Welcome I want I want to welcome you today to this session and I will be introducing Fred Schellenberg with or from American Organization for Immigrants. Fred will be talking to us about the needs of the immigration population so thank you Fred for being with us and welcome again everybody thank you for joining us at this summit and I hope you enjoy the session Fred. Okay good morning. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you all today. I'd like to talk about three things this morning. First of all a little bit of a commercial for my organization, American Organization for Immigrants. Then I'd like to talk a little bit about the process that we share and partner with on the interfaith welcoming coalition to help the migrants coming up from Central America to to the United States and then finally and and while I'm talking about that I would also like to describe some of the needs of the migrants as they pass through San Antonio and then finally I'd like to talk briefly on some of the issues that are confronting the folks that are on the border waiting to seek asylum to come into the United States particularly in the in with the drop of this coronavirus. Okay first of all our goal is really based on the same issues that our immigration laws are based on. That is the basis of preserving family unity and that's assisting with family-based petitions. What does that mean? It means that if somebody has come to San Antonio from Mexico for example and they're a lawful permanent resident but their family is still down in Guadalajara, we help that person go through all the paperwork and the necessary protocols and procedures to have that family prepared to immigrate to the United States. Of course the ultimate path is the next step is to seek citizenship and we help those folks in the application process but one of the things that we also do is that we help them with English as a second language and the civic and history courses because as you know when you take the citizenship exam you have to answer out of about 120 different questions things about the history of the United States and how our government is organized. And finally we offer low-cost immigration services and those services that we provide and we're accredited by the Department of Justice to perform these services and these are services related to legal immigration services related to asylum, renewal of DACA, employment authorization and so forth. In a broader sense the think of us is that we offer help and information about the immigration process and path to law for permanent residence and citizenship. Furthermore we provide to our low income clients orientation on how to adapt to the cultural changes and responsibilities to live in our country the importance of learning English and how to prepare for things like finding meaningful employment. Part of this is a basis that we started the NGO about three years ago and that had to do with we were volunteers at different other organizations in the city and we had learned that there was not one place where a person who wanted some help go to get everything done at the same time. And so we started this NGO in 2017 and what we really are like coaches and so we answer questions about employment about what it means to get your child in school as well as doing the legal paperwork to become a law for permanent citizen. You know and our vision really is to ensure that our clients integration is as legal permanent residence and citizens here in the United States. We're open Monday through Thursday and most evenings and Saturdays with appointments. We're easy to find we're right across the street from Thomas Jefferson High School on Donaldson and those are our phone numbers 210-250-762-210-454-2164 and we're fluent in Spanish so don't worry about that. Okay and our goals for this year started at the beginning and really are focused on family unity and so our plan is to have four citizenship workshops for lawful permanent residence and what does that mean? That means about a two and a half to three hour session where we explain the documents that are needed what the requirements are to become a lawful for a lawful permanent resident to become a U.S. citizen and how to fill out the forms and pay the fees and so forth. The other goal for this year is for tutorial classes for the citizenship interview. We go through a series of sessions. I've got a series of online learning programs that help people learn the answers and study what it means to be a U.S. citizen and these are done in English as for some clients who don't speak English very well we have the courses in Spanish as well and depending on their age and the amount of time that they've been in the United States they may be able to take the examination and the interview in Spanish. We also seek to expand the expansion of our capability to assist asylum cases. Part of our effort with the Interfaith Welcoming Coalition is to help those arriving from Central America and oftentimes those folks they are asking for asylum and many times without having a representative or an attorney working for them they don't realize the implication of meeting the deadlines staying in touch with the immigration service showing up for the immigration court appearances or appearing at the scheduled hearings with the Immigration Customs Enforcement Service. When they miss these deadlines and don't show up then they're very liable to face deportation even in absence you know. One of the things that I'd like to just point out and I'm sure you all recognize the importance of this is the number of immigrants that we have here in San Antonio. Our San Antonio population is about two and a half million more or less and about 15 I would say about 15 percent are immigrants in San Antonio so it's a sizeable portion and the foreign-born households spend about this given the ratio in the population they spend about 15 percent of the 30 to 35 billion dollars in gross sales in the San Antonio area each year and that's about five billion dollars so the immigrant population is an important element in making San Antonio work. Our focus or the clients that as clients are those folks who are here in San Antonio as law enforcement residents and can have the possibility of becoming citizens we're constantly reaching out through our connections here in San Antonio through the city of San Antonio Immigration Liaison Service through different churches through the Interfaith welcoming coalition and our partnerships with other NGOs here in San Antonio to help folks that are looking for a low-cost and and we do a lot of pro bono work as well we're all volunteers in this organization. Now I'd like to talk a little bit about the migration issues that we have for those folks that are the women mostly that are coming to San Antonio from Central America. One of the issues that we've all read about in the paper and are acutely aware of is the violence against women in Central America and this slide is just to highlight some of the points that 50 percent of the murders of women in Guatemala are gang related, 90 percent of the murders are not prosecuted in Guatemala and are the top five countries for female murders three of them are in Central America, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Well these women have a lot of reasons to be fleeing from those countries and coming up to the United States unfortunately the atmosphere that we have here in the United States is making it more and more difficult for them and their children and and husbands to get asylum and that's why it's important that we feel that it's important that we expand our capability to help those folks arriving to the United States and and seeking asylum. Steps in the journey. I live for about 20 years in Mexico and worked in Mexico and Central America and it's not an easy trip. Travel north through Mexico generally they have been surrendering at the border most of the folks that are coming up don't have visas to travel to the United States so they're either coming across the border at the checkpoints and that's where some of the administration's policies about remaining Mexico and the Mexico protocols mean that people have to wait in in Mexico and shelters and halfway houses until their number comes up for an interview. If they do go across the border illegally entering without inspection and are picked up by a border patrol agent they're placed in detention and that's even changing now and I'll talk about I'll talk more about that later but if they convince the Border Patrol Agent in that first instance that they are seeking asylum and they have a credible fear they're then detained in something called the icebox in Iveara and I've been in some of these offices of the Border Patrol on the border and they're cold. I don't know if it's because the agents spend so much time out in the hot sun and when they come in the office they want to feel the flesh but it's cold in those and so the folks that are coming up when they're held in detention they have these names for that and the dog pound and while they're processing if they pass that initial step then they will be held in in detention. Here's a snapshot of the routes that folks are using. Most of the folks that are coming up from Central America are crossing over through Guatemala at Tapachula. Some are coming over at Tinosique over on the eastern side of Mexico but it seems to me that most of them are passing through Tapachula and it's a you know everybody has their own way of coming up. A lot of them are using coyotes and the amount of money that they're paying for a coyote depends between five to ten thousand dollars. They also are using in common a very waste to get to the United States either by using the la bestia or using a bus or using friends to give them rides as they hop Scott across Mexico to the U.S. border. One time we had more folks coming across and going up through Tijuana entering Tijuana through the California point but now the statistics indicate that most of the folks that are coming up from Central America are passing from into Texas from Ciudad Juarez all the way down to Matamoros. I've seen this trained and this is this is a real photo. It's incredible and I'm sure many of you have seen the movies that they talk about the travels and the violence. Folks that are coming on this thing are subject to extortion. The