when as you're working on something, what you're responsible for starts getting taken over by additional expectations. "Oh, well, you said that you might be able to help with this, so why don't you do that too?" "Well, I don't really know how to do this, so why don't you help with that and explain it to me?" Even just training someone on a process as you go down the line might add on to the scope of the work that you're expected to handle in a publishing process. Now when you're working with authors, in addition to that initial planning meeting, you'll also want to set up communication throughout their project. It does not have to be weekly. It should not be weekly, but find the best mode of communication for you and how often check-in should happen, whether it's monthly, bimonthly, or over specific set of time.
For example, you might check in at the end of every academic semester or quarter, depends on your institution.
Another important question is what's the best mode of communication for you and what do you use on your campus? Do you use phone, email? Do you meet in person? Do you use Slack, Teams or something else? A project management tool like Trello or Jiro? Really think about what you have access to and what makes sense for the way that you're communicating with your authors.
If you're communicating with your authors as someone who is just developing content for publication, maybe a quick email or phone call is all you need. But if you're talking to them as someone who is developing a proof of concept, for a first chapter, for a larger publication, then maybe you do want to check in with them in person to just see how things are going or to work through something like a Teams call for them and other members of their team if they have, for example, five different authors working on the material with them. Thinking about how many people are part of the project will really change the expectations of how you're working with someone with their OER.
All right. So tips for ambitious authors. This is a hard one. Okay. We talked a little bit earlier about people that like to do work slowly, that they're not really in a hurry, they just want to get stuff done eventually. But there are also people who think big who say, "Actually, I wanted to just do one book, but now I think this is three books, so I'm only going to do the first part in the first publication, and then I'll make two more books." OER projects can grow and change over time, but it's important that when you're talking to authors who are excited about doing more and more and more, you reinforce what you worked on in the beginning. What was that planning meeting about? What were the expectations you hit?
A resource that isn't published as I say here, isn't doing anyone any good. So if someone says, "I'll get that out later, but I really want to add more H5P exercises. I really want to add better images. I want to go get a 3D scan of the entire area we're talking about." You do not need to do that. We can get something out now and develop updates over time, or we can get out a portion of it now and finish the rest later. When you're talking to an author who's suddenly decided that they want to do something entirely different, it's best to go back to early planning notes also and ground them in that discussion. "Hey, you said that you needed this for your students in this class for this specific purpose. I know you're excited about all these other possibilities of what we can do, but maybe let's get this bit done now and then we can look into those updates down the line."
So what is my process now after looking back on all those other examples? As I said, I've worked with a lot of different people and different expectations and some of my processes have been quite bad, but nowadays, we have a fairly new process for working with authors that I think has helped us have a more reasonable expectation for how we work with them and get their publications out the door. So first we have that meeting about their project, the scope, the timeline, and the needs. We discuss the capability of our tools, specifically Pressbooks. "Hey, you can add text boxes, you can add videos. Here's things that you can implement." We train authors on accessibility, formatting, and share content from our campus partners who can offer additional support. That way we're not having to come back later and say, "You got this completely wrong," hopefully.
We share our formatting guidelines and instructions on sharing image files. So rather than having people draft content directly in Pressbooks, we say, "Hey, draft the materials using basic accessibility features, headings, alt text, other materials like that." And then say, "Here's where something should be in a text box," or "Here's where an image should go and send us those files separately." That way we can import the materials ourselves. And if they have peer review requested, reviews are completed with those Word files prior to importing the material to allow for easier editing.
The formatting, importing and publication work is handled by our team. That way we don't have to worry about again, going in and having to make changes later down the line if the author does something wrong in the importing process or if something breaks. If we're doing it, we know we're doing it the correct way. Now that does add a lot onto our process. It might seem like actually you're doing a lot of work, aren't you? But in the long run, doing a little bit of extra work at the end means I'm not having to do a lot of work over time coming back to authors explaining things, giving them the process, training them on importing, coming back and fixing the imports when they're broken. That little bit at the end is actually not too bad in the long run.
Now, you might also be thinking about, okay, so I have an expectation. I know what I'm doing, but what about the roadblocks that you don't expect? There's always going to be something that goes wrong even if you do everything right from the beginning. This might include communication issues with authors or collaborators. "Oh, you didn't actually talk to us about this." "The accessibility office is busy this week, so we can't review your materials." Schedule changes might happen, whether they're teaching two classes this semester when they weren't supposed to teach any, or things just happen on our end where we suddenly have five books working down the timeline at the same time. Maybe grant payouts are stalled, and so authors can't even get started on their work because they can't pay a TA to help them with their development or review process.
