What is Pressbooks?

Pressbooks is an open source web-based digital book publishing tool built upon WordPress. Pressbooks aims to make it easy for people to publish their long-form works on the web and make them available for download in standard ebook formats: EPUBs and PDFs. Pressbooks supports text and images as well as interactive and multimodal components such as video, audio, and interactive activities.

As of today, the Pressbooks software is mainly used by post-secondary OER programs to publish OER that are written and adapted by faculty and staff working at their institutions. Overall, Pressbooks has been widely adopted as it is easy to learn, easy to share content that looks good, and has been designed specifically to support the publication of OER.

This case study takes a comprehensive look at the range of sustainability models that have developed around the Pressbooks software and how open source plays into that. First, we will look at Pressbooks (the company), which develops Pressbooks and offers it as a service, and how they’ve been able to build a company and a sustainable business model around a largely open source software. Then we will look at Open Education Alberta, a collective of post-secondary institutions in the province of Alberta that have organized access to Pressbooks for their institutions. Finally, we will look at BCcampus, an organization funded by the Province of British Columbia that self-hosts the open source version of Pressbooks and provides free access to the software for faculty and staff at BC post-secondary institutions.

Part 1: Pressbooks (The Company): Software as a Service

Pressbooks was founded by Hugh McGuire and first released in 2011. Hugh had worked on various web projects over the years. In particular, in 2005 he founded LibriVox, a non-profit initiative to crowdsource the creation of audiobooks for public domain books and share them for free. LibriVox worked because there was a set of free, open source tools that people could use to make audio recordings. Based on the success of that project, Hugh determined that the world should have a set of easy, web-based tools to enable making books. That was the genesis of Pressbooks.

From the beginning, Hugh wanted Pressbooks to be open source but also a business. Initially, Pressbooks focused on supporting independent writers who wanted to self-publish their books. However, starting in 2013, Pressbooks began shifting their focus from individual authors to academic and educational publishing. In 2015, Pressbooks announced PressbooksEDU, a Pressbooks-hosted service to support publishing initiatives at post-secondary institutions, with a specific focus on open textbook publishing (Mays, 2015).

Since then, Pressbooks has become the most common tool used to publish OER and has developed into a successful company with 20 employees. Pressbooks has around 200 enterprise-level subscribers, serving approximately 600 institutions across mainly the United States and Canada, as well as Ireland, Australia, and a few other places. Over 6,000 OER have been published using Pressbooks. It also continues to have a number of open source users who self-host the software for their communities.

Sustainability Model

Organizational Structure and Governance

Pressbooks’s organizational structure grew and developed in step with the company. In 2015, Pressbooks had one developer working three days a week and one marketing person working 10 hours a week. At this time, Hugh was not drawing a salary from the business. In 2017, Pressbooks received a substantial grant from Toronto Metropolitan University (then Ryerson University), with funding from eCampusOntario that allowed them to hire two full time developers to start developing the features needed to break into the EDU market, recruit clients, and actually begin to establish a sustainable business model.

As of 2024, Pressbooks is a private company with about 20 employees. While the company is technically based in Montreal, the team is fully remote, working across Canada, the United States, and beyond. The team comprises approximately 40% development and support, 40% marketing and sales, and 10% admin.

As a private company, Pressbooks does not have external governance, although they have had external advisors over the years. Strategy and decisions are determined collaboratively by the leadership team made up of the founder, the CEO, the VP Technology, and the VP Strategy and Growth; the entire team provides significant input regarding the directions they should be going and what to prioritize. In addition, Pressbooks makes an active effort to stay connected to their clients and respond to their needs and ultimately grow value for educational clients using Pressbooks.

Revenue Model

Pressbooks struggled for a number of years to establish a reliable revenue stream and become financially sustainable. In the early days, Hugh believed that universities and institutions who thought open source was important would also understand the importance of financially supporting the open source software they were using. However, that never materialized in a meaningful way. While large organizations like SUNY, BCcampus, and UNIZIN were hosting Pressbooks for their communities and contributing some code back, they were not paying Pressbooks on a consistent basis for the work that goes into sustaining the software. In the early days, development contracts played a key role in sustaining Pressbooks financially as they worked on growing their client base. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the following push towards digital was key in cementing that client base – it marked a financial turning point for Pressbooks that really enabled them to develop a sustainable business model.