women are particularly vulnerable and it's just very hard. I can't believe how they must be suffering so much in Honduras or Guatemala or Salvador to flee and take the list and come up in these in these areas. This is a snapshot of holding facility. In this is a facility of the Mexican immigration in Tapachua where they separate the men the men women and children are separated from the men and they're terribly overcrowded and again given the background of the coronavirus you can see how if someone is detained it'd be very difficult to maintain the social distance and once the viruses start spreading there it's just going to spread like a wildfire. I just don't know how we're going to be able to help folks in that condition. Here's one of the board patrol facilities in Brownsville and you can see how they have folks on the pallets they're stacked in there very close together. They're on these mats and the aluminum foil it's not very thick it tears easily and the food that they're given is not a taco not a tortilla but generally it's a ham and cheese sandwich in a bun and then you're not used to having those things and that's all you get. It's not very very appetizing but it is something. After the process extends and assuming that the person has made that initial threshold for credible fear they're moved to in Texas they're moved to family detention facilities depending on their background and who they are and if they've got a criminal activity to eat a dilly or a car in Texas I've actually gone down the car and helped the women there prepare for their second level of credible fear interviews when they meet with an asylum office. Many times that particular interview is done over TV and the judge is here in San Antonio. We also have while the majority of the folks speak Spanish but there's a significant number that do not Spanish it's not their initial their main language and we wind up using an interpreter by the telephone so it's all very complicated for someone that is being thrust into this and without representation and the fact that they're being confronted by using a telephone to do the interpretation and then it has to be translated into English it makes it very confusing for a person who's trying to give their declaration about why they're why they fear for themselves why they left their country and why they fear to return and those are two separate questions and asylum officers go to these various various times. Many times when I'm seeking the women I ask them tell me what happened when you had your first child and they can tell me the time of day where they were who was with them what the clothes were how the room smelled what happened and so forth and I use that as an example to say these are the kinds of details that you have to include in your declaration of why you left El Salvador Guatemala Honduras and why you're afraid to return. Clearly one of the aspects of it is the trauma that these women and men have experienced as they fled from their home countries and sometimes that clouds their memory and they can't remember all the details and so that's why having a representative help them through the process is so so important that helps them clarify it helps them focus helps them remember some of the detail and by going through these interviews several times person has a much better chance of gaining asylum here in the United States. The other points is that these administration these facilities have been expanded as you've seen on the television and the news reporting not only do we have the fixed facilities in Carnes-Dilly and and in Burks, Pennsylvania which is a much smaller one Carnes has about the capability for about 1500 people Dilly is I think about 2500 people not full right now given the shutdown on the border but that's the capacity and the Trump administration is budgeted for expansion of 10 facilities. These facilities were operated by private companies and they're for profit and the statistical numbers that are the financial numbers that come out of these companies show that it's really expensive on the way that we're handling and detaining our people coming to the United States seeking asylum. I guess the bottom line is is that we don't need to be protected from asylum seeking family we need to be protecting them it is a prison like a facility and there's inadequate medical care we've had expanding instances and use community health workers we know that it's really important to make sure you give the right dosage for the vaccine for the medicine for flues or coals and stuff like that and oftentimes the dosages were larger than what was needed and there was a reaction to that. They are awaiting the credible fair interviews while they're in detention but if there's folks like me are not going down to help them in the representation they will have to do that on their own and if they fail that credible fear then they will probably be deported and they can be held in detention while that process is underway for several weeks. We've had people women stay in carns for as much as six to eight weeks. Hard to read this slide but the point I wanted to make here is that there's several ways that somebody can come to the United States seeking asylum. One there's a refugee process which means a person is asking to come to the United States from outside of the United States. These should be the refugees seeking to come to the United States from Afghanistan from Iraq from Syria and they go through a vetting process through the United Nations and then the United States wants the United States exception. Under the Trump administration that number has been cut back to 18,000 a year. We used to be allowing in between 85 to 100,000 applicants every year so it's a real closing of our welcoming arms to folks that want to seek asylum as a refugee in the United States. The other way that folks, people can come into the United States is that they have a passport and they have a visa to travel into the United States. They enter into the United States, enter with inspection and once here they decide that they don't want to go back to their home country for a variety of reasons. Once they do that they can then ask for asylum. The third way is when somebody doesn't have the travel documents and this is what happens to a lot of the people coming up from Central America. They come up to Mexico, they go to the border and then they cross the border and at a port of entry and they tell the board of patrol that they want to, they're asking for asylum. Our process when the numbers weren't so great was rather straightforward. There would be an interview and if the board of patrol person thought that the story was reasonable and there was sufficient reason to allow that person to come in, the person would be admitted and then go through this process that I've already described about being in detention while there was a credible fear interview by an asylum officer. If they don't want to wait and they decide to just come in they'll cross the border without inspection and that's what's happened and that's part of the reason that the administration has had such severe reactions to people coming across the border. Those entering in that way they can still ask for asylum but the process is a little more difficult now. I'll talk more about that later. American Organization of immigrants, we're partners with the San Antonio Interfaith welcoming coalition and you may know this that the coalition came together in 2014 in response to the huge surge of people coming up from Central America. I volunteer on Tuesdays with Interfaith at the airport and what I do there is I have a set of backpacks and when the folks are brought to the airport by the Customs and Immigration Service which means that they pass their credible fear interview and they have a one-year period to be in the United States and file officially formally for asylum and they have a person or contact that they're going to stay with here in the United States and what we do is we have a backpack that's got some supplies for them and we help them get their airplane tickets. Generally their family members or the person that they're going to stay with has bought the airplane ticket for them and we help them go through security, help them get to their gate, show them what it means to transfer from one air to if there's a layover how they have to go from one airline to the other as they find their way and we also make contact with the person that's going to help them at the destination and make sure they're going to be there at the destination airport to pick them up and take care of them. I get a lot of phone calls from these travelers as after they reach their destination they call back again it's just having somebody that they can talk to and they have questions about well what happens if I miss my appointment or I'm not in the same location that I at the same address that I gave when I first filed for asylum here in the United States or am I most of them a lot all of them but a fair number of them have an electronic monitoring device agree yet they and they have questions about that it's not charged up so it's just having somebody that can reach out and and and help them kind of navigate the process as they seek to do obtain asylum here asylum here in the United States. There's a snapshot of famous bus stop downtown St. Mary's in Navarro. Here we are. Generally the volunteers are at the bus stop from sometimes early at 6 30 in the morning till 8 9 10 o'clock at night and I have to say that the people at the Greyhound bus station have been incredible. They're always out alerting us if there's somebody that seems to be lost or has come up without the necessary paperwork or they need a place to stay overnight partners with the interfaith or Catholic charities they oftentimes will provide support for overnight housing and then tonight church downtown on South St. Mary's will help out and of course with the interfaith welcoming coalition we sometimes will help out United Methodist when we had the surge last year we and we were using the resources of the city of San Antonio for the migrant resources which was incredible. We were using United Methodist there at Travis Park for overnight lodging. The travelers on the bus is it's a little more difficult because normally the bus ride is two or three days so we have a more a larger backpack