8.13 Making Your OER Discoverable

Now that you are reaping the fruits of your OER, you will want other folks to be able to easily find and adopt your OER for their teaching. Depositing your open textbook is a nearly effortless way to store and promote your OER as well as quantify and qualify the scholarly impact of your OER work for promotion and tenure.

For your third year deliverable you will be asked your preferences for depositing your OER. Let’s briefly discuss your options so you can make an informed decision of where to plant your OER.

Institutional Repositories

As you likely know, your institutional repository (IR) houses the research and scholarship of faculty, staff, and students. Depositing in an IR will benefit you in the following ways:

• Your OER will be indexed and discoverable by major search engines.
• Your OER will have additional credibility as a scholarly publication supported by and associated with an academic institution.
• You will be able to permanently archive multiple versions of your OER, allowing you to be transparent about versions of your OER. This can be particularly useful because Pressbooks does not store editions.
• The IR will track such usage statistics as download counts, geographic analytics, altmetrics badges. In other words, you will be able to quantify how and where your OER is being used from downloads to social media posts.

For OERFSJ, we will deposit your OER in LMU’s IR, Digital Commons as part of an OERFSJ collection. But SCU, SMCC, and USF each have their own IR where your OER can be stored.

OER Directories

There are a number of OER-focused directories where you can broaden the discoverability of your OER. Many have their own review systems to further quantify and qualify your OER’s impact. Here is a short list of some of the OER directories.

• Pressbooks Directory is the easiest way to put your OER on the map. Plus, Pressbooks Directory is one of the first places OER advocates check for materials to adopt. For these reasons, we recommend putting your OER in the Pressbooks Directory.
  • To place your OER in the directory, select Sharing and Privacy under the Settings in the left menu in Pressbooks. Scroll to the bottom and check the option to place your open textbook in the directory.
• MERLOT offers a peer review process, user ratings, and an award system to recognize the quality of your work.
• OER Commons, operating under the umbrella of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), curates their collection through a standards-based review process as well as a transparent user-rating system of accepted materials.
• Open Textbook Library (OTL) encourages OER creation by focusing on original, not remixed, OER produced at colleges and universities belonging to its parent organization, the Open Education Network (OEN). You would be eligible to submit your OER to OTL through LMU’s membership in the organization.
  

  Show Off Your OER

  Now that you are familiar with your choices, return to your year three deliverable and select where you would like to deposit your OER. Keep in mind, aside from the IR and the Pressbooks Directory, each directory or repository has its own review policies, making your acceptance to their collection a beautiful bloom for your promotion and tenure dossier.