Now, Pressbooks is a for-profit company that makes its money by providing software as a service. Pressbooks uses a subscription model with subscription levels targeted at educational institutions, teams, and individuals. Ninety percent of Pressbooks’s revenue comes from providing the Pressbooks software as a service to educational institutions. In addition, a small amount of revenue comes from independent self-published authors and a partnership agreement with a company that sells to public libraries.

As Pressbooks’s core functionality is open source, it has always been possible for others to take the Pressbooks software and host it themselves. For example, BCcampus has done this for the B.C. post-secondary system for a number of years, which has resulted in that market being largely out of reach for Pressbooks. The trade-off has been that BCcampus has been a key ambassador for Pressbooks, which has helped Pressbooks grow and connect with new clients, especially in the early days. However, it does continue to be a concern that someone else will come along and compete directly with Pressbooks’s services by hosting the software for large communities themselves. As such, the development of additional, subscriber-only features has been key to ensure there are things Pressbooks can offer that another hosting service could not. So far, with a few exceptions, organizations have generally preferred to pay Pressbooks to handle the maintenance, support, security management and hosting rather than trying to do it internally; this includes some organizations who started out self-hosting the software.

Sharing Agreements

Pressbooks’s core functionality centers around the creation and publishing of books, and Pressbooks operates on the fundamental principle that tools supporting the making of books and content should remain open. This core functionality is built upon WordPress, an open source tool for creating websites. WordPress uses the General Public License (GPL), which requires that derivatives of the software retain the same license. As such, the core Pressbooks software is under the same license and anyone is able to take that software, host it themselves, and adapt it as they wish.

Although initially completely open source, Pressbooks has put considerable resources into developing new features and functionality that are proprietary and only available to Pressbooks clients and subscribers. This is a key part of Pressbooks’s business model to ensure that there are additional incentives for people to subscribe to Pressbooks directly rather than host the open source software themselves.

When determining what is released open source and what remains proprietary, Pressbooks looks at whether the new feature is related to the core functionality of creating and sharing books or if it is additional to that. For example, a feature related to book metadata would likely be released open source while a feature to support managing an institutional publishing network or passing student data back to a learning management system would likely remain proprietary. When Pressbooks takes on external development contracts, they have a conversation with the contracting organization and negotiate the license of the resulting software.

Although open source has presented a challenge when it comes to recruiting revenue and developing a sustainable business model, it has also played a key role in recruiting clients and building trust in the company. In the early days, big open source users like BCcampus contributed code to adapt the software for the specific needs of open textbooks and demonstrated the potential of Pressbooks for OER publishing to the wider OER community. In addition, people working in OER generally want to use open source tools where possible, even if open source isn’t key to the tool’s functionality. And finally, with open source, there is a guarantee that if at any time Pressbooks were to quadruple its prices or behave unethically, people could take their data and go somewhere else or set up their own Pressbooks network.

Community Engagement

The main community that Pressbooks engages with are those working in OER. Pressbooks works hard to connect with the OER community where they are by attending open education conferences, setting up booths, and facilitating panel discussions between open education leaders. Pressbooks continues this work online by organizing public webinars on topics of interest to the OER community. In addition, there are roles on the Pressbooks team that are dedicated to recruiting clients and supporting existing clients.

Unfortunately, Pressbooks has never had the capacity to facilitate a robust open source software development community around Pressbooks. Fostering that type of community takes time and energy, and it wasn’t something Pressbooks could prioritize when they were putting all their resources into prioritizing the needs of clients, and generating enough revenue to keep going.

Legal Considerations

Pressbooks works hard to ensure its software aligns with various legislation that its clients are expected to follow. Because Pressbooks has clients all over the globe, that legislation varies from place to place, from the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) in Ontario, Canada, to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union.

When onboarding new clients, Pressbooks is often asked to provide documentation that shows their compliance with legislation relevant to the jurisdiction of that client. For accessibility compliance, Pressbooks works to ensure their software aligns with WCAG AA standard, which is often the standard cited in accessibility legislation. To demonstrate this, Pressbooks fills out a Voluntary Product Assessment Template (VPAT) that shows a self-assessment of the accessibility of their software. Pressbooks is also asked to complete security reviews for new clients. These types of reviews can be labour intensive, and it has been valuable to have someone on the team who has in-depth knowledge about privacy compliance.