I guess is the way I would say it in terms of the the material that we give these people help them on their way and we also if necessary can make a cash cash outlay if they don't don't have any money at all and generally they don't but most of the time our support is through material in the backpacks and snacks and stuff like that at the airport it's a little more straightforward the only difficulty at the airport is that for most of the travelers they haven't flown before and so there you're we're showing them what it means to travel by air what it means to go through the security checkpoints how to get their tickets explaining to them what it means to ride on the plane how to find their seats and then we also check in with the ticket agents to make sure that there's an assist that somebody can speak Spanish if they're going to Houston or going to Atlanta that there will be somebody there to help them on their way as they make make their layover and seek onward transportation it's hard to read this slide but this is a sample of the material that we're providing in our bus station backpack there's toiletries toothbrushes and personal hygiene we also provide snacks fruit bars and apples and these are done by different volunteers in different churches in the in the San Antonio area that make up these lunch bags for us and then we store them and then portion them out as we need them on the bus we can provide bottles of water and we also provide small blankets during the winter we're providing also hoodies because it gets cold and and depending on the age of the child and whether the child is healthy or not we sometimes will provide a little bit of cough medicine or some baby aspirins and that sort of stuff what's been the impact of the immigration policy changes for example in 2019 we gave out almost night well 18 500 backpacks and our rule of thumb is that we give out a backpack not for every child but for every family and most of the time the family is two people so you can see that you know 35 40 000 people at the airport we gave out about 7 000 backpacks in 2020 as of the end of march we've only given out 412 backpacks at the bus station and 341 at the airport so you can see how the policy changes implemented by the trump administration have really shut down the border so the interfaith is doing more with the increased focus is now on advocacy we're being asked to write letters to our congressmen and senators to help education at the state level and particularly working and and appealing to dhs uh to be aware of the humanitarian aspects of our immigration policy the other thing that we're doing is that we're providing more support for our border partners we just provided a donation of about 40 some odd thousand dollars 45 thousand dollars to eight different shelters in the real ground that's well from the real grand valley all the way up to uh cedad well laredo and uh this is both in uh in the united states we also did in the web laredo el paso cedad four is san bonito egopas pietr nagr uh rionosa that's one of the ways that the interfaiths can help um alleviate some of the difficulties for those working in the front lines so to speak at the shelters on the border if you'd care to make a donation here's our website the interface welcome coalition dot or donate or if you would like to mail a check you can just mail a check to the interfaith welcome coalition care in the university presbyterian church at 300 bushnell san antonio texas so what's happened uh with the new protocols okay the one uh that is and this is still undergoing uh legal challenges is the migration protection protocol mpp or common called remain in mexico it's been in force since january 29 and it meters those seeking asylum to stay in mexico given the corona virus and the credit conditions and the shelters on the border uh there there's all kinds of problems uh waiting there and now uh we've had refinements to the mpp and one is called the prompt asylum claim review pacr and that's for uh persons is not a mexican is set for an interview that person has on the border has a 24 hour window to seek legal assistance in preparation for an asylum interview and that's when they come across the border in the morning and there's an interview by television and then they're they're shuffled back over into mexico to wait for the decisions it's almost impossible to do this uh the uh accredited representatives like myself or the attorneys that are working on the border means that we really have to be on call 24 hours a day and and be able to respond when somebody calls to to go to the border or in the border area go to these facilities and oftentimes it's that we have to do it by telephone because the border patrol says whether it's just not a space to do this or because of the coronavirus uh virus we can't have more people in the in this tent courtroom that they've set up if the asylum interview is not successful then that person is placed in what we call expedited removal and again has to remain in cbp detention until deported and that can be uh very quick less than a day the humanitarian asylum process is the same process but it's for mexican citizens finally uh the one of the rules that the trump administration has tried to put and it's still under legal uh challenges that's the protocol that's based on immigration in europe it says the person coming to the united states has to first has to ask for asylum in the first country that they've entered after leaving their home country mexico uh guadama hunders the government is talking to them about that but it's not uh it's given in my understanding it's not a uh an agreed upon procedure the goal of the emergency models is to reduce the number of detainees in u.s custody and to reduce the risk of spreading these infections across the border stations and and the flow of unauthorized border crossings has plunged since these measures were implemented on saturday march 21st for example we were at the border patrol reported they were averaging about a thousand per day for the border and a week later it was down to about 600 per day and then under these rules uh the u.s border patrol agents are processing these migrants from mexico guadama el sábado and hunders in the field before they're even able to set foot in the united states that means that they are staying in border and it it gives a lot of authority to the border patrol agent one estimate that i've heard is that migrants who cross in the united states illegally are being expelled to mexico in an average of 96 minutes under these emergent sequel measures so bottom line is what do they need okay well you've seen some of the stuff from the backpacks but uh part of the part of the issue is as community health workers i think is just the trauma that folks that are in our area that do arrive to the san antonio area is that they need they need legal assistance to maintain the stay here in the united states and they need legal assistance and it's not only myself but other non-profit organizations that can help them do this work on a pro bono that's the main thing the other issue that i the other thing that i think where they need help is just understanding what it means to be seeking asylum here in the united states and understand what access they might have to medical help to outreach programs from the city of san antonio okay that's about all i have to say this morning thank you very much for your attention um if there are any questions i'd be to be happy to take them and try to answer all right great um so we do have a couple of questions friend uh first of all before before i forget um we do have uh some people asking if you can share the power point if we can go ahead and share that with everyone and i know that it does contain information as far as your contact information as well as um you know the list of items to be donated so will that be available to share with everyone yes i need to um i don't want to well let me uh send that to you later okay okay perfect and we can talk a little bit more definitely all right and so we have one of our questions um what about people on hold for immigration in the bair county joe normally they would process out of pierce all and be taken to the border within a month right now they seem to not be moving anyone is this a violation of rights uh who is working on that and how long can they be held before deportation actually that's a very good question the uh rule is is that they're supposed to be only held in detention in these processes for 72 hours but because of the the emergency uh model that's being used we've had people uh in in detention for as long as a week and but it's and there are court cases pending on that okay and do they explain the public charge law to the clients no okay the public charge law was just implemented on uh february the 24th and um there's a lot of confusion about folks that are receiving who may be receiving for example some of the benefits that the federal government will be providing under the care act or if people are accepting medical help my understanding from what i've read from the united states citizens uh immigration service is that receiving benefits under the care act will not affect their status as as a public charge that said however if the person is in the process of applying for law firm to residents or is in the process for applying for citizenship they're going to have to answer the question truthfully that they've accepted the public benefit then they need to explain exactly what the circumstances was and that's the guidance that us cis is providing to uh folks like me to help uh in the application process but and what about um any immigrants that may not be spanish speaking or outside of the san antonio area are you assisting them we uh there are different organizations our focus is mostly for those who are spanish capable but there are different other NGOs here in san antonio that can handle uh different languages if in fact we have somebody that's speaking quiche your mom from central america we have access to translation services to help those folks in the process okay and so i imagine that part of this would be uh they can reach out to you uh at the information you'll provide on the okay great thank you very much for everything right and thank you everyone okay thank you very much and we're going to go get on to the next session


