After doing our research on the publishers that worked with open books, we got an idea of what we were aiming to have in our textbook and how we wanted it to be. To become more accessible and achieve wider public, we agreed that the textbook should be published in at least three main formats: HTML, EPUB and PDF.  Lorna provided us with references of popular open books editors to study them and decide which of them would work best for our content necessities. The main platforms that we have been studying are GitHub, Manifold and Pressbooks. Additionally, the University Open Press Service offered us a short workshop to show the team how will this new platform work and what we could create with it.  

The University of Edinburgh Open Press service is a very new platform designed by the university to host open journals and, right now, it is developing to host open books in the near future. At the moment, the service hosts around 20 open journals. It seems like a great way to publish our book as we already have access to it, and the team of Open Press service would be able to help with all the licensing, policies and indexing processes. However, it is still in its final stage of development, meaning that we will be assessing the platform with the Open Press service to see if there are any practical issues. In addition, it will work just as a publisher of the PDF file version that we already would have created, which means, that if we want to offer various formats of the book, we will need to create them ourselves using other tools.  

Here is an example of the journals that are already published using this service: https://playground.journals.ed.ac.uk/antiquaries   

This post was written collaboratively by our Open Textbook Interns, Ana Reina Garcia, Ifeanyichukwu Ezinmadu, and Kari Ding.

Open Book Platforms Research: UoE Open Press Service / Open e-Textbooks for Access to Music Education by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0