Pressbooks has policies and procedures built into their work to ensure the development work they do and new features they put out remain compliant with security and accessibility requirements and legislation. For example, for something like accessibility, these policies and procedures are built into the development process from the start. This ensures new features are more likely to be accessible from the beginning rather than having to retrofit and redesign, which can create a lot of extra work. In addition, to ensure their design is accessible to end users, Pressbooks occasionally has their software audited for accessibility and makes improvements based on those audits.

One of the values of working directly with Pressbooks is that clients benefit from the expertise and work the company does to ensure Pressbooks is compliant with these different requirements and laws, which is a significant amount of work.

Reflections and Learning

Challenges

A key challenge for Pressbooks is one that exists across the OER ecosystem: the value that OER and open educational technology generates for the educational systems is often not truly seen by the budget controllers in educational institutions. For instance, the financial inputs from educational institutions for OER (and by extension, Pressbooks) remains small relative to the spending on other educational technologies. In addition, there seems to be a lack of systems thinking in the OER space, which has made it hard to coordinate the financial side of things on a larger scale. In the end, although OER and open source software may be free to use, they are not free to make and maintain, and if open source is to endure, higher education needs to invest in it properly.

Successes

In the end, a stubborn commitment to Pressbooks’s principles has been key in building a successful, sustainable, mission-driven company.

Recommendations

When it comes to advocating for funding for open initiatives, it’s really important to understand what funders are trying to achieve, and to articulate how open can help them achieve that. It should be the case that “open” is an obvious choice, especially around things like student success. But, when designing these kinds of open programs, people working in open haven’t invested as much as they should in directly tracking the data about how a specific open program is moving a needle on something that is a priority for someone who controls a substantial budget. We need to know what those metrics are and demonstrate how an open initiative contributes to that priority to make the case that more should go into this effort rather than less. “Open is good for you” needs to be turned into a metric that is measurable if someone is going to continue to fund it.

Part 2: Pressbooks via Open Education Alberta: Shared Subscription

Alberta does not have a centralized organization supporting open education work in the province. As such, open initiatives have been community-driven. Following community practice discussions in May 2018, a province-wide Open Education Technology and Infrastructure working group was established between several Alberta academic institutions. The group identified the shared barrier of the lack of hosting and publishing infrastructure for open education work because many institutions did not have the institutional capacity to support local publishing and hosting technologies. In March 2021, Open Education Alberta was launched using a self-hosted instance of Pressbooks as the infrastructure for open education publishing.

The original service model for Open Education Alberta (2021-2024) used a self-hosted instance of Pressbooks organized at the University of Alberta. The University of Alberta provided access to the technical infrastructure free of charge to any interested Alberta institutions, while partner institutions joined a collaboration agreement. This agreement ensured that participating institutions agreed to manage the majority of the service load by providing direct support to their students, staff, and faculty to publish OER licensed content. Each partner institution was responsible for their own local service model that supported individual content creators and intersected with the provincial model around account creation, publication, licensing, and marketing.

The creation of content was a mediated process where institutional representatives would use a shared Google form to request the creation of books, the creation of user accounts and the publication of new books to the Pressbooks catalog. The publication of books was also mediated through a request form. University of Alberta staff would check requested books to ensure they had an OER-applicable Creative Commons License, that they had a downloadable file, and a statement of credit to the University of Alberta Library as the Pressbooks service host. Upon publication, all content was minted a DOI and ISBN from the University of Alberta Press and deposited into the University of Alberta Institutional Repository for preservation.

Because the network was self-hosted, there were no limits on the amount of books each institution could have and experiment with. The group also had several shared books and user accounts that could be used for teaching and demonstration purposes. Finally, a steering committee consisting of representatives from various institutions also existed to make decisions and steer the direction and vision of the program as it grew.