aren't we right? Okay we are now recording so sorry about that everyone and let's get the slides back up okay so yes so this is this is going to be focusing on open textbooks and there we are and having a sort of a replay but also a kind of a new discussion really with some great questions that we've got lined up for our panel members um Dara and Laura um and um yeah that'll take most of the session hopefully there'll be time for you to ask questions as well and we're really looking forward to it yeah okay so shall we get started with our copyright news so uh no well we're just going to do a quick since we last met of course um so what's been what's been happening um I spent uh I was in Oxford where I work on Monday at the Thatcher Education Centre so there's a picture of me uh of course not the first time actually you've been in the presence of no indeed because I grew up in Finchley I grew up in that's where I grew up she was our local constituency MP so I once did in country dancing form under Thatcher so I was remembering that reminiscing um but yeah slightly uh juxtaposed this image there as well of us with Lucy and Evie they may join us they may at some point some people might have met them at icepops yeah yeah and we've kind of got them on our mind this something in the pipeline isn't there there will come clearer there is so we don't need to say much more about no we don't but they're still here no they're hanging around we're trying to keep them quiet actually because the constant chatter about copyright just worse than us so okay next up is just a reminder about the um the the blog um archive of all the webinar recordings and if you miss any sessions just to let you know that these sessions will all go up onto the alt youtube channel as well so today's session will be available um fairly quickly usually by Monday um on the alt youtube channel but you can see the full listing of the webinars um which I think Chris is going to put in the chat are you um no no I won't okay I'm not okay he's not getting right I think everyone knows where that is yeah yeah yeah so let's get going with our next item which is okay so um I'll take you through a bit of this copyright news yeah um there's loads loads of things that we thought we'd like to share with you the first thing um was we were really delighted to have a blog post that we put up this week um from Katie Wise who um attended Ice Pops um she is not a copyright person um so she is a library assistant um and she's actually one of the new professionals on the information literacy group committee and um we were really delighted to be able to offer her a place at the conference and she came along and she shared what she calls some of the flavors of copyright um with her reflections on attending the conference and in particular a question she asked the panel at the end our expert panel um about what um new professionals needed to know about copyright and how they keep themselves up to date and things like that so really great to see um that post from Katie and um it was lovely to meet her at the conference um next up was um the uh news story that I expect many of you have been following um about um Wiley's ebook titles that were removed um from their collection um I think this happened at some time at the end of August yeah um and it's um been certainly um doing the rounds on on Twitter and on some of the mailing lists about the problems that this is concerned this is this is caused and also to sort of um to encourage people to have a look at whether some of their academics and their authors have had their titles removed as well um because um obviously you know it's important for people um to know what's happening to books that they're writing for students that they think are available um there's a little bit of a kind of I guess hot off the press news that came out with a press release from Wiley just earlier this week so if you haven't picked this up yet um that Wiley have now said well that that after quite a bit of pressure on social media um and through sort of lobbying them um that they are working to restore access to the ebooks as soon as possible um they're saying that the materials will remain in the collection through to June 2023 um so I think it's a watch this space actually of what happens I know acquisitions librarians collection development people have been very um concerned about this so um I think we have to keep a watching brief but very relevant to the topic we're going to be talking about today which is um is is obviously related to to that when we talk about the the idea of open textbooks as a potential alternative absolutely um so the next one is a webinar that the knowledge rights 21 project is running and that's on the 26th of October um and it is uh book digitization online access and lending as far as I can tell tell the we're talking about that very topic of the ebook um SOS ebook crisis as well as controlled digital lending and all of those questions that people are looking at now about how can copyright law either flex or be interpreted to support uh providing access to materials so that will be an interesting one to see where that project has got to so the link to that is there excellent um and then um another item I just thought was worth picking up um world culture there's actually a podcast I think by that same title as well but this is a a book that's been published by um uh an author um glin moody who writes um quite a bit in the this sort of copyright digital collection sort of space um this book is actually available for a free download as well so you can get a pdf you can also get an epub version um and we've just popped the link in um there um but as it it's described as it's a journey behind the copyright bricks it's um it's certainly a book um I'm looking forward to reading um and I have been following the the the podcast by the same title which has had interviews with some really interesting people CEO of creative commons was one I really enjoyed as well yeah yeah and Cory Doctorow yeah and yeah yeah so great a great um read um which I'm looking forward to and then um kind of on the topic of reading um I um I've been I'm actually working on a piece to write up a study that I did last year on student reading preferences during the pandemic um and while I was doing that um and doing a bit of the literature review searching um came across um the article um it was published very recently in the journal of the Association for Learning Developers in Higher Education which is all about student uh sort of perceptions of reading online it's not specifically during the pandemic that study but it is a really interesting read and kind of got some implications at the end for what people who work as learning developers do I was interested in it from the perspective of what we do as librarians and educators um we've got a quote from the second article haven't we we have yeah um the second article is actually by um a good friend of mine I've been collaborating with Diane Mizraki who's at UCLA um and Alicia Salas for a little while on academic reading preferences this is uh the topic of Diane's doctoral research but she's published the paper looking at the data of students in the US and their preferences for reading online during the pandemic what I'm hoping to have out um in the not too distant future is a comparison of what UK students said um so watch this space if I can find any time to finish writing the article but yeah we've got a good quote here um from um uh Diane and Alicia's article which is really um you know that probably something that doesn't surprise us so we're obviously talking about creating um more ebooks but many um large percentages of learners reported completing their assigned academic readings less frequently during the pandemic they also highlighted and annotated their texts less frequently um small minorities reported favorable experiences of reading online and um as ever recommending sort of further study to understand you know how we might better support students if what we're seeing is students increasingly doing online readings but it's fairly clear and it's fairly clear coming out of the UK data um that students don't particularly like having to spend a lot of time staring at screens when they're doing that academic reading and they do still have preferences for print which is interesting and I mean it's relevant to the conversation about you know copyright and getting access to materials because there's so much of a um you know focus and well you know we should be enabling digital access to things but actually we need to think about the people who are impacted by this and it's not just you know it's not just believable we might pick up on this and with our panel yes okay so you mentioned the panel I have mentioned the panel so um we are we are going to very shortly go over to our start our panel discussion um and we're absolutely delighted to have two fantastic speakers joining us today so we have Lorna Campbell who's the Learning Technology Services Manager at the University of Edinburgh also um somebody who's worked in open educational resources for um quite some time um Lorna's also got a blog about openness and knowledge equity which I certainly read regularly find it really valuable um and then we have Dara Snowden who's the textbook program manager at UCL Press which is actually the UK's first fully open access university press um Dara before that was working um in publishing uh worked at um Roman and Littlefield um and um also at Edinburgh University Press and Bloom's republishing um and was a rising star in publishing in 2019 um and still still is rising Dara right it's it's really great to have you both with us um I'm going to stop sharing slides for the time being um because we are having more of a kind of panel discussion here aren't we so um it would just be great if we can perhaps now go over to our our speakers and if I can just ask you each if I can go to Lorna first maybe just can you just could you just really briefly say hi to everybody anything you want to add to the biography that I've just shared about you of course thanks for the introduction Jane it's uh it's wonderful to be joining you again um so as Jane said I um I currently work at the University of Edinburgh where I'm the manager of the Learning Technology Service so I've