Are you passionate about open access and making education more affordable for your students? Would you like to publish an open textbook for your unit of study?
We are looking for expressions of interest from academics to participate in a pilot project that aims to publish an open textbook to support any discipline taught at the University of Sydney at undergraduate or postgraduate level.
Why publish an open textbook?
Open textbooks present an opportunity to reinvent how knowledge is disseminated and taught. Driven by the development in digital technologies, the proliferation of e-reading devices, and the rising costs of educational materials, they have been increasingly adopted by faculty worldwide who believe that educational content should be freely available to students, teachers and members of the public.
Apart from providing free educational materials to your students, you will be able to retain control over your content and make an impact on the teaching in your area of expertise. You will be able to create a textbook that fits your unit of study and your teaching preferences. You can do it yourself, or collaborate with other academics, or students.
As well as authoring a whole textbook, you can also build a textbook by mixing and matching chapters from other works available in open access (on platforms such as OpenStax, Flatworld Knowledge), adding local perspectives and case studies, and incorporating current events.
As open textbooks are primarily digital (though you can make a low-cost print-on-demand version available to students), you can experiment with digital technologies and incorporate multimedia components, such as video, audio, animations. Depending on the type of content you want to include, the open textbook can be as simple as a downloadable PDF or an ePub file, or as complex as the award-winning Organizational Behavior by Talya Bauer and Berrin Erdogan, and hosted on a dedicated platform.
How to get involved?
If you are interested in publishing an open textbook for your course, please submit a one-page proposal by 1 December 2017. We are particularly interested in proposals for original and previously unpublished projects with multidisciplinary appeal that would lend themselves to digital delivery and contain multimedia content. Your submission should include the following:
- Your contact details
- Textbook title
- Unit of study name and student enrolment numbers
- Description of contents, including any multimedia
- Table of contents with brief chapter descriptions
- Estimated length of manuscript and delivery timeline.
To submit a proposal, and if you would like more information or have any further questions, please contact Agata Mrva-Montoya on 02 9114 1456 or [email protected].
Sydney University Press was re-established in 2005 as an initiative of the University of Sydney Library and is a non-for-profit scholarly publisher.
