Publishing open educational resources

Open Educational Resources are resources that are available openly and free of charge. They give lecturers and education support officers the opportunity to use and build upon each other’s work.

Utrecht University Library supports lecturers who want to publish self-created open educational resources. To this end, Utrecht University has a license on edusources, SURF’s national platform offering open educational resources to educational institutions.

Edusources and SURFsharekit

Publishing educational resources in edusources is done via the SURFsharekit, an online depot, also containing educational resources. After material has been uploaded in the SURFsharekit, it can be shared through edusources. SURF has several user manuals on how to upload and publish educational resources.

Preconditions

To safeguard the quality of the shared educational resources the library has laid down four preconditions. The educational resources:

• are published under an open license.
• observe the copyright of others.
• are provided with correctly filled in metadata fields (in the SURFsharekit).
• do not contain (sensitive) personal details.

More guidelines regarding didactics and form can be found in the Quality Model Open Educational Resources.

The library offers support on these topics. Do you want our advice on the options of open educational resources or do you encounter some issues? Please contact the library.

Publishing open textbooks

An open textbook allows you to create your own book that seamlessly links up with your teaching. Open textbooks are continuously adaptable, which keeps the content of the book up to date. Multimedia or interactive elements bring the text to life for readers. Besides writing your own book, you can also adapt existing books to better suit your teaching (provided the book's licence allows it). Open textbooks are also available to students free of charge.

The university library supports the creation and publication of open textbooks with Quarto. Quarto is an open-source publishing system that allows you to create open, interactive textbooks. Open textbooks created with Quarto are hosted via GitHub on the University Library Github Repository. View an example open textbook using Quarto here.

Quarto

Quarto is a publishing platform that can be integrated into multiple programmes. It can be used in combination with RStudio, VS Code, Jupyter, Neovim and Editor. With Quarto, it is possible to publish open textbooks in multiple formats (ePub, PDF, HTML, MSWord) that can be modified at any time.

Possibilities with Quarto:

•  A simple interface to format your open textbook for people not familiar with R, Python or Julia.
• DOI generation per open textbook. - Add images, video and audio files to your open textbook.
• Interactivity by integrating applications into your open textbook.
• Version control: update your open textbook whenever you want, but also keep older versions available.
• Ability to add more complex things (interactivity, plots, data files) directly from RStudio or Jupyter. This requires some knowledge of the relevant coding language.
• Your open textbook can be managed by the University Library. It will then appear in our Github Repository.

Check out this open textbook for more possibilities with Quarto.

The University Library is currently exploring the possibilities of supporting open textbooks with Pressbooks. If you would like to know more about this, please contact us.

Contact

Would you like to discuss your plans or the possibilities regarding an open textbook? Or have you already written an open textbook and would you like to showcase it? Utrecht University Library can help you get started. Contact library.learning@uu.nl