Open Educational Resources (OER)

Red Deer Polytechnic Library is a participating institution in the Open Education Alberta initiative, a collaborative, no-fee publishing service for open textbooks and other OER. This gives RDP faculty and staff access to the Pressbooks publishing platform, which can be used to adapt existing open textbooks to the needs of students or to create new openly licensed resources.

Pressbooks is a Canadian-based book publishing tool that can be used to create, adapt, and publish open books. Authors can copy existing open books and adapt them to their own context, or create new openly licensed books.

Here are examples of open books published using Pressbooks:

• Geological Structures: A Practical Introduction
• Português para principiantes (language-learning book with embedded sound clips and embedded activities)
• Research Methods in Psychology, 2nd Canadian Edition (example of a book adapted from an existing US version)
• Environmental ScienceBites (example of a project involving student authors)

View more examples in the Pressbooks Directory

Who can request an account?

Any member of the Red Deer Polytechnic community (faculty, staff, students) can request a Pressbooks account. You must have a proposed book project in order to be issued an account.

How do I request an account?

Complete the Pressbooks Account Request Form below to initiate the request. You will be contacted by a Librarian who will outline the features of Pressbooks and your responsibilities as a Pressbooks User. All users must sign and agree to the terms of the publishing agreement before an account will be issued.

Pressbooks Account Request Form

Ready to publish? Use this checklist to ensure that your Pressbook is publication-ready!

Pre-Publication

Pressbooks Author will:

Review for accessibility. It is recommended that books meet the BCcampus accessibility criteria: BCcampus Accessibility Toolkit

Acknowledge the University of Alberta (include their logo). This can be done within the Book Description (see an example near the bottom of this Pressbook).

Add Red Deer Polytechnic as both the Institution and Publisher in Book Info.

Select a Creative Commons or other open License in Book Info > Copyright.

Make the book downloadable within Pressbooks: 
Step 1. Go to Settings > Sharing and Privacy Settings >> Share Latest Export Files > Select Yes. I would like the latest export files to be available on the homepage for free, to everyone.
Step 2: Go to Export and select at least one format (recommend PDF (digital), PDF (print), and EPub), then click on the Export Your Book button. The files generated will automatically appear on the book home page as download options.

Add a book cover that includes the title and author(s); this will be uploaded to Book Info > Cover Image. This cover will be used for the web version of the book. You can use Canva, Photoshop, or any image editor to create your cover. Pressbooks suggests the following dimensions for cover image files:

• Image must be at least 800 pixels tall and have an aspect ratio between .66 and 1 (e.g., 800 x 600, 1200 x 900, 2560 x 1925, etc.)
• The recommended image size is 1200 x 900 pixels [1200 pixels tall (height) x 900 pixels wide (width)]
• Use RGB as the colour profile when saving your cover image files
• Save as .jpg or .png
• Learn about the Pressbooks cover on the Pressbooks Guide

Publication

Pressbooks Author will:

Request that the Pressbook be published in OEA Catalogue by contacting Sona Macnaughton.

Request that the Pressbook be added to RDP Digital Repository.

RDP Library will:

Request the publication of the Pressbook via a form to the U of A Library. RDP Library will provide them with the following: Book Title, Author(s), and Publisher (Red Deer Polytechnic). 

The University of Alberta Library will:

Assign a DOI and ISBN to the book. 

Add the title to the OEA Catalogue.

Post-Publication

The Pressbooks author:

Will continue to have access to Pressbooks to edit as required; the book can evolve over time. 

Is free to submit the book to other OER repositories if desired.