Sustainability Model

Organizational Structure and Governance

Over the four years of 2020-2024, Open Education Alberta grew to represent 14 institutions and one external organization. The group had published 65 books, with hundreds more in development. However, the group was growing out of the small grass-roots model that had been initially developed. Although the group was collaborative, administration and hosting of the Pressbooks instance was solely with the University of Alberta. That meant the University of Alberta was responsible for the technical support for all institutions and updating the Pressbooks software. University of Alberta institutional policies required Pressbooks to be upgraded within a few weeks of each new release for safety and security purposes. Pressbooks has a frequent upgrade schedule, so testing and upgrading the service was a time-consuming activity. In addition, the open source version of Pressbooks didn’t have some of the features they needed to effectively run a multi-institutional Pressbooks instance. This included the ability for faculty with approved institutional email addresses to create their own accounts or to have institution-specific network managers. With the open source version, all account creation had to go through the University of Alberta, and network managers had editing access to all books on the service, as well as the public facing website.

In 2022 it became unsustainable for the University of Alberta to continue their hosting of the Pressbooks service. As such, Open Education Alberta began to investigate a hosted network with Pressbooks that shared costs and administration responsibilities among all participating institutions, with Pressbooks taking over hosting and maintaining the software. In summer 2024 Open Education Alberta transitioned to a hosted network. Instead of funneling all work-flows through the University of Alberta, this new consortial model has required the development of a new governance model. Network administrators are now elected from across the participating institutions to manage the creation of books, coordinate user accounts, manage the public facing website, and respond to support requests. The University of Alberta Libraries still responds to publication requests as they continue to assign a DOI and ISBN to published content and deposit the downloaded Pressbook in their institutional repository.

The shared workflows have meant that Open Education Alberta has had to develop more robust shared service and policy documents. A Workflow and Participation guidelines document governs the group’s activities as whole. Open Education Alberta now has several governing committees including: a By-Laws and Administration project group, an Outreach Project Group, a Network Managers group, and a Steering Committee. Because the new consortia model requires a financial commitment to access Pressbooks, interested institutions can also join the community of practice without subscribing to the Pressbooks instance. Policy developments such as group by-laws that consider specific terms and procedures for the administrative roles are still in development, but readers can contact contact@openeducationalberta.ca for any policy and procedure documents or details of interest.

Revenue Model

Open Education Alberta now partners with The Alberta Library (TAL), a not-for-profit library consortium in Alberta who negotiated on behalf of OEA institutions to establish a contract with Pressbooks for a hosted network. Each institution has a different financial contribution determined by the number of books requested by an institutional representative and size of the institution. TAL coordinates the contract management and payment with Pressbooks on behalf of the group, allowing the group to focus on the community of practice and the content creation of OER.

Sharing Agreements

There are three levels of agreements in place in the management of Open Education Alberta: The negotiated contract between The Alberta Library and Pressbooks on behalf of all participating institutions, a collaboration agreement between TAL and each participating institution, and then each institution’s local agreements with their authors with terms that meet their institutional needs. Key to all these agreements is the requirement that materials published using the OEA platform are freely available, without barriers, as open educational resources.

Community Engagement

Beyond Pressbooks, Open Education Alberta is a community of practice for supporting the creation and adaptation of OER. While institutions now have to pay to access the Pressbooks tool, interested institutions and practitioners can still take part in community meetings and be involved with the group.

Members spent significant time and energy supporting the self-hosted Pressbooks. Now that this work is contracted to Pressbooks, Open Education Alberta is at an exciting time where this energy can be turned to engaging and growing our community of practice in new ways. It is exciting to see how this group will develop over time!

Reflection and Recommendations

The Open Education Alberta (OEA) service model developed quickly over a short period of time, so they can compare the experience of self-hosted to Pressbooks-hosted models. As a self hosted network, the University of Alberta was responsible for every software update and all front-line user technical support requests on behalf of all member institutions. This extra administrative work was incredibly time-consuming and meant that staff were focused on activities that maintained the service. On the other hand, self-hosting meant the University of Alberta had full control over the platform and could offer unlimited user accounts and books. For that reason, a policy about removing incomplete content was not a priority for them, especially given the understanding that authors might have to delay a project and come back to it years later.

As a hosted network, OEA now has support from Pressbooks in managing the infrastructure, updating the software, and responding to technical support requests. Sharing the network administration across institutions also means the workload does not fall to only one person, and also ensures greater sustainability of the network, as all participating institutions are working together to develop the program. One notable drawback of the hosted network is that it will require more mediation of content creation due to the book limits that each institution is subscribed to.