Sometimes personal emergencies happen to you or to them, and staffing changes can also really affect the publication timeline, especially if it's someone on your publishing team. So these all happen, it's okay. It's important to remember that the issues you encounter in the publishing process are not all going to be personal or expected or things that you can account for. Sometimes they just happen, and understanding that and being prepared for it is useful, but you're not going to be prepared for everything. So think about ways you can navigate roadblocks when they do occur. You can evaluate and edit your schedule as necessary. Be ready to be flexible. Refer back to earlier discussions again about setting expectations. "I know you wanted to do this differently, but we need to get this done on time."
Reflect on what you can finish now or work on later and be transparent about where issues are arising and how long it might take. For example, you might say, "Hey, I want you to know I did see your email that you have chapters three, four, and five ready for import, but right now we have three other books that are finishing up that need to be done for the summer semester. So we have to give those priority." Just letting an author know that there's work being done, that you recognize that they're talking to you and that you're not forgetting them can be a good way to help keep up communication lines, to help keep up that relationship without, again, infringing on that question of are you being too familiar? Are you letting those guidelines break down?
And if you encounter a roadblock that really shouldn't have been there, that's a problem on your end because of communication issues or missed expectations, you can take notes on how you can avoid that same problem in the future. In general, it's best to just remember we can't account for everything. Sometimes things just happen.
But if you feel like you're stuck, you can ask a couple of questions as well. So first, are you the one who's stuck or is the author the one who's stuck? And based on that answer, you can figure out who you need to talk to. Make sure you're in agreement on how to proceed before you get started on something. So if the author says, "Oh, I really want to fix this." Don't just fix it the way that you think you should, ask them what they think fixing means so you're not doing something the author doesn't want.
And remember, if you set a bad example early on, a bad example in this case meaning, "Ooh, I did something that I shouldn't have, and now they expect me to keep doing it." You can always enforce boundaries again as a new workflow or a new change in your process. So say, "Oh, I know that you saw before that I was handling the copy editing process for your chapter. We've decided as a publishing unit that we are not going to do this anymore and instead we're going to refer you to the English department's copy editing team," blah, blah, blah, whatever the case may be. In general, avoid setting those expectations. But sometimes you can't help what you've done in the past.
So reflecting and moving on. There are a lot of different things you can do after a project goes bad, very badly. You might think, okay, well, I'm going to set new standards and expectations for my work. Like I just said, we're going to say, "We don't do this anymore. These are our expectations." You could maybe take a step back, say, "We're not going to publish anything for the next year. That was just a bad time. I need to take a break." Or you might just refuse to work with a particular author in the future because that wasn't your fault, that was just a bad time. But as you think through, how you can handle these issues, you should think about your standards, what do you want out of your publications and the needs of the authors, or the standards that your authors have and the needs of you as a person who is doing this work with them.
Now, your standards might mean, "Hey, I want to help make this material look good, but my author's not a graphic designer so I'm going to help with that." Or your standards might be, "Well, I want to get this book out and our author wants to make it really great. We need to talk about how we can meet in the middle and make it as good as it can be." But in general, as we like to say, perfect is the enemy of good. And sometimes you just need to say, "Well, this is good enough. We're going to get it out there and publish this thing." And if it's not great right now, that's what second editions are for. That's what updates are for. And because it's an OER, that's what adaptation is for, making something better through other means to meet your different communities needs.
We say this a lot throughout the Pub101 curriculum. I'm sure you've seen it a lot of times, but self-care is really a part of the publishing process and really any services you offer in a university environment. Sometimes when you're thinking about what support you offer, you can say, "Well, maybe I want to offer the support, but I don't want to give it myself. I do not have time for this right now. I do not have time for this at all. This is not in my job description so we're not going to do this." No one is entitled to your labor, especially if it's not in your job description. And when you can leverage support that's available across your campus system or state, there might be services available you don't even know about that you can get in touch with for help.
Okay, that was a lot of very little distributed tips, ideas, examples. So I want to chat with you about what your processes and practices have been like. Have you published any materials before? What's the process been like for you? And what roadblocks have you gotten snagged on in the process? I'm going to stop sharing because we don't need the rest of that.
Amanda: Thank you, Abbey. That was fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing those recommendations and tips and tricks with us. Before we transition to questions and chatting, I am going to point people to our Padlet activity. There's my mouse, and I'm going to drop the link specifically for the Padlet. Oh, that doesn't look right. That looked like my consultation link. Let's try getting the Padlet link. Copy link address, yes, please.
Abbey: Having copy issues?
