For Open Textbooks to be widely adopted in academia, issues pertaining to peer r
For Open Textbooks to be widely adopted in academia, issues pertaining to peer review, curation, and testing must be addressed. The curation and testing of Open Textbooks is essential to Rebus’ goal of producing scalable models for OER publishing. Rebus has partnered with the Open Textbook Network to discuss pertinent problems, especially those around content management, in terms of peer review and accessibility. While Rebus’ work with the Forum is concentrated in one space and the organization has engaged deeply with it thus far, the work on Peer Review, Curation, and Testing is currently in its nascent stages. As Rebus is still in the early stages of discovering the nuances of these processes, the following section provides an outline of Rebus’ current workflow and the direction it is taking, rather than a systematized critique of its limitations and the directions for improvement.
3.1 Peer Review Working Group: Revising the Review Process
A key challenge in the adoption of Open Textbooks in universities is that faculty are often skeptical of the “quality, comprehensiveness, clarity and currency of open textbooks” as these are perceived to be low-cost, low-quality alternatives to high-cost, high-quality printed textbooks (CARL 2014). The absence of appropriate marketing of the peer review process in the production of Open Textbooks legitimizes these attitudes.
Peer review is valuable for indicating the quality of educational content, and is integral to the production of textbooks, scholarly monographs, and journals. Its presence signals to the prospective user of a text that it has passed through rigorous quality control, and that its content is suitable for discussion and use in the classroom. In the age of content abundance, when the barriers to content production are minimal, peer review performs an important role in signaling the trustworthiness of a particular book. Indeed, many instructors reject Open Textbooks “because they question the quality of freely available resources, especially when such sources aren’t connected to a reputable publishing house, institution, or author” (Pitt 2015). While traditional publishing houses are assumed to have vetted the content and quality of textbooks through open or closed peer review, the same does not hold true for Open Textbook creators. Thus, marking the scholarly legitimacy of Open Textbooks is, for Rebus, an essential step in the process of distributing such texts.
Rebus is trying to develop a set of standardized approaches for peer reviewing Open Textbooks, and is using various models on existing projects. Peer review has taken place on four texts thus far: Financial Strategy for Public Managers, Literature Review for Education and Nursing Students, The Science of Human Nutrition, and Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship. With Financial Strategy, both chapter and full-text reviews were conducted. Authors could recommend potential reviewers, but remained unaware of the specific chapters each in