The UBC Library has created an Open Text Publishing Guide to help authors navigate the process of creating a text. If you are in the middle of creating your open text or are about to embark upon one, this guide will walk you through what the project entails. We have focused on providing templates and workflows to provide concrete help and assistance as you undertake the process of publishing your own text.

Guide Content

The Open Text Publishing Guide is divided into 6 phases of the publishing process:

Phase 1 – Planning Your Project

This section covers what to consider before you begin writing. Determine the Project Scope covers how to frame your project so that you can better understand what you are working toward. Developing a Project Timeline covers how to develop a rough timeline for your project, create a budget, identify project team members, and more.

Phase 2 – Learning Design

This section affects the overall design of your project. If you are involving students in your project, Developing a Student Engagement Plan will cover everything that you need to think about. The Text Design Rules will help you incorporate structured parts, chapters, sections and subsections that are organized in a way that facilitates understanding. Develop an Accessibility, Diversity, and Inclusion Plan will help ensure that your text is inclusive and accessible for all students.

Phase 3 – Creating Content

In this section, you can learn to track and Identify Existing Resources that you can re-use or modify in your text. Before you begin writing, Develop an Outline can help you organize the topics to be covered in your text and how they will be organized in a table of contents.

Phase 4 – Text Design

Developing Style Sheet for making decisions about the final style and design of your text at the beginning of your project will help save you time and extra work.

Phase 5 – Release

This section covers what to do when preparing to release your open text out into the world. The guide covers how to develop a Peer Review Strategy for your open text and a Release Plan to help you market and promote your text will ensure your work is used broadly.

Phase 6 – Post-Release

Finally, the last section of the guide gives you guidance on what to do after your text has been published. This covers things like Collecting Impact Data and making decisions on how you want to show the impact of your text and considering revisions by investigating ways to gather feedback to improve and upgrade your text after its initial release.

Guide Structure

Each phase begins with an outline of key concepts followed by the parts of the chapter.

• Key Concepts provide you with the primary ideas covered in the publishing phase.

Each part in this guide contains the following

• Examples provide content in practice. Using existing projects, the examples provide you with a better understanding of how to develop your publishing plan and workflows.
• Templates provide you with both interactive and downloadable documents that can be completed to construct your overall publishing plan and workflows.
• Supports provides you with details of how UBC Library (Okanagan and Vancouver) and the Centre for Teaching and Learning Technology (CTLT) can support your text development.
• Adaptions details the resources, guides, and toolkits used to develop the content. These are excellent resources to learn additional information about the topics presented.