Academic motivation behind textbook publishing

What is it about?

To understand whether open access textbook publication might be appealing to UK academics we first needed to understand author incentives for writing and publishing traditional textbooks and learning resources. The aim of this research was to dig deeper into the motivations for authors, rather than purely looking at open. The project wanted to understand why authors choose to publish textbooks and other learning resources to provide models, best practice and recommendations for future work on open textbooks. To provide greater context for their preferences as authors, the research was expanded to include more detail on what academics want as teachers.

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Why is it important?

Open textbook publishing is an emerging topic in discussions about the transition to open access. We believe that this is the first study of its kind in the UK, as evidence is largely anecdotal. Therefore, the gap in the literature combined with anecdotal evidence from the two UK open textbook projects were major contributing factors to the study, which sought to test perceptions in an attempt to shed further light on why authors publish text-books and what the motivations and barriers might be to a transition to open access textbook publishing.

Perspectives