worked as a learning technologist for oh since it's 1997 so um I don't count how many years that is um I've been involved in the open education space since about um 2009 um which is when if you cast your minds back some of you might remember a disc program called the UK open education resources program and that was really when I first started getting involved with uh the whole idea of open education resources and since then it's something that I've had quite a sort of long-standing personal commitment to is um knowledge equity in particular so it's the whole field of open knowledge including open education practice open education resources and most recently open textbooks um so yes that that's that's kind of why I'm here today great thank you and um Dara would you like to just uh introduce yourself briefly anything you want to add to what I said yeah um thank you so much for inviting me and and I'm really happy to be here hopefully everyone can hear me okay um great um yeah I I feel a little bit and I have for the last year or so feel like a little bit of an interloper because this this job this role with UCL press is my first ever job that's that's working within a fully OA capacity um my background is in commercial academic publishing but but as I was thinking about it you know my first ever job in in academic publishing was at Bloomsbury academic way back when Francis Pinter was in charge of that portion of of publishing and Francis went on to found knowledge unleashed and do a lot around open access um and there were these kind of ongoing discussions happening at Bloomsbury academic at the time that that I was privy to and listening to and and so actually open access has sort of followed me through through my commercial publishing career and then uh yeah it feels like full circle now to be to be somewhere that's that's so committed to that practice uh and trying to make it work as as as a fully open access university press that's great thank you thanks and yeah really um you know really looking forward to what you've both got to say so what we're going to do um we we mentioned in our copyright news a bit about the the ebook SOS crisis some of the problems that have been in the the the press recently about the Wiley books and things like that um and I know that um sort of uh licensing and the kind of pricing of of uh textbooks is not either of your area but one of the things I'm wondering my sort of first question to you both is whether you think that the kind of recent resurgence in interest in open textbooks because you know it's as as Lorna said this movement started you know quite some time ago in the UK just did a lot of work in 2009 to try to kind of kick start interest in open educational resources um and it kind of largely fell by the wayside but I'm wondering is it is it related to the kind of crisis in ebook pricing is it something to do with covid um and you know how much of these were a factor at your two institutions when you were sort of deciding you know to launch open textbooks should we go Dara first is there anything you'd like to say about that yeah for my program so the textbook program at UCL press um the pandemic was absolutely the catalyst for action um so the background is that that to my understanding open access books had been on the radar for a few years we had participated in that JISC project the institution as e-textbook publisher back in 2016 2017 um uh and sort of dabbling with the idea thinking about it planning around it but you know no kind of strong push to to create something in that space um but really that that sharp pivot to e-resources uh and their high and often unpredictable pricing models um really drove the need for a dedicated program of a sort of home grown textbooks homegrown alternatives to commercial provision um UCL as an institution now has has been doing work around kind of openness for a long time we have an office of open science and scholarship um and the press of course has been going for about seven years now with an established monograph program and a journals program um but really the need for open access textbooks was was really hammered home in 2020 as a as a financial imperative for for us as an institution to to explore yeah lona what about edinburgh um again quite you've had quite a long history of um working in the open education of space um but was it something that drove it you know was it covered was it um yes i know it's sorry my cat has dried we have the cat he's also extremely wet sorry yes so um yeah we've taken a slightly different approach at edinburgh and i'm actually i think one of the things he said that i think is quite interesting is that um open education fell by the wastebites after the the gist program i don't actually think that's the case but i think now i think what we've seen in the uk is that a lot of open education initiatives are situated with learning technologists or with academics rather than in academic libraries who have been extremely successful in supporting open access and other forms of open publishing and in terms of the way we support openness in edinburgh it it really is something that is supported right across the institution and i know that my colleague eugen from the library is here today i'm sure i saw his name on the list of delegates there so um enry university library has done a huge amount of work supporting open access there's a new open access um a new scholarly publishing policy that was published um that was shared just last year i think um that really enshrines that commitment to open access the the library has also had a really successful open journal platform um which hosts a wide range of open access student created journals that's been there for a number of years um the open ebook press is much more recent um that was set up i think um two years ago um and i think possibly partially in response to the pandemic but there is a much wider commitment to open education in the institution as well and the open education resources service is situated in a division called learning teaching and web services which is um the directorate of my colleague melissa heightened who some of you will know and she's very much um driven the university's vision for open knowledge and um the oer service has been there for i think it's about six years now and we that service was really set up to um encourage both staff and students right across the institution to engage with the creation and use of open education resources in many forms so i think this commitment to open this um is something that is very much ingrained in edinburgh from way beyond you know prior prior to the pandemic um but i think um the refocusing on open textbooks is a more recent thing and is certainly bound up i think with the crisis in e textbook costs and also i think just um the changes in education more widely i mean we we all remember the great online pivot at the beginning of the pandemic well you know everything had to go online and of course that put more pressure on um digital resources rather than physical resources so these things have all have all um had an impact i think yeah lona sorry just to clarify the the the impetus for open educate that that kept going and has has been going at uc other as well i just meant in terms of um you know a dedicated textbook program yeah we sort of dabbled with the idea and um in in lots of different guises um but yeah similarly to edinburgh you know uc l have have been flying that flag for for open education for long before the pandemic absolutely yeah can i follow up a question around terminology um because we've we've we've talked about a lot of things we talked about open education open education resources we're talking about open textbooks for open knowledge open scholarship i the team that i work in at the body and is open scholarship support um and i wonder whether interesting to hear you saying lona that actually that momentum has continued going it's happening in different places within our higher education institutions and under different banners and under different names i wonder whether you could reflect on what the differences are between those different things and is there is there a need to somehow link those things together conceptually among the people who actually have an influence here to to keep that momentum going and build on projects that are maybe slightly different things but they all can get some synergy or whatever kind of word you want to use to to to help get that movement yeah okay i mean if we're where to start untangling all that i mean that's um there's there's all kinds of issues in there um part of it i mean there has traditionally been a bit of a divide between the open education world and the open access world for various reasons i think one of those reasons is the way that our institutions are organized here in the uk just you know they're they're the academic library tends to have a distinct identity and governance structure yeah learning technologists tend to be situated in different places in our institution they're sometimes more scattered across our institutions um there have been different policies that you know there are open open access policies exist driven by the research councils open education resource policies are are are less common and they don't they tend not to have this real sort of top down push i i think also um again you know going back into history i should i should confess here that my my academic background is actually in archaeology so i always tend to sort of look a bit so you know the past and where we came from um even before the just open education resources program there was a program called the digital repositories program and that was a program that was responsible for providing seed funding for a lot of digital repositories in institutions i think that was around about 2007 2008 and there was a strand of that program that tried to um build digital repositories for open education resources in institutions and it didn't really work because open education resources are a very wide class of things you know it could be anything from a single photograph a simulation a 3d model to an entire course they're um where a scholarly works are a more homogeneous type of thing they have a defined lifespan and they tend to have an end point so there's a lot of things mixed up there that i think um and