Working with other Contributors

In addition to collaborating with your project team, you may want to enlist the help of other contributors over the course of your project. These are people who may contribute content such as a foreword, introduction, or chapter, or those who help you edit your content or give feedback. Of course, you’ll want to give credit to all of your contributors in your acknowledgements, which you can read more about in Front and Back Matter. However, some contributions also require specific permissions and considerations.

Contributors Permissions and Releases

Contributors who author or create content to be included in your OER, such as a chapter author or someone who agrees to be interviewed for a video, should sign a letter of consent to publish. You should also obtain a signed form for any photograph of an identifiable individual that was taken in a private place, such as the person’s home. Even if the person agreed to have the photograph taken, that does not necessarily imply that he or she agrees to its publication. If the contributor is a minor, a parent or guardian should sign the release form on their behalf.

Similar to requesting author permission to reuse existing copyrighted material, this documentation should be kept on file with your project materials and will be submitted to the library before publishing your resource.

Working with Student Contributors

You may also want to work with student contributors, either by hiring a student worker or by involving your class in the creation and revision of your resource. When working with student contributors, there are a number of special considerations to protect their autonomy, privacy, and digital identities.

Since publishing openly under their own name contributes to their digital footprint, it’s important to discuss with your students the potential impact (positive and negative) that publishing openly may have on their overall digital presence. You’ll want to be sure your students understand what open licensing means and to give them agency in the choice of whether or not to openly license their work, and if so, which license they choose.

You’ll also want to think about building in options to protect their right to privacy under FERPA. Some options include:

1. Getting FERPA waivers from the students.
2. Making the open resource and credit the students who contributed, but without identifying that they were part of a specific course.
3. Allowing students to use pseudonyms when building the open resource.
4. All of the above.

The Rebus Community published a comprehensive Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students, which delves deeper into these considerations and provides case studies, project ideas, and other resources that may be helpful if this is a direction you’re considering.

‘Working with Student Contributors’ adapted from Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students, 2017 by Rebus Community, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.