5.1 Summary: A Model for Educational Publishers?
As this report has described, the Rebus Foundation is building an Open Textbook publishing model that will supply people with the tools to publish and disseminate knowledge instead of restricting publishing resources to a limited group of players. By standardizing the structures for Open Textbook production, Rebus opens the possibility for current and prospective publishers to reproduce and improve upon its models. Rebus’ collaborative platform gives them the ability to build on, expand, or adapt works as they need, at both the individual and institutional level. These processes make content more usable for the end user, and expand the range of uses it can be put to. Rebus’ communal ethos seeks to reinvigorate educational publishing as a service that reflects the values of the community it wishes to serve.
At the heart of Rebus’ functioning is its forum, which allows users to come together over a diverse range of OER projects. Rebus looks to further improvement as, in the future, the forum will be accompanied by project management software with enhanced capabilities. This software will enable easier handling of OER projects, with a sophisticated mechanism for recruiting volunteers and keeping track of tasks. The forum and the software will act as a directory for people to find collaborators to help them with various aspects of their projects.
Standardizing both the peer review and accessibility processes will be useful for both faculty that is considering adopting the book and for students who would like to use the book. Peer review is an important element in allowing these books to enter more mainstream avenues as it convinces these adopters of the books’ value. Additionally, accessibility audits can indicate whether these books are compliant with present standards, allowing all students to be able to read or use the book from the moment of publication without any additional measures being necessary.
Currently, marketing these textbooks is the most pressing challenge. At present, Rebus needs to inform people about the existence of Open Textbooks, while simultaneously educating them by defining the product and the benefits these may bring. Even once this is done, however, non-tenured faculty may not feel comfortable contributing to such texts. Budgetary constraints for marketing make it yet more difficult for adoption to occur, especially given that other publishers have substantially more funding and pre-established channels to reach relevant consumers. Consequently, Rebus has to adopt alternative methods for reaching end consumers and encouraging adoption. In particular, Rebus relies on leveraging its networks for word of mouth marketing. For other adopters, Rebus may find it prudent to emphasize the updatability and modularity of Open Textbooks as benefits that distinguish these books from traditional print textbooks. The search for these alternative methods is critical to Rebus’ long-term success.
5.2 Future of Books and Challenges: Development and Scalability of OERs
With the growth of the Open Textbook movement, a central challenge for Rebus will be growing to scale. While funding presents the most obvious challenge, there are also more technical issues hampering Rebus’ ability to scale. Most significantly, Rebus is not a publisher in the traditional sense, and this may generate issues moving forward. For example, Rebus does not handle the distribution of most of the texts it produces. Consequently, individuals and groups working with the company have to be self-reliant and pro-active in order to disseminate the text. This fact further adds to the efforts required of Rebus’ voluntary collaborators, and may at present be discouraging newer users from partnering with the organization.
In contrast, Rebus’ new project management software will significantly aid the scalability project. Because it is based on Rebus’ real-world experience with Open Textbooks, and built with flexibility in mind, the project management software’s functionality supports collaboration across a wide variety of texts, from textbooks to scholarly monographs. In this way, Rebus is already equipped for some of the challenges that it will face in the near future as it continues to grow.
However, an issue in Rebus’ operation model is that while Rebus enables the collaborative creation of content, it does not own any of the content that is produced through it. This tension in terms of ownership produces legal ramifications, as Rebus may be held responsible for texts produced even if it had no direct input in their production. Such risks are also compounded when, in certain situations, Rebus needs to identify as the publisher of a text. These situations emerge when one or several of Rebus’ collaborators apply for funding or grants, for example. In these cases, and particularly as it grows, Rebus must be careful to tread the fine line between collaborator and publisher, especially given the insistence from sections of the educational publishing community that it is not the latter.
Finally, the question of long-term organization and planning proves salient for Rebus’ attempts to scale. At present, given its promotion of completely open and free content, Rebus does not earn any revenue from its efforts or royalties from books it helps produce, and neither does it ask for any financial contribution from collaborators. Consequently, the organization relies on the inflow of funding from external granting agencies. Rebus is currently investigating means for making its work financially self-sustaining and capable of remunerating its employees. While the former problem is difficult to resolve at present, one possible solution to the latter may be to partner with large funding organizations (such as the McConnell Foundation and the Northern Nursing Education Network) towards the funding of Open Textbook projects. These partnerships could range from single books to series dedicated to specific topics, and the funding would be used to remunerate collaborators and for marketing. Rebus’ ability to simultaneously promote open knowledge, remunerate its collaborators, and sustain itself financially is essential to the health and long-term existence of the company.
5.3 Federated Rebus: Looking to the Future
As part of its long-term plan, Rebus seeks to bring collaborators to together and to become part of yet larger programs for collaboration at a global scale. Rebus is currently working with large state and provincial educational systems to build Federated Rebus Communities, which collectively seek to “publish core open textbooks, freely available on the web, in all subjects in all languages in the world” (Rebus 2017). The project’s aim to publish “in all subjects and in all languages” expresses Rebus’ aspirational ethos, one that is necessary to counteract the status quo in which Open Textbooks are being published “without a global systematic approach, and with minimal collaboration among institutions, state/provincial systems, authors and publishers” (Rebus 2017).
The solution for Rebus lies in producing a systematic and global approach to textbook publishing. This approach aims to encourage collaboration across vast systems and numerous institutions, while focusing on one subject area at a time. Federated Rebus aims to integrate adoption and long-term content stability into the publishing process, and is part of Rebus’ desire to make Open Textbook publishing a truly sustainable field. The persistence of this endeavour relies on achieving financial sustainability and scalability across all subject verticals, both aspects that Rebus is currently looking into.
At the present moment, the future for Federated Rebus seems bright. Several notable collaborators, including the eCampus Ontario and Open SUNY, are currently working with Rebus to develop a model that could be funded by government initiatives promoting OERs. Given these developments, the Rebus Community is slowly but certainly growing and achieving scale. In the years to follow, Rebus’ growth will certainly create further opportunities and challenges, all of which will collectively be conducive for understanding and developing Open Textbook publishing. These large-scale aspirations are integrally related to Rebus’ day-to-day functioning. Small improvements—such as creating quality markers for books and ensuring they are accessible from the moment of production—will help Rebus carve out a permanent place for Open Textbooks within the educational publishing landscape. By making the tools through which knowledge is produced freely available and by forming communities around content creation, dissemination, and engagement, Rebus strives to hold open the doors to knowledge.