i think in a way it's been it's it's been unfortunate that we have ended up with these two silos that we have the open access stuff going on in the library we have the open education um resource resource and open practice stuff going on in well quite often scattered across the institution um and i would certainly see this resurgence of interest in open textbooks as potentially a way that we can actually bring these two domains back together which i think really is is what we need to be doing yeah i i'm i'm just reflecting on the fact that um we don't tend in the uk to have um a position which we increasingly see in us university libraries which is an oer librarian yeah and that yeah i think that is a missing piece perhaps i think it's and that's a whole a sort of whole other thing is the the distinction between um the conception and the reality of open education resources in north america and in the uk and europe more widely and the the way textbooks are used in higher education is very different in north america and in the uk and north america both in the us and in canada courses tend to be very reliant on a single astronomically expensive textbook and these costs are prohibitive and actually do prevent people from accessing higher education so the oer movement in the us has for many many years been focused on the provision of open access textbooks because that is a place where they can make a real difference to students access to education and colleagues in the us have been incredibly successful in doing that i mean if you look at the work of an organization such as spark for example um and you know work up by you know funded by the the hula foundation promoted by creative commons huge amount of really successful work creating and promoting open textbooks here in the uk textbooks are used quite differently and quite often it's the library that bears the brunt of the cost of textbooks and courses may use multiple textbooks rather than rely on one single one so i think because the way textbooks are used is different between the us and the uk we haven't seen the big push for open textbooks that occurred in the us and therefore we don't have oer librarians i think having oer if a whole kind of raft of oer librarians was suddenly to materialize in the uk i'm not sure how much that would change things immediately because the way we use resources is still quite different but i do think that um like i said before i think we are at a point now where we really need to look at um at access to resources and i think there's a lot of knowledge in the learning technology community about providing access to open license teaching and learning materials that i really hope will filter the library space yeah absolutely i mean i i just reflect on the fact i've worked most of my career sitting between libraries and learning technology but it is it's quite a it's actually quite a small space in some ways there's not a huge amount of crossover and one of the things we've tried to do is actually to bring those two communities together yeah yeah through through the webinars through the the old special interest group i wonder if i could um ask dara would you be able to talk about um kind of the culture that you have at ucl what what's allowed you to to get i mean you mentioned before about them and the the background the history of having the ucl press and very strong open access publishing um but leaning on from what lauren was saying about not necessarily having oer librarians that's not necessarily things that's going to make the difference for what has made the difference for you i don't know whether it's part that you want to share some examples of of some of the projects that you've been working on yeah absolutely so ucl presses it sits within library services so we have a really close connection to ucl's library librarians and services provided there um and in terms of kind of yeah having access to you know my job is made easier by being able to point to our established programs within the press um so i'm not having to um start from scratch a lot of the times when i'm speaking to teaching faculty or academics certainly not to librarians who already know a lot about what it is we're doing um about open access um so it coming against of from a commercial publishing perspective into this new kind of oa space i'm having to do a lot of both so i'm having to be an advocate for open access publishing why it's beneficial for both you know the author the reader the ecosystem for those that are not sort of you know that are still sort of navigating that space as well as commissioning textbook content in a in a more traditional sense so trying to identify where there are challenges or specific needs within a module or a discipline um you know where we can perhaps you know where there might be opportunity to create something that um that that offers us offers students an enhanced way of learning a different way of learning so doing all of that kind of mapping and workshopping of of um you know whether there's a gap in the market for us to create something whether we can create something oa that could could potentially kind of compete or be a really high quality alternative to a commercial provision um so that kind of you know uh investigating as well as um a lot of kind of educating um you know authors and academics about all of the um all of the various things that are involved in open access so things like license you know lots of questions around um licensing and copyright and permissions and how does that you know how does that work if i'm going to produce something uh open access um so it's it's sort of a two-part process it's sort of trying to work with them to find opportunities for textbooks and then really sort of um selling them on the idea of of it being open access um and again i can point to a lot of places within our institution that offer guidance and policy so open science has a lot of um a lot of uh policy around that that can help sort of guide it and also through that process as well um but yeah so it's sort of that that um that balance absolutely and i see that there are some some questions that evelyn's asked about academic publications and the difference between publications they're going to help academics with career progression lona agreeing with that and and tom also coming in about the emphasis on on high metric outputs so um what you've just described here you're talking to people you're doing the kind of hearts and minds approach you're convincing them that it's the right thing to do uh to what extent are there actually incentives within the ucl career progression thing that support being involved in in textbooks and education resources rather than just focusing on your you know high high value monograph or whatever it is yeah i mean that's been our struggle from from from you know the first sort of experimentation with open textbooks versus our more established monograph program you know there is a clear incentive structure to publish research in that in that way um but but not not as much in terms of uh open education resources or indeed specifically what i'm doing open textbooks um so we've had to do a lot of kind of consultation with teaching faculty and various members within in ucl to identify what would be a kind of sufficient incentive um and we've sort of landed on a bit of a balance between financial enumeration so a lot of authors particularly in stem disciplines that that would perhaps traditionally go to a commercial publisher would receive you know moderate to substantial royalties for their for their work and that's always been a huge challenge you know in between the sort of disc project and me starting you know that we've had a few sort of open calls for textbook proposals uh very few kind of have come through to us because yeah there's no clear incentive to to opt for publishing it as an open access publication versus a commercial textbook um so so we do have a flat fee model for our authors we're working on that at the moment and and you know every time we commission a new author we're asking for their feedback on that on that pricing structure and and and flat fee model so we are having to invest in that um but also widening some of our promotion criteria so at the moment there is specific wording that relates to open research particularly within within the sciences but but making sure that we have reference to that also in for those on teaching teaching contracts that participation and an authorship of open access textbooks can contribute to to you know a portion of of that promotion criteria and framework for them to demonstrate that that commitment to openness which UCL is is you know really wants to encourage yeah would you would you like i mean you've got a couple of textbook examples haven't you on slides which um i could just i could just put up to just show people who aren't familiar um if i just just share those now briefly um and then maybe you could just yeah talk us through so happy to talk you through very quickly yeah absolutely so um we we've published three textbooks today two of them have been as part of this this JISC project back in 2016 2017 um and one that's come in a bit later from from an open call for for textbooks um and as you can see there are kind of most successful in terms of downloads has been the textbook of plastic and reconstructive surgery um this project came to us pretty much fully formed so we were very lucky to be able to work with um the three editors and that they had put together you know a roster of a fantastic contributors um and and had this book in mind and and really wanted it to be open access so it was fortuitous that we had this you know we were part of this project and could fund it in that way um so i've just put some of those stats down for you as well to to show um uh total downloads to date we are tracking where it's being accessed in terms of countries and territories um and for i'd say most of our books with the exception of some of our enhanced e-books of which you know we have we have only a handful um all of our open access books are also available to purchase as um print on demand so we are sort of also keeping an eye on on kind of who who wants them as as print copies and providing that to to um to an audience that that is willing to you know to to pay um a print price for those um and