The administration of the publishing platform is, of course, dependent on which platform is selected. We used Pressbooks Simple Book Publishing platform.

We did not want the unfinished OERs to be public, so they were created and edited in private mode. This required that users of any role log into their Pressbooks account to access their book(s).

Author editing access on the publishing platform is dependent upon the technical abilities of the author. The PST recommends that the author only have viewing access to their book on the platform. The strongest reason for this is that there is very little versioning history within the text editing of content in Pressbooks. It is difficult to monitor changes which require editorial overview. (See also Change Logs.) In Pressbooks, this translates to the PST having an administrative role on each book that provided the broadest “rights” including editing. Authors typically had author or subscriber roles, as did anyone else involved with the OER Project, which provided viewing only.

Pressbooks has a Super-Administrator role. Coordination of all access to the ROTEL Domain textbook OERs had to be done through the Super-Administrator role. This involves creating the shell of the OER in Pressbooks, and adding ‘users’ (even administrators) to the book and assigning their various roles. The Super-Administrator should be able to respond to requests in a timely manner.

The Super-Administrator was also responsible for adding the OER to the ROTEL Catalog (a simple toggle) and maintaining the Catalog’s Landing Page of “Our Latest Titles” where up to four titles could be highlighted.

Analytics

Pressbooks provides access to the plugin Koko Analytics about the originating URLs accessing the ROTEL OER, and which parts of the OER were accessed. Administrators and Super-Adminstrators can see the analytics of each book when in editing mode of one. This information is very interesting and gratifying, but not accessible to any other roles unless the Analytics are made “public”. The Super-Administrator made each OER’s analytics public and recorded its URL to share with the Project author and teams. The Administrators, Editors, and Author roles were excluded from the counts of page views for the OER so as not to skew the numbers during the iterative editing process.

Lessons Learned

Early in the project, OER projects were made public to facilitate author/PST dialogs but were not added to the ROTEL Catalog with the belief that only those with the OER’s URL could access the OER. In consulting the analytics for the OER, it was apparent that people outside of the ROTEL Project were finding the incomplete, unpublished OERs through basic browser searches on the internet. This resulted in keeping the OERs private/unpublished and requiring the login step for the authors to view their OER during the publication process. This extra step is not difficult for authors.