Amanda: Always. As much as I don't mind anyone using my consultation link, that's not particularly helpful in this context right now. If you've never used Padlet before, it is pretty easy. Once you click that link, there is a plus sign next to today's session or at the very bottom of the page and it will open a sticky for you to write on. You add your comment, and then click publish to share it with us. So this week we're thinking about what would you want your authors to know about working with you? And feel free to take some time and do that really quick, or you can do it as we're facilitating these questions and chatting. And I'm going to spare some time for Karen at the very end of the session for us to remind you about some links again.
I had a question, Abbey, to get us started. You said you added the vibe check slide this year. And so I was wondering, do you have an example of where you made a decision based on vibes that didn't work out that you could share with us? I know I've made lots of those bad decisions myself.
Abbey: Actually, no. I think more than that, I was just realizing there are times when I might in the future accidentally do something where I feel bad about it. So in the past it's mostly been, oh, I just give people the benefit of the doubt across the board and offer extra things. But I realized now that we're setting more expectations and roadblocks in place and saying, "Hey, here's where we're not going to do this." If I continue to make concessions for some authors, either because of prior experiences with them or because they seem nice, then that could lead into very obvious breaches of, am I actually not being inclusive for my authors? Am I not taking their needs into account? Am I just doing this because of some other biases that I have? So I wanted to hedge that off early before it became a problem.
Amanda: That's excellent. We had a situation here at Ohio State where we had worked with one particular author several times and she always is difficult. And so we ignored the vibe there of maybe we should go our separate ways. And this year when she applied for a syllabus review grant, we were like, "You know what? You've had a couple grants. We're not going to work with you this time." We have to let other people get an option to do this work. But it took us a long time to get the vibe check to where we were like, "We should do something about that rather than just struggle."
Abbey: Yeah, we have blacklisted someone before due to just bad experiences with them saying, "Oh, well, you should change this for me. You should put this here. Oh, I know we said we already published this, but we need to make edits now." Or, "Actually, can I take this to a commercial publisher? They said they'd offer me money for it after it was published." So that's happened before. But what I'm more concerned about is potentially not giving someone support because of whatever biases I might have built in that I'm not aware of. I don't want to say, "Ooh, you remind me of this author I had a bad experience with, so I'm not going to offer you the support," even if that's not going to be the case. Questions, experiences, who wants to share? It can be positive sharing too. If you've done something with your publishing that you say, "I'm really proud that we made this change," I would love to hear it.
Evangeline Reid: I guess I'll share from a different perspective. We don't have an existing publishing set up at my university, but we have applied for a state grant that we are hopeful we will get. And so we're putting the pieces in place to make that happen. And it's interesting because I'm coming to this as an instructional librarian who this is an additional role that I'm taking on, and I'm very aware of how difficult it can be to communicate with faculty in that relationship because I find that they're often unresponsive or they respond to only what is important to them and not what I need from them. And so I'm going into this very cognizant of that and also things that people have written about ad nauseam about the power dynamic or the relationship dynamic between faculty and librarians, maybe not always being the way we might want it to be. And so I guess I'm just reflecting on the context that I'm existing in it with instruction in relation to this. And I guess I was wondering if anyone here could speak to that relational dynamic in the context of publishing. Is there anything unique to that that you might be able to add on to?
Abbey: I'll wait and see if anyone else has a comment first. But I'm happy to jump in if you don't. Okay, I'll start and then if anyone else has comments, feel free to put them in the chat or hop in. In general, even if you do have an official, I can say, "Oh, our digital press offers these services." I am not in the digital press. I am a librarian. And they might not take it seriously because it's not a university press, it's a library publishing outfit. So even with an actual publishing program, there are places where a faculty member, an author might say, I don't really take this seriously. Issues, for example, where they'll say, "Here's a manuscript, can you put it up?" Seeing it as a posting process rather than a publishing process. "Oh, you just put it up on the internet, right? And then it's published, whatever you call that." And then you say, "No, there's peer review. There are other checks and balances we need to go through, sir, ma'am." So it can be really hard to get past those expectations.
I think it helps, especially you have a grant coming in potentially, hoping for you, but it can help to say there are certain expectations we need to meet. There are things that we need to account for in reporting. There are things we need to account for in our process to give back to someone else who's in charge. So I can say, "Hey, for this material that we're giving you a grant for, then we need to report back to our provost and say how it came out by this time. So I need to have some sort of outcome from you, and I need to be able to say that this is how it went, and I need you to give me these specific details." For you it might be, "We got a grant to develop these publishing supports, so in order for us to meet our expectations, I need you to."