we work out our print prices to be competitive in the market but also just to cover costs of production and printing so we're not looking for profit from those from those print editions um i'll just move on to the next slide very quickly so the other book that we published in partnership with jisk is this key concepts in public archaeology yeah it's a very different very different kind of textbook from from the medical sciences textbook it's more within kind of arts humanities social sciences it's an edited collection um that would look more familiar you know to a lot of people as uh as a kind of more upper level undergraduate postgraduate level textbook again it's done it's done really well it's hard to benchmark we don't really have um yeah it's hard to compare um but you know to to our to our minds this is this is a textbook that's done that's done very well um and then uh introduction to Nordic cultures that's a text that came to us again the author um submitted that proposal to us after we did a we did a call for textbooks back in sort of 2019 2020 um and and this was kind of one of one of the ones that came to us um not a huge response rate for that for that call um for submit uh for for textbook proposals at that time and a lot of the you know we were asking lots of people sort of you know why and um you know lots around kind of lack of incentives to write textbooks but also timing you know teaching faculty are juggling many many things and um and trying to get them to write a text is is is tricky where we found traction has been or have been authors who are in the process of putting something together for a commercial press and have heard about our program and are interested in exploring an open access alternate you know pathway to publishing um so sort of catching them at that stage where they've kind of already got a project in mind um and they're ready to sort of commit some time to it and then you know hopefully we can we can um talk to them about what it would look like if if they published it as open access yeah yeah thanks that's really really interesting dara launa do you want to perhaps say a bit about um how things uh worked at edinburgh because you've got um an open textbook on music education haven't you um and then we'll go to some questions i think because uh we've got we've got we've got a bit of time and we've got plenty of questions popping up in the chat there so launa yeah yeah i mean i can't comment too much on how the the the open press um at edinburgh is is based in the library as i said um the OER service is based on a different bit of information services so i'm not sure what the um the strategic drivers were when it was set up and if they have plans going forward in the future for for doing the kind of thing that dara has been talking about in terms of potentially you know putting out open calls or commissioning content the way that the press is set up it's called edinburgh diamond and it's based on the open monograph press is that it is very much a hosting platform rather than a publishing platform per se um so for example it will do my colleague um rebecca washterska who manages service who is um unfailingly helpful and a really fabulous colleague she can do all the assistance of um you know getting the content onto the platform and assigning isp ends and cataloging the open textbooks but you need to go to the press with the actual textbook itself so the project that i was involved in was actually to create a textbook from existing open education resources because one of the real drivers for um putting so much funding into open education at the university of edinburgh sustainability we want to ensure that the resources are both our staff and our students create are sustainable and contribute to this wider pool of open knowledge so what we did was we took some content that had originally been created for a MOOC oh i can't remember how long ago i mean this MOOC is about i think almost 10 years old called the fundamentals of music theory the content from that MOOC had already been repurposed for an on-campus course so um some of the academics involved in the MOOC took the content adapted it added to it and started using it for teaching a non-campus course for undergraduate students we then took that content and the original MOOC content and re-adapted it again to co-create an open textbook with academics from the school of music and also student interns so it was very much a sort of student co-creation project and it was actually funded by a very small student experience grant of the university that's a fund that we have for students to do all kinds of projects so we created the textbook together from scratch and then we took it to our colleagues in the library who were able to who are very very keen to to host the textbook on edinburgh diamond and it was actually the first ebook that the platform launched with and it's been really interesting to see their response to that textbook we thought it would you know we thought some people would be interested in it but we were quite astonished by the number of downloads that it was getting quite rapidly which you know were in the thousands within a month or so and so that was very much an experimental project see could we do this could you take existing legacy content and turn it into an ebook and what we found was yes you can and you can be very successful doing that but the overhead creating that ebook is quite significant and I think for that model to become sustainable we would need to look at how we could support academic colleagues to do that yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely um there's an interesting question that Kate's put into the chat so they aimed primarily at Dara but I mean I think it's worth Lorna you commenting on as well I mean you I don't think you do have librarianship at University of Edinburgh do you it's it's not taught as a subject um but Kate's asking if if you know there's sort of strong link between the press the library is helped by librarianship being kind of seen as a credible academic subject I don't know do you think that is do you think that is an issue do you think yeah I'm not sure I don't think it hurts yeah I think it does help um yeah it's tricky for me to comment on that and on that in particular but um yeah I think establishing those you know the fact that we sit within that that team you know we're part of the the UCL's library services structure just gives us just gives everyone else in that team a lot more access to us and what it is we're doing and collaborating within our decision making so we have a lot of library services colleagues that are on our publishing boards so they're you know they're part of kind of our our management and and decision making uh and vice versa you know we consult um uh it's they'll consult with us uh also about kind of um you know e-text book issues and things like that um but yeah a link with the you know when people are learning about publishing publishing studies because that's also something that's right yeah we do yeah is there is there some collaboration between that work um I guess different sectors that are often seen or often find themselves on opposite sides of offense is that is it something that in terms of the culture of the institution has managed to find a way for for you know for there to be a meaningful collaboration between people who have yeah that's a really good point yeah we we um in our journals program we also have a few student journals that that are generated from um some of the content that that um and research that the publishing MA is is doing um right they have access to us as well in terms of you know being able to contact us and and and vice versa we do a lot of um uh workshops and things with that with that MA group so they have access to a kind of working at university press as part of their um as part of their course as well so there's yeah there is quite a lot of collaboration there as well um and again it sort of supports that ecosystem ecosystem yeah I mean I haven't been lucky enough to visit UCL and talk to some of the library students and talking to to the lecturers there I know copyright when it gets covered in the library studies module is looked at from quite a different perspective as it is on the publishing MA so it's interesting to see how you know it's certainly within the institution actually doing something instrumental you've managed to take advantage of of having both there are some other questions but we are we have 10 minutes left yeah I mean I guess my final question I would quite like to ask was um related to some of the studies that we highlighted that are being done about student reading preferences I don't know Launa are you familiar with some of that work and what what what what do you think of of the idea that are we creating a lot of online content that students actually might not necessarily want to engage with I don't know I'm not sure I've struggled to answer that question to be honest the sort of my engagement in that area tends to be more um with students creating content yeah so we've got some really engaged students yeah which is which is actually something about um where we put a lot more focus on is trying to work with students to create open knowledge so that the students are themselves are creating um open content because they're so much incredible I mean if you think of the the amount of work that students create through the course of their um you know academic studies and it's so much of that material just disappears into a black hole it's never to be seen again so one of the things that we're very committed to in Edinburgh is trying to surface um as much of that content as we can um through a wide range of sort of open education in the curriculum initiatives so that we're actually um working with students so that they are creating content that can be reused but completely sort of like avoiding your question um but I think that's an area though quite some success I think we can be quite passive can't it and actually what you're doing is actively engaging students in the knowledge creation so rather than just consuming you know that whole sort of information literacy space is absolutely what we're doing and so we have a number of courses where students are creating open education resources we also have our wiki media in the