MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

PublishOER

Investigating new business models for including published works in OER

The PublishOER project, led by MEDEV, Newcastle University, seeks to develop new ways of complementing the OER resource collections with high quality published content by investigating new business models for embedding published works in open educational resources.

Partners:

• Elsevier publish 2,000 journals and 20,000 books  - many of them text books.

• JISC collections have expertise in negotiating national licence agreements.

• Rightscom have links to all publishers and they have expertise in trading and protection of intellectual property rights and digital content.  They recently undertook research on how to create an automated 21st century rights environment for digital resources.

• The Royal Veterinary College will provide an opportunity to conduct a needs-assessment of both academic and student OER users. Work will be coordinated within the RVC (and also Nottingham vet school) by ‘student researchers’ employed on a retainer basis to organise focus groups, liaise with academics, promote specific resources to target audiences and feedback to the project. This feedback and the evaluation of the work will inform investigations in other subject areas.

The project team will survey stakeholders in the context of advancing academic publishing in challenging times (responding to changes in UK further and higher education); test models of working through a significant case study in veterinary medicine; and explore the potential for mutually beneficial national licence agreements. We will investigate alternative, flexible ways of raising income while supplementing existing resources with weblogs, reviews, comments and ratings from users, and ways of incorporating published works into OER, ensuring staff and students are operating within best practice, accrediting, attributing and paying (when necessary) for using commercially published material in sharable resources.

This project has the potential to build the foundations for a new mixed economy incorporating published works in which learners and teachers will benefit from a broader range of high-quality resources, tested in the veterinary sector, ensuring better currency of information in OER and increased personal choice.

Aims and objectives:

The PublishOER collaboration will investigate new publishing models by identifying and testing possible business prototypes for embedding third party rights in OER and documenting those approaches providing maximum benefits to all parties. It will:

• Build on existing expertise and current thinking in rights management and embedding published works in OER and recommend ways forward for the sector (next steps);
• Explore and document new business models to enable sustainable release of OER by conceptualising, planning, piloting and testing different approaches to embedding third party rights;
• Test the approaches in reality or hypothetically with staff and students who generate/use OER;
• Explore discovery of and payment for published works embedded in OER in support of new business models especially in the context of veterinary medicine;
• ‘Release and collect’ (make discoverable) and enhance a significant amount of OER;
• Consider how web 2.0 rating systems positively/negatively impact on OER with embedded rights.

The project proposal is available to download in .doc and .pdf formats.

For further information, please contact g...@medev.ac.uk

OER phase 3 blog