The Rebus Community is an effort to build a collaborative model for open textbook publishing. As of January, 2017 we are working on a dozen Open Textbook projects, with faculty and staff from more than 30 institutions. We'll talk about where we're at, what we've learned, where we're going and how to get involved.
At the Rebus Community, we are building a community-driven, open textbook publishing process, and a global community of collaborators on Open Textbook creation, supported, where appropriate, with technology.
The Rebus Community was founded in August 2016 to address the following problems:
1. there is no standardized, cost-effective way to publish Open Textbooks
2. institutions or academics wishing to publish Open Textbooks must figure out how to do it themselves
3. there is no central community of Open Textbook creators, to enable sharing of knowhow and processes
4. there is no standard (web-based or otherwise) format for Open Textbooks to enable the kind of remixing open licenses are meant to afford.
Seven months in, we are working with 31 faculty, 17 librarians, 22 other collaborators from 51 institutions working on 12 open textbook projects. This work is feeding into development and enhancement of software to address pain points in Open Textbooks publishing.
We'll talk about what we've learned so far as we've begun to build a collaborative ecosystem around the process of creating open textbooks, what's next and how to get involved in the Rebus Community.