The JCU Library Open Education team (OE team) provides assistance for the publication of open educational resources for our JCU students and the broader community.  The JCU Open Educational Resources Program is a library-led initiative that provides support for authors in addition to advocacy for open education and open practice.

Underpinned by the Pressbooks publishing platform, the JCU Open Educational Resources Program offers an alternative to traditional publishing, resulting in professional-looking publications, openly available for others to read and reuse. Please refer to our JCU Open eBooks catalogue to see examples from past publications.

The OE team provides assistance across all points of the publishing workflow, subject to availability and following conditions set out in the JCU OER Author Agreement.

Training and Consultations

We provide training and consultations to prepare you to produce an open educational resource (OER). This may include:

• understanding copyright and Creative Commons
• finding and adapting open educational resources
• using our publishing platform, Pressbooks.

Copyright Support and Clearance

We will review the manuscript for potential copyright issues and provide guidance on how to apply for permissions as necessary. We may also suggest openly licenced alternatives. The authors are responsible for any associated copyright fees.

The OE team can advise on the appropriate Creative Commons licence for your work.

Editorial Support

The OE team can provide authors with guidelines on editorial standards, including style templates, and advice on aligning content to the formatting on the Pressbooks platform. However, the OE team does not offer copy editing or proofreading services.

Formatting and Design Support

The OE team will provide support for the Pressbooks platform, including:

• designing sample chapter/s and providing design support
• plugins, such as H5P and TablePress
• book cover guidance
• accessibility and usability guidelines and testing.

Post-Publication Support

We also provide post-publication support, including:

• metadata and search engine optimisation support
• depositing your text into national and international repositories, including:
  • JCU’s Library catalogue
  • JCU Library Open eBook collection
  • Pressbooks Directory
  • The National edeposit (NED) service, maintained by the National and State Libraries Australasia.
• providing authors with publication analytics
• promotional support, including distribution in the Australasian Open Educational Practice Special Interest Group Digest (OEPSIG)
• archiving
• training on how you can update and maintain your text.

Chapter Attribution

This chapter has been adapted in parts from:

Open Publishing Guide for Authors by University of Southern Queensland. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.