Looking at both experiences, depending on financial considerations, the technical abilities of staff, and organizational priorities, both options have benefits and challenges.

Resources

• Open Educational Resources Collaboration Agreement. The Alberta Library.
• Workflow and Participation Guidelines. Open Education Alberta.

Part 3: Pressbooks via BCcampus: Self-Hosting to Provide a Centralized Provincial Shared Service

In 2012, BCcampus received funding from the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education in British Columbia for the BC Open Textbook Project, which had the goal of identifying and creating open textbooks for 40 high-enrollment entry-level courses in the B.C. post-secondary system. As part of this project, BCcampus needed a tool to support the publication and sharing of OER. In 2014 they decided to adopt Pressbooks, as it was open source and took a web-first approach to publishing (BCcampus, 2014).

Initially, BCcampus was using Pressbooks to publish select open textbooks funded directly by BCcampus. In 2015, BCcampus decided to open up Pressbooks to all faculty and staff in British Columbia so they could experiment with and try out the platform. Since then, the BCcampus instance of Pressbooks has been self-hosted by BCcampus at no cost to the BC post-secondary system. It is a self-serve instance, meaning any person with a BC post-secondary institutional email address can create a Pressbooks account and use the tool to write and publish their own educational resources. As of October 2024, the BCcampus Pressbooks instance has over 2000 registered users, 300 of whom had been active in the previous four months. There are over 400 public books, 340 of which are under some kind of open license.

Sustainability Model

Organizational Structure and Governance

BCcampus is predominantly funded by the Ministry of Post-secondary Education and Future Skills in British Columbia, Canada, and is mandated to lead projects and facilitate collaboration in teaching, learning, and open education in alignment with B.C.’s post-secondary system priorities (BCcampus, n.d.). BCcampus is made up of three core units: Learning & Teaching, Open Education, and the Project Management Office. In addition, BCcampus has three support units, including Communications and Engagement, IT Services, and Operations. The leads of each unit report to the Executive Director, who reports to the Steering Committee, BCcampus’s governing body. The Steering Committee includes ministry representatives, senior post-secondary administrators, and leads from other post-secondary and Indigenous education organizations based in B.C. BCcampus is not a legal entity and as such is administered by Simon Fraser University via an agreement with the ministry.

The Pressbooks service operated by BCcampus for the B.C. post-secondary system does not have a formalized governance model. It is jointly operated internally by the Pressbooks product owner on the Open Education team and the IT Services team. The Pressbooks product owner is predominantly responsible for the front end of Pressbooks and user support. The IT Services team is responsible for the back end of Pressbooks, ensuring the software is secure and operating as expected. The Pressbooks product owner and IT Services team get together a few times a year to update the software. Decisions about Pressbooks at BCcampus are made in consultation between the Open Education and IT Services teams, with the Open Education team providing strategic direction and identifying priorities.

Revenue Model

BCcampus has funded the self-hosted Pressbooks service through a combination of annual operating funds from the ministry, additional project funds from the ministry, and project funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. As such, BCcampus has made Pressbooks available to the B.C. post-secondary system at no cost. This has allowed BCcampus to provide a free, centralized service without needing to generate revenue from users or recover costs. This centralized structure ensures a more efficient use of public funds and human resources.

The initial costs of setting up Pressbooks at BCcampus in 2014 was covered through targeted government funding for the B.C. Open Textbook Project. The lead developer on the project at BCcampus dedicated significant time to developing plugins for Pressbooks so the tool would include features specific to textbooks. Much of this code was incorporated back into the core Pressbooks platform (BCcampus, 2014).

The ongoing cost of operating Pressbooks has generally been covered through BCcampus’s annual operating funds. The Pressbooks software is open source, so BCcampus does not pay for the software, but it does pay for the costs that go into hosting, maintaining, and supporting the software, most of which goes towards salaries and hosting infrastructure. Here is a breakdown of approximate annual operating costs for Pressbooks at BCcampus as of 2024:

• $1000 – Support software (Issue management software, knowledge base, code management software)
• $200 – Operating software: WP security plugin, Prince XML
• $0 – Domains – covered by bccampus.ca
• $0 – Encryption certificates – covered by bccampus.ca
• $66,500 – Labour
  • $31,250 – Systems Administrator (0.25 FTE)
  • $12,500 – Developer (0.1 FTE)
  • $22,750 – Front-end administrator and user support (0.35 FTE)
• $25,000 – SFU Hosting Technical Infrastructure and System Administration

Total: $92,700

In addition to annual operating costs, at times BCcampus has been able to dedicate resources to developing new features for Pressbooks, either internally at BCcampus or by hiring external contractors. This has generally been possible due to additional project funds received either from the ministry or the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has funded open education projects at BCcampus for a number of years.