Even if it's just worded that way, in order for us to meet these expectations, that can help set up the exclamation points over their head so they say, "Oh, this is important. This is a grant reporting thing. I'm used to that." So talking as if you're not just coming in as librarian but as a grant manager, as a publisher can help broach those expectations and the experiences that you're used to running into. But I can relate. Have others have anything they'd like to share or ask about or complain about? That's fine too.
Micah Gjeltema: This is Micah Gjeltema from Minnesota. I think just to echo, I think a lot of the things that you've been saying, Abbey, I am very fortunate that my position is very open education focused and a lot of it is just trying to get the projects. And I'm often just so grateful that somebody would approach us with something or talk to me at all that it is sometimes hard to do those boundaries, and it is hard to have that plan at the beginning and be very upfront about how much work it's going to take. Otherwise, I might put them off and things like that. So even your recent session at the Library Publishing Forum, I was just thinking about that peer review element of before you even accept a project, asking authors to provide peer reviews where we'd struggled with that so much and that hadn't occurred to us where I think sometimes not enough occurs to us to ask for initially.
That ends up being a real problem at the end, and that ends up making people disappointed with us, I think. And it's not the magical hands-free automatic experience that they expected. And sometimes maybe they won't come back. And so I think there is something to be said too for that strength of boundary and scope. In the beginning it might turn off some projects, but not establishing those things and having a lackluster relationship I think also can turn off people for future publishing elements. And so yeah, this has all been very helpful for me to just hear from you again and just to be a little bit stronger and be more confident in our asks upfront because we are the ones providing a service.
Abbey: Absolutely. I think it's hard with these conversations to say no to things when you're just so happy someone's coming to you and willing to work with you. I recently did an audit of how many projects we're currently helping publish through our press. We have 20. We have 20 that we're in the middle of right now, which I think helped put into perspective, "Ooh, we need to have some more expectations put in place at this moment." But yeah, I think it can be hard to say no to something if it's a good project, if it's a good idea, even if you can say, "Well, we are very busy right now, but I love this. I want this to happen. And I know it might not if we hold you back another year." Absolutely. So learn from my mistakes. Say no when you have 10 plus projects in the pipeline.
Amanda: Start small. Don't start with 10 projects in the pipeline. Start with one to three and then scaffold up from there. And you can test the waters of what you as one person oftentimes can support. It gets different once you can have extra hands doing the work. But even then, you have to think then about everybody's individual bucket of capacity. But yeah, 20 is a lot, Abbey.
Abbey: I will say to counter the, oh, it's a shame when someone gets excited about working with you and then they're disappointed. In the opposite vein, I like to start off communications by first saying, what do you expect this to be and what can we really do? Because maybe that person would be disappointed if they came in thinking, "I'm going to do specifically these sorts of things that I want to do." But then if they find out other things you can do, they're even more excited. So again, we're going to go back to the horrible, "I'm making a VR experience," where they think, "I need to buy all this equipment. I need to buy a 3D scanner. I need to buy goggles. I want to build a whole room in our department to account for making these cool interactive materials." And I say, "Okay, that's wonderful, but do you need that for your students or would it be more useful for them to have some images from different directions that they can look at in a general model that we can build in H5P?" It's built into our systems. You don't have to pay extra for it. You don't have to use your grant funds on it. You can hire a TA to help compile those materials and images and help you pull this together. You have limited funds and time. Let's think about how you can use those smart by leveraging the tools we already have. And by just reigning that in a little bit and saying, "Actually, here's some cool things we can do. It's not what you're thinking, but it might work really well." And sharing some examples of other OER that have done similar things. People will be more excited and also more reasonable in their expectations.
Amanda: I'd also just like to reiterate that it's also not the end of the world if you have to say no to something and say not right now. That's one thing that's really nice. Once you've set your program up, if you have a grant cycle and you can say, "Oh, your project sounds really great, but we only accept projects in the fall, here's when the call will come out. I'm more than happy to put you on our mailing list so that you get first access to that. I would love to encourage you to apply, but our publishing schedule works this way."
Abbey: And if you don't have funds, I know a lot of you don't have money at all, it doesn't have to be there's a grant process. It can also just be there's a call for publications. So you have a specific timeline when you take on new projects that you can enforce as, "Hey, this is when we're starting up new things. If you missed it, please feel free to talk to us about your project. We can meet over the summer and talk about what you want to do so you're ready to submit a proposal that's good in the fall, but you don't have to start it right now. We don't have time to accommodate that right now. Let's come back to it later." It doesn't have to be tied to money. If you don't have money, that's okay.
Amanda: That's very true, and I will tell you that in my first grant program, the money hardly mattered to the instructors that we were working with. We had lots of really engaged folks who just wanted to make course materials for their students.