curriculum program that's very successful and it really is about teaching students how knowledge is created and consumed online and to encourage them to start to create open knowledge as well yeah and might I also suggest that part of the issue with student reading preferences um has a lot to do with proprietary platforms of restrictively licensed content forcing them to consume it in a particular way whereas the values of open educational resources is that the source material is there to be reused remixed and put into ways that actually can be incorporated by teachers by students themselves into into a more helpful and meaningful way um yep just a thought yeah any sort of final any final thoughts from you Dara we're approaching the end any yeah I was just listening to Lorna speak about empowering students to create open open content which is yeah fantastic and um it's a bit trickier for for me and my program because we are you know we are sort of I wouldn't say restricted but structured in a very kind of publishing you know in a way that that um asks the question kind of what kind of publishing intervention is is needed in that um we've been having a lot of conversations also about repositories and how we host content and what we're hosting and where with the press it's it's really important for us to be able to track downloads so that has dictated kind of where where where we can put stuff um you know within that parameter you know we want it to try and be as be accessed as widely as possible but um part of our remit is to is to track those downloads and so um a lot of our content is is produced in a relatively traditional e format of pdf and um you know things that jstore will take um uh so so you know sort of opening opening up kind of more discussion around different kinds of content is is something we're doing at the moment and trying to figure out how we can um yeah how we can host it where we can put it and and what we're able to track from that um no decisions yet no no no i mean i think the thing that is i think related to that is the question that's been running in the chat about how you actually update the resources so perhaps the final point and perhaps for both dara and mona and thinking about this dara the question there is about how you ensure that your resources are kept up to date i suppose in some ways that's similar to traditional publishing where you look at new editions and look at how you change them you're saying you're integrating a revision and new edition process into what you do yeah so again very very similar to sort of how other publishers would do it um so we will be looking at you know which commercial textbooks are on a revision cycle if we're producing something that is is competitive to that we need to make sure that we're keeping up with that also so that you know we're not um you know we're not having a our textbook being used for a few years until you know a commercial commercial publisher has a new edition with updated content so we have to keep keep within that process but also being mindful of the kinds of topics we're publishing on so whether they are um whether they include a lot of policy that changes a lot whether there are you know within stem and sciences um whether there are kind of lots of discoveries happening all the time that that mean that that content does need to be kept up to date you know once every year or two years and making sure that our we manage expectations with our authors about that also so that they they know when they start the process of of of publishing with us as an open access textbook author that we will be kind of calling on them to provide updates um you know as and when the content needs revision also soliciting feedback from people that are using the book um whether they would benefit from from additional content and and having that be part of our process of um uh thinking about revision and and and new edition so what can we add that will make this more accessible or more usable um uh trying to solicit solicit that kind of feedback once we once we publish the initial book um so so that kind of feedback loop um will form part of of how we how we think about new editions as well absolutely thank you and launa from your perspective is there anything you would add to your experience of ensuring that content is kept up to date or people are aware that you know you can't just do something openly and leave it there or how well I think I mean there are two aspects to that on the the um the open press side so it's Edinburgh Diamond is underpinned by uh open monograph press um which I believe does have built in um version control and again that is um that's managed by our colleagues in the library and in actual fact the music textbook is currently we're preparing the second edition of that and we'll pass that over to um our colleague Rebecca and she will manage that um that update on the other side of things I think there is an aspect that you do have to accept that when you release something under open license to some extent it's it's gone and there's only so much you can do to track how that resource is used ethically there are very unethical ways you can track content across the web but if you want to be open and transparent there is a certain amount of letting go that you have to do and accept that once you make an open license resource available for download and reuse under open license people can do all kinds of things with it that you will never know about um so we do us we do some tracking of our you know wide broad spread of open education resources we have multiple repositories we put content all over the web we share it whatever will be useful and it's not that we do no monitoring at all we certainly do you know like to know if people are using our resources um but I think we're probably we do much less of that than um the the kind of more formal monitoring that that Dara was talking about thank you so much you're so right now now once you publish it it is you know to to some extent it is just out there yeah let it go let it go there you go there's a song there it is let's not do that so no we're nearly going to 12 o'clock well we are we are pretty much on 12 o'clock so I think um we think we should wrap things up it's been an absolutely fascinating conversation yeah thank you both so much for your time really appreciate it really I think we could have talked for another hour even you know we went in some different ways to the discussion we had at the OER 22 conference as well but it's been really useful so thank you I would also note that we didn't necessarily talk that much about copyright which is really the the topic tends to be of these webinars um but I think it's something that clearly there's there's you know things that we may come back to and certainly we're talking about third party copyright content within open education resources there's a whole discussion there and so there's there's certainly that's going to be happening yeah but thank you again so much yeah for joining us thank you if anyone has any questions presumably they would be able to contact you if they want you know you're happy to talk about what you've done if anyone wants to emulate that I'm certainly very interested in working at how we can incorporate what you've done at your respective institutions into into where we work at the Bodlein so we'll see how things will progress yeah yeah thank you thank you so I think that just leaves us with a couple of slides before everyone rushes off to go and grab their lunch with some future webinar dates that we've got coming up we mentioned our last webinar two weeks ago the IFLA publication that's called Navigating Copyright for Libraries and what we're hoping is we're going to have two webinars from some editors and authors who contributed to that open access book which is going to be on the 11th of November and the 2nd of December but kind of watch this space because we're we're just in discussion with the editors to find out who might be able to join us for those sessions and otherwise it'll just be you and I talking about our chapter yeah well you could do the first one I'll do the second one yeah we could break it up into yeah it's like it's a really small part that's it let's do it like that yeah we've also got an exciting Christmas special lined up on the 16th of December one of our copyright padawens is a bit of a quiz quiz genius and it's going to be a star of tv quiz shows only connect yes absolutely yes hybrow tv yes and I love the fact that you put that there's a James birthday special coming in January it is the day before my birthday well that's the date of the webinar wk goodness yeah fantastic okay so we're just going to leave people with one last thing one last thing before they rush off or if they haven't already gone they may well have done yeah okay one last thing tell us about this Chris what's going on many of you will have seen or heard the podcast that we did with Mark Lewis and Beatles expert number one greatest Beatles expert in the world who is this evening and tomorrow performing his own show Evolver 62 which is the story of 1962 the Beatles 1962 through a number of objects it's fascinating did and I had the privilege of being able to see the preview show we did yeah so there are still tickets remaining if you are able to get to london and able to get this tickets tomorrow tomorrow the bluesbury theater once again another ucl connection yeah and it's a great show and I had the privilege of performing with Mark this was what the weekend before last it was uh it's an event that Jane you've been instrumental in arranging a Beatles tribute mark spoken it I think you're actually playing love me do at that point aren't you yes I think so yes yeah yeah and Mark's on the tambourine and singing indeed yeah that's my friend Anthony and we did some we did some bigly three power heart it was incredible yeah maybe that'll be what he does to earn himself a few more on his next tour but genuinely if you if you have anyone that is interested in the Beatles uh for the people that remain it is it's a fantastic show yeah I mean I think it's available if you can somehow get into London on the train strike day tomorrow yes yes so I think that's it all from us um we will just stop the recording um but thank you again to Dara and Lorna for joining us this morning