New OEN Member Benefit: Manifold Access

The Open Education Network (OEN) now offers community members access to its Manifold instance as a membership benefit. Manifold is a publishing workflow collaboratively developed by the CUNY Graduate Center, University of Minnesota Press, and Cast Iron Coding. It is commonly used to support the creation and publishing of open educational resources (OER). 

This new benefit is in response to the community’s interest in using Manifold, and the OEN’s goal to provide infrastructure and support to people who want to publish. 

In early 2022, the OEN launched an initial two-year Manifold Pilot after being selected for a Manifold Digital Service Support Award. We then invited the community to explore the platform and leverage it in developing a variety of open education publishing projects.

Terence Smyre, Manifold digital projects editor at the University of Minnesota Press, and Robin Miller, open educational technology specialist at City University of New York, provided virtual training and plenty of encouragement. 

“We wanted to see if Manifold could meet a community need,” said Karen Lauritsen, who wrote the application for the Manifold Digital Service Support Award, and is OEN’s senior director of publishing. “There are many pathways for creating and publishing OER, and we want to support as many as we can.” 

Now, the OEN welcomes institutional and consortial members to enjoy Manifold as a membership benefit at no additional cost. 

In January 2024, the OEN expanded access beyond its original pilot group to include all community members for an additional year. This extended pilot period enabled the OEN to gather additional information about whether the community found the tool useful for their openly licensed publishing projects and practices. 

It did not take a year for the community to signal their interest in using Manifold! By July they had published more than 20 projects using the OEN instance, exceeding the pilot’s goals. For one librarian, it provided the infrastructure she needed for launching an OER publishing program.

“When the Open Education Network announced the pilot, I was really excited about it because prior to this we had no OER authoring platform,” said Anne Marie Gruber, liaison & textbook equity librarian, University of Northern Iowa. Since the pilot program launched, Anne Marie has collaborated with several faculty to publish six resources, which you can browse in the University of Northern Iowa collection. More are in the works.

“Going into the pilot I knew that the OEN and the open community are great,” said Anne Marie. “I really wanted to have that opportunity, as essentially a one-person OER operation, to be able to make some deeper connections with folks doing similar work at other institutions.”

The OEN will organize members’ Manifold publications into collections so that members can showcase their open publishing projects with one landing page. For example, Eastern Kentucky University has published two projects during the pilot, which are visible in their collection. For a complete look at all of the OEN community’s published projects, you can browse all projects.  

“It is so exciting to see what people create when they have access to the tools they need,” said Karen. “I am amazed by what our community has accomplished in a relatively short amount of time.”

Go to OEN Manifold Community for helpful information and FAQs. Learn more about how the OEN supports open publishing through infrastructure, professional development and community. Contact Karen with questions about Manifold or other OEN publishing resources.