Abbey: I have some people who haven't used their money and I said, "It went away last year." And they said, "Oh, I just forgot. I've been doing other things." But yeah, sometimes they just get the grant so they can put, "I got a grant on my CV." The actual amount is less of interest, which is a shame because other people really need the money. That's a toss up. Okay, we've got five minutes. Does anyone have final questions, comments, things they'd like to share with the group?
Amanda: While you're thinking about those final questions, I'm going to go ahead and put the links that Karen shared earlier in the chat again. Want to invite you to OEN Engage! this summer, and the other is for the Pub101 facilitated experience survey. We would love to get your feedback so that we could make this better.
Abbey: All right. Well, thank you everyone for your time. I will say also my final tip. If you've realized that you've put a lot of time into helping someone with their project, feel free to assert that you should be listed as a collaborator or even a co-author on that material because sometimes you really deserve it and you might as well ask. All right. Thank you everyone.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:18:18 Karen Lauritsen: https://z.umn.edu/OENEngage24
00:18:33 Karen Lauritsen: Pub101 Feedback, please and thank you: https://z.umn.edu/pub101-2024
00:19:56 Amanda Larson: https://linktr.ee/pub101
00:22:40 Amanda Larson: yay!
00:41:31 Amanda Larson: The covers Abbey mentioned: https://open.oregonstate.education/
00:41:37 Karen Lauritsen: Here are the Open Oregon cover examples Abbey just mentioned: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173/pages/publishing-imprints
00:41:58 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "The covers Abbey men..." with 😀
00:42:28 Amanda Larson: Reacted to "Here are the Open Or..." with ⭐
00:43:25 Amanda Larson: Yes do the first part, not all three at the same time. 🙂
00:53:35 Sarah Clinton-McCausland: just wanted to say that this was SO helpful -- thank you so much!
00:54:14 Abbey Elder: Reacted to "just wanted to say t..." with 👍🏻
00:54:23 Amanda Larson: https://padlet.com/alarsonoer/pub101-z1d7xlq5amzizljf
00:54:40 Sara Davidson Squibb: I feel like there is a clear theme around scope, boundaries, and communication in these sessions!!
00:54:47 Sarah Clinton-McCausland: Reacted to "I feel like there is..." with 💯
00:55:23 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "I feel like there is..." with 💯
01:02:47 Evangeline Reid: Thank you
01:05:25 Sarah Clinton-McCausland: Yes, it's hardest to say no to things that are genuinely exciting!
01:10:33 Amanda Larson: https://z.umn.edu/OENEngage24 https://z.umn.edu/pub101-2024
01:10:59 Margaret McGuire: thank you!
01:11:11 Kestrel Ward (they/them): Thank you, this was great!
01:11:21 Micah Gjeltema: Thanks!
00:18:33 Karen Lauritsen: Pub101 Feedback, please and thank you: https://z.umn.edu/pub101-2024
00:19:56 Amanda Larson: https://linktr.ee/pub101
00:22:40 Amanda Larson: yay!
00:41:31 Amanda Larson: The covers Abbey mentioned: https://open.oregonstate.education/
00:41:37 Karen Lauritsen: Here are the Open Oregon cover examples Abbey just mentioned: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173/pages/publishing-imprints
00:41:58 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "The covers Abbey men..." with 😀
00:42:28 Amanda Larson: Reacted to "Here are the Open Or..." with ⭐
00:43:25 Amanda Larson: Yes do the first part, not all three at the same time. 🙂
00:53:35 Sarah Clinton-McCausland: just wanted to say that this was SO helpful -- thank you so much!
00:54:14 Abbey Elder: Reacted to "just wanted to say t..." with 👍🏻
00:54:23 Amanda Larson: https://padlet.com/alarsonoer/pub101-z1d7xlq5amzizljf
00:54:40 Sara Davidson Squibb: I feel like there is a clear theme around scope, boundaries, and communication in these sessions!!
00:54:47 Sarah Clinton-McCausland: Reacted to "I feel like there is..." with 💯
00:55:23 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "I feel like there is..." with 💯
01:02:47 Evangeline Reid: Thank you
01:05:25 Sarah Clinton-McCausland: Yes, it's hardest to say no to things that are genuinely exciting!
01:10:33 Amanda Larson: https://z.umn.edu/OENEngage24 https://z.umn.edu/pub101-2024
01:10:59 Margaret McGuire: thank you!
01:11:11 Kestrel Ward (they/them): Thank you, this was great!
01:11:21 Micah Gjeltema: Thanks!
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