Sharing Agreements

Regarding sharing mechanisms, licenses, and agreements that are relevant for the BCcampus Pressbooks instance, there are three things discuss:

1. The relationship between BCcampus and its user community;
2. The licenses of content published on the Pressbooks platform by users; and
3. The license of the software itself, including features developed using BCcampus resources.

BCcampus began offering Pressbooks accounts to faculty and staff in the B.C. post-secondary system in 2015 to allow them to explore and experiment with the tool. Since then, Pressbooks has grown into a key tool for open education practitioners in British Columbia, as many use it in their teaching and publishing. However, due in part to the emergent way Pressbooks use developed in B.C., BCcampus has never established a formal service agreement with Pressbooks users. In practice, anyone with a B.C. post-secondary email address can create a Pressbooks account and create and publish content using the platform without restraint. This open approach to giving out accounts has some benefits, as it ensures that all institutions have access to the service, no matter their financial resources, and it ensures there is a low barrier to experimenting with Pressbooks and publishing OER. However, it also comes with some challenges and risks as the number of accounts and books on the platform has ballooned.

As for content published by users, BCcampus doesn’t oversee what gets published and doesn’t dictate what licenses people apply to their work. Content creators retain the copyright of their work and are responsible for the content they publish as well as following licensing terms and copyright law applicable to content they are using or adapting from others (OER Production Team, 2021). In general, most content published in Pressbooks is under a Creative Commons license, an open copyright license that allows anyone to use, edit, and share the resource for free.

As for the Pressbooks software, when BCcampus first started using Pressbooks, BCcampus had a dedicated open source developer who installed, configured and maintained the Pressbooks platform. BCcampus felt it was important to not only use an open source product for the open textbook project, but also actively contribute back to the Pressbooks eco-system to support the sustainability of the platform. As such, the BCcampus developer wrote code for new features and contributed that code back to the Pressbooks core platform under an open license, which allowed BCcampus to contribute to Pressbooks in a way that benefited both BCcampus and Pressbooks. Although this happens less often now, BCcampus is occasionally able to contribute to the development of new Pressbooks features.

Community Engagement

BCcampus works to engage with three groups of people around their Pressbooks service: community users, other organizations self-hosting Pressbooks, and the Pressbooks company.

Community users include instructors, faculty, and staff at B.C. post-secondary institutions that are using, sharing, creating, and adapting open educational resources in Pressbooks. To support these users, BCcampus works to build awareness and provide training and resources for Pressbooks. The support resources include an annual live webinar series called the OER Production Series that covers the basics of OER, Creative Commons licenses, Pressbooks, and accessible design. This series is recorded so it’s available for someone to watch at any time. In addition, BCcampus maintains written guides and video tutorials. In general, the support resources are designed to be multimodal and allow people to navigate them on their own time. BCcampus also has an OpenEd help email where people can reach out with questions or if they need help.

The next group that BCcampus aims to connect with are other organizations who host the open source version of Pressbooks. Since there are many self-hosted open source users, BCcampus occasionally comes across software bugs and errors that are from the local hosting environment and can be hard to diagnose. Reaching out to other open source networks for help and insight has proven valuable. These relationships have generally been relatively informal, with emails being exchanged back and forth when issues arise.

And the final group that BCcampus works to retain a positive relationship with is the Pressbooks company. When BCcampus first adopted Pressbooks, BCcampus worked closely with Pressbooks to develop new features for the platform. Contributing code back to Pressbooks is something BCcampus continues to do as resources allow, but in general this happens less often now. Pressbooks has grown as a company and now develops features that are geared to an open education audience more so than it did in its early days. In addition, BCcampus has focused on supporting a growing user base for the self-hosted platform, which has required spending more time on ensuring uptime of the platform rather than developing new features. BCcampus continues to engage with Pressbooks through their GitHub repository, reporting bugs, submitting feature requests, and staying up to date with new releases, as well as attending Pressbooks webinars and info sessions and connecting with them at conferences.

