Making Your OER Discoverable

Now that you are at the pinnacle of your OER creation process, you will want other folks to be able to easily find and adopt your OER for their teaching. Think of it as planting your flag on a mountain top.

Depositing your open textbook in repositories and directories is a nearly effortless and free way to store and promote your OER. If you are unfamiliar with repositories and directories, you can think of them as specialized databases that make stuff discoverable on the web. In other words, it will make it easier for users to find your OER through Google and other searches. As a bonus, many institutional repositories and specialized OER directories also offer usage statistics, review systems, and more. Such quantifiable and qualifiable information helps demonstrate the impact of your OER work, which is especially useful for retention, promotion, and tenure. (For more about demonstrating the impact of your OER, see Growing Your OER: A Marketing and Advocacy Toolkit.

Let’s briefly discuss your repository and directory options so you can make an informed decision of where to plant your OER flag.

Institutional Repositories (IR)

As mentioned in our discussion about sustainability, your 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 PDF versions of your OER, allowing users access to different 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, and altmetrics badges. In other words, you will be able to quantify how and where your OER is being used, whether through downloads or shares on social media.

For OERFSJ, OER are deposited in LMU’s IR, Digital Commons as part of an OERFSJ collection. We coordinated with our partner institutions to make the OER accessible in IR at Santa Clara University, Saint Mary’s College of California, and the University of San Francisco.

OER Directories

There are a number of free OER-focused directories that can increase the discoverability of your OER. Generally, you complete a submission form, and the directory links to your Pressbook within their library. Many directories 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.

• 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 with an institutional or consortium membership with OTL’s parent organization, the Open Education Network (OEN). Loyola Marymount University has an institutional OEN membership and SCELC (Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium) has a consortium membership.
• Pressbooks Directory is the easiest way to put your OER on the map because it 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, to Settings in in the left menu of your Pressbook editor and select Sharing and Privacy [1]. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select the radio button next to Yes, I want this book to be listed in the Pressbooks directory [2]. Don’t forget to select Save [3].

Show Off Your OER

Now that you are familiar with your choices, you can decide where you would like to deposit your OER. Keep in mind, aside from your IR and the Pressbooks Directory, each directory or repository has its own review policies, so make certain to review the acceptance criteria for MERLOT, OER Commons, and OTL.

Image Descriptions

Image 1.

Screenshot of the Loyola Marymount University Digital Commons page for Open Educational Resources for Social Justice Projects. At the top are the Loyola Marymount University logo and navigation links for Home, About, FAQ, and My Account. The page title reads Digital Commons @ Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School, followed by the breadcrumb trail Home > LMU Library > Open Educational Resources for Social Justice Projects. A left sidebar includes Search, with fields for entering search terms and selecting context, along with links for Advanced Search and Notify me via email or RSS. Below that are browse and information links for Collections, Disciplines, Authors, Author FAQ, the URL https://library.lmu.edu/oerfsj/, Scholarly Publishing Libguide, About Digital Commons, FAQ, Contact Us, Sign Up for Email Notifications, and Researcher Feedback. The main content area features the heading open educational resources for social justice projects and a paragraph explaining that the OER for Social Justice grant supported faculty at four California private universities in creating openly licensed, equity-centered educational resources. It states that the program was funded by the U.S. Department of Education, enabled 11 faculty teams to design OER for high-enrollment courses integrating diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and anti-racist frameworks, and that the materials will remain freely available. Beneath this are a Follow button and links to Switch View to List and View Slideshow. A grid of book covers is shown, including Business Ethics and Social Responsibility, Concepts in Biology, Critical Research Methods in Psychology, General Chemistry 3e: OER for Inclusive Learning, Human Physiology: An Open Textbook, No-Nonsense Filmmaking, Principles of Economics, Rhetorical Communities, Writing Our Bodies, and Your Voice Matters: First-Year Writing & Social Justice. At the bottom left are logos for Loyola Marymount University William H. Hannon Library and Loyola Law School, Loyola Marymount University, William M. Rains Library. [Return to Image 1]