Open Educational Resources (OER)

Accessibility

Accessibility starts with your book's content.

• Use chapters, headings, and subheadings to organize your book's content for easy navigation.
• Add alternative text to images for people with visual impairments
• Make sure your font is large enough to read--12pt for regular text and 9pt for footnotes.
• Use high contrast colors for charts, diagrams, and text in graphics

Use these tools and resources to ensure that your book will be accessible for all audiences:

• BCcampus Open Education Accessibility Toolkit

  The Accessibility Toolkit provides the resources for creating a project that is truly accessible for all users. They include an accessibility checklist to assist with reviewing your project.

• Color Contrast Analyzer

  This chrome extension analyzes web pages and provides a visual understanding of the contrast of your page and whether the text is accessible to users with visual impairments.

• Accessible Colors

  The Accessible Colors tool helps check color contrast ratios for making accessible graphic elements.

Review with Hypothes.is

Hypothesis is an open source web annotation tool that allows authors, editors, and readers to highlight, annotate, and discuss content on the web.

When you enable Hypothesis in Pressbooks under Settings, readers can both create and read annotations without installing the Hypothes.is extension as long as they have a user account. These public comments will be visible to anyone who views the book. 

You can control where Hypothesis is visible in your book--front matter, chapters, or only specific chapters--toggle whether highlights are on or off, and choose whether the sidebar is open by default.

Uses

• Collaborative editing: Enable Hypothesis as part of your editorial workflow. Create a private group, leave comments, editing suggestions, and discuss changes to be made on chapter pages prior to the book going public.
• Reader feedback: Use Hypothesis as part of the peer-review process or leave the option open for anyone who is engaging with your books. 
• Student Engagement: Provide a space for students to interact with course materials and one another. 

Publish Your Book

You can view your book on the web by clicking on the title of your book on the top menu in Pressbooks, then clicking Visit Book. To make your Web Book public, go to Upgrade for the payment options.

You also have the option to share your book with individual subscribers or users which you add to the book. To do this, go to Settings > Sharing and Privacy Settings. Under Private Content make sure All logged in users including subscribers is selected. Then, under Users > Add New, you can invite new users to be subscribers by email. 

Export Your Book

To export your book, go to the Export page from the left sidebar menu of the book's dashboard. 

Supported Formats:

• Print PDF
• Digital PDF
• EPub
• Mobi

Experimental Formats

• Epub 3
• XHTML
• HTML Book
• OpenDocument
• Pressbooks XML
• Wordpress XML

Remember, you can import a Pressbooks XML file. If you create a Pressbook on a private Pressbooks.com account, you can re-upload it through your institution's hosted Pressbooks at a later date if needed. 

The Publish Tab

The Publish tab of the dashboard does not have to do with your book's visibility to the public or with exporting your book. What it does is help you market your book by adding BUY links to vendors like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iBooks to your book's home page. 

Copyright covers both published and unpublished works. The work does not have to be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office nor have the © symbol.

Type of works included are:

• literary, musical (including words and music), or dramatic works
• pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works
• motion pictures and other audiovisual works
• sound recordings

The length of time a work is covered by copyright protection is extensive. Basic rules in the United States include:

• If published before 1923, the work is in the Public Domain
• If published between 1923 and 1978 without a copyright notice, the work is in the Public Domain
• Currently, copyright is held for at least 70 years after the death of the author, but copyright protection may be renewed and extended for longer periods

Keep in mind that Copyright protection does not extend to:

• any idea, procedure, process, system, title, principle, or discovery
• works consisting entirely of information which is common knowledge and containing no original authorship such as facts, standard calendars, height, and weight charts, etc.
• any document which is in the public domain

Items in the public domain include:

• Works for which the copyright has expired and has not been renewed
• Works of the U.S. Government created by government employees
• Works for which the author has designated use is available within the public domain (although the author may have designated some requirements such as providing credit to the author which is known as "attribution")

Here is a link to our guide if you would like to learn more about copyright!

"The term “public domain” refers to creative materials that are not protected by intellectual property laws such as  copyright, trademark, or patent laws. The public owns these works, not an individual author or artist. Anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission, but no one can ever own it." -- Welcome to the Public Domain - Rich Stim      

The timing for when a particular type of format of work enters the public domain varies widely depending on a variety of factors including but not limited to:

•  Unpublished vs. published works
•  Date first published in the U.S.
•  Publications by foreign nationals       
• Publications by U.S. citizens living abroad
• Sound recordings published outside the U.S.     

Please note, in order to create or clone a book on Pressbooks, email your request to OER@tamucc.edu.