Standard Policy

The publishing process was handled as an iterative process. Each member of the team worked with each author (group) on an individual basis. Each author was treated as unique with individualized needs.

We worked through the entire publication process with each author step-by-step, keeping them abreast of the progress and any questions we had along the way. This would typically include:

• Regular communication via email and document comments about all aspects of the publishing process; often a dozen emails would travel back and forth between the PST and the author groups throughout the process
• 1 – 3 meetings between the Copy-Editor and the author
• 1 – 3 meetings with the Multimedia Specialist to discuss, draft, and approve multimedia solutions including H5P and image adjustments
• 1 – 3 meetings with the Technical Editor to discuss and adjust formatting and consistency concerns throughout the book

Rationale

As a project based on the idea of openness, one of the guiding principles is for transparency, which means we wanted to avoid “siloing” as much as possible. This iterative process allowed authors to maintain control of the content.

Lessons Learned

This approach is fairly idealistic and optimistic, so it does come with its own challenges.

Time Commitment: This practice means that the team is reliant on regular interaction with the author. This could, and often would, increase the amount of time that we needed to dedicate to working on the books.

Grinding to a halt: Requiring approval for incremental fixes has meant that we have come to a standstill while we wait to hear from the author. Writing these books is not the author’s full-time work, and it would predictably and reasonably be set as a, “when I have time,” task. This was a major contributor to a number of the books being published later than we had originally estimated.

Version control: The iterative process certainly had difficulties when it came to ensuring that content was matching drafts. The best example of this is how the uploading process worked:

1. The Copy-Editor and Multimedia Specialist inform the Technical Editor that the text is complete and ready for upload.
2. The Technical Editor downloads the document from Google Drive to load in Word for both ease of use and format adjustments for uploading purposes.
3. The Technical Editor uploads the content that has been downloaded and formatted into Pressbooks.

The second step of this process is where difficulties can arise. Author groups will continue to edit and update their document in Google Drive after the Copy-Editor and Multimedia Specialist have handed it off to the Technical Editor, and those changes would not be reflected in the Pressbooks version as a result.

Enforcing Standards: In addition to the difficulties with Version Control, we had difficulty establishing and maintaining control of the various versions and ensuring their adherence to the standards built into the style guide. The upside of utilizing Google Drive and Google Docs is its ease of use and relative universality, but that also caused some pain points when attempting to coordinate. Each author had their own level of comfort when working with Google Drive, in particular, which meant we had consistency issues with items such as:

• Sharing folders. Authors would share folders from their personal drives which we would be unable to edit or make changes to without requiring extra steps.
• Which version? In more than one instance due to sharing confusion, the PST had to determine which version the author was working with at any given iteration, and it was not unheard of to have three copies of the same file in different locations with similar/same names.

Because of the tight timeline we were working with, we were unable to spend the time to correct some of these errors on the case-by-case basis. We agreed as a team during the second round of publications that we should be locking down the folders so authors could not edit the versions we were working with. However, that would have been a larger time commitment than we could afford to implement.

Recommendation: Establish a more standard method of submission protocols, where materials exist, and how they are accessed/edited. This sort of method should be communicated clearly to authors early in the process.

For example, being able to lock the folders to view-only to authors once the copyediting process is complete, and this being the standard operating procedure that is part of the expectations for the authors.