Background: This program is intended for libraries and library faculty and staff involved in digital publishing, digital collection management, and large collaborations and partnerships. The project can serve as a model for others to publish non-traditional materials and gray literature, and to produce licensed products to support open educational resources. 1) use this model to provide publishing and peer-review services to partner organizations. 2) use academic promotion incentives to build volunteer participation in collaborative projects. 3) use existing digital collections to design unique licensed products that provide sustainable funding for projects.
Description: This health sciences library partnered with a national medical society to create an open access, discipline specific repository of peer-reviewed learning objects in many formats. The library is responsible for managing peer-review, technical processing of learning objects, maintaining databases, organizing, and disseminating the collections. The society members are responsible for creating content, serving on the editorial board, designing curriculum outlines,and general guidance. In order to fund the project, the partners have negotiated a contract with an electronic publisher to produce specific curricula as licensed products with royalties supporting the project. The project is evaluated based on usage statistics, society member engagement, and revenue generated by spin-off products. Benefits of the project include teaching, research, and service credit toward academic advancement for all participants. Educating creators on maintaining copyrights is another important outcome.
Conclusion: The project has been successful due to incentives for volunteer participation. Society members receive credit for serving on committees of their national society, acting as section editors for the licensed products, and as authors of peer-reviewed learning objects in an online educational platform. The library serves as the publisher and receives funding to support the digital repository project. The licensed products provide finding to sustain the larger open educational resource. More than half of the users of the repository are international in origin, showing that there is a need for high quality teaching and learning platforms globally.