Legal Considerations

Two pieces of legislation that are relevant to an organization hosting software and operating in British Columbia include the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIPPA) and the Accessible British Columbia Act. To ensure the privacy and security of content and user data, BCcampus regularly updates the software and dependencies to ensure the software remains secure. In addition, BCcampus uses servers that are based in British Columbia to ensure all data is stored locally. As for accessibility, the legislation is still quite new, so there are not yet clearly defined standards to follow. However, the company that runs Pressbooks has customers in other jurisdictions, including Ontario and the United States, that do have mature accessibility legislation. As an open source user, BCcampus benefits from the work Pressbooks does to ensure the platform is accessible. In addition, BCcampus works to support its community users in creating content that is accessible for students with disabilities through regular webinars and written guides.

Reflections and Learning

Challenges

• Adapting as the service grows. The B.C. Community Pressbooks instance started as a sandbox for interested faculty and staff to experiment with Pressbooks. Over the years, it has developed into a trusted publishing tool used by multiple institutions and educators across B.C. As the user base has grown, so too have the infrastructure requirements. This has resulted in a significant increase in hosting costs over the years as well as a greater need for user support and formalized procedures and policies.
• Maintaining a regular update schedule. Keeping the Pressbooks software up to date has been challenging. BCcampus has a very small IT Services team who are often working on multiple projects at a time — Pressbooks maintenance is only a small part of their work. In addition, Pressbooks updates are generally very resource-intensive and require careful, methodical testing to ensure proper set up and functionality.
• Cleaning up abandoned accounts and books. Allowing anyone with a BC post-secondary email address to create a Pressbooks account and experiment with the platform means there are a lot of abandoned accounts and books. We have had to develop processes and mechanisms for identifying those accounts and books and how to remove them.
• Platform content moderation. The BCcampus Pressbooks instance is set up so anyone with a B.C. post-secondary email address can create an account and publish content online. The positive part of this is that it makes knowledge creation and sharing easy and many incredible OER have been created at institutions independent of BCcampus’s knowledge and support. The risk, however, is that offensive and inappropriate content could be published on the platform.

Successes

Having a B.C.-specific Pressbooks instance that any B.C. faculty and staff member can use to publish open content has been vital to the success and growth of open education in B.C. Since Pressbooks is designed for open education and web publishing, it is easy for people with limited technical experience to create accessible content, clearly openly license it, and have that content be used and findable on the web. In addition, as account creation and publication is largely unrestricted, it has allowed for the decentralization of OER creation and publishing in the province. While many OER in Pressbooks are published via BCcampus grant programs or institutional OER publishing programs, many are also the result of an individual or small team getting together on their own to create and share open content that is relevant for their context.

Recommendations

• Develop a content and account removal process and do it regularly. This will ensure that abandoned content and accounts do not build up and become a drain on server resources. This can be labour-intensive, so having automated tools to support this type of work is helpful.
• Have a business owner for the platform. This is someone who sets strategic priorities, supports users, and ensures the platform continues to meet the needs of the organization and users.

References

BCcampus. (n.d.). About us. https://bccampus.ca/about-us/

BCcampus. (2014, October 16). The BC Open Textbook Project turns 2. https://bccampus.ca/2014/10/16/the-bc-open-textbook-project-turns-2/

OER Production Team. (2021, November 26). Content disclaimer. Pressbooks Guide. https://opentextbc.ca/pressbooks/chapter/content-disclaimer/

Open Education Alberta. (n.d.) About. https://pressbooks.openeducationalberta.ca/

Mays, E. (2015, May 29). Pressbooks releases new offering for academic and library publishing, open educational resources. Pressbooks. https://web.archive.org/web/20200322024312/https://pressbooks.com/2015/05/29/new-offering-academic-library-publishing-open-education-resources/

Taylor, S. (2024, February 27). Five things to know about Canada’s proposed law to guard against online harms. CTV News. https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/five-things-to-know-about-canada-s-proposed-law-to-guard-against-online-harms-1.6785283