Last Wednesday, we met for our monthly Office Hours session to discuss MOUs between institutions and faculty undertaking open textbook projects, and to begin the process of creating a new template MOU that can be used by open textbook creators across the globe.
Out of the discussion came several key areas that an MOU must address:
- Intellectual property rights
- Remuneration
- Liability
- Timetables (with flexibility built-in)
- Multi-university collaborations
With these general requirements in mind, we will be drafting a new MOU template that can be used and adapted by open textbook practitioners globally. But first, we are seeking feedback on some existing MOU examples that Amanda Coolidge of BCcampus and Billy Meinke of University of Hawaii kindly shared. As the first step toward the template, we invite you to read through their example MOUs and leave comments on the elements you find especially useful (or not).
We have also included a link to the recently launched Model Publishing Contract for Digital Scholarship. This model is intended mainly for other forms of digital scholarship (monographs etc.) and to govern publisher/author relationships, but let us know in the document linked above if you think there’s anything worth adapting for a textbook-specific MOU. (Thanks to Anita Walz for bringing this one to our attention!)
Finally, we realised that broaching the issue of student involvement in open textbook projects raised more questions than it answered, and as a result, have decided to dedicate January’s Office Hours to discussing student involvement in open textbook projects. We have invited Open pedagogy superstar Robin deRosa, as well as several others who have worked with students on open textbooks, to join us and talk about best practices, student rights and agreements. We hope you can join us. That session will take place Jan. 31 at 2 p.m. EST and you can RSVP here.
A huge thanks to everyone who attended the initial meeting and we look forward to keeping the conversation going!
Zoe + the Rebus Team