The Open Educational Resources Collective (OER Collective) is a capacity- and capability-building service designed to enable university libraries in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand to start or scale up open textbook publishing. The service model is built around community and collaboration, with the intention of harnessing the collective experience across CAUL Member institutions to accelerate the adoption of open textbook publishing and use in the region.
The Collective is not just a platform for publishing – although it does provide one.
It provides the administrative infrastructure, training, community spaces, guides and resources that university libraries need to establish, grow and support open textbook publishing programs. The Collective facilitates community and collaboration across institutions for both library staff and authors. And importantly, it supports the production of open textbooks by providing funding to support authors in developing open textbooks through a grant program that has awarded more than $93,000 in grants in its three years of operation.
The platform
We provide a publishing platform for Australian and New Zealand open textbooks. The shared Pressbooks platform allows institutions to try out open textbook publishing without committing to a platform and without the administrative overhead of managing one. It’s also where OER Collective grant-funded books are published. On our Pressbooks platform, participating institutions are building an open textbook catalogue of titles written specifically for the Australian and New Zealand contexts.