 Good evening everyone, thank you for joining us this evening. My name is David Shear, I'm the Scholar Communications and Research Curation Consultant with the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. This is our last event for our Open Access Week events. This evening we'll be talking about open publishing and how it's been implemented and practiced here at Carnegie Mellon. We have a great panel as well as a wonderful moderator. I'm now going to turn it over to our moderator, who is the Director of the Entertainment Technology Center's Press, Brad King. Thanks, Dave. So we're going to have a conversation today. So if you guys have questions while we're talking, don't wait until the end. You can have them and if they come in, we may get some stuff from Twitter online as well. So my name is Brad King. I'm the Editor and Director of the ETC Press, which is one of two university presses here at Carnegie Mellon. Drew will talk a little bit about that, I think, because he founded it, and we're an open access publisher, so everything that we do is based in that and we sort of move out from there. I came here, this is my first year, I've been working with Drew for about nine or ten years on the press, but I just came here full-time. My background is actually as a technology writer, so I worked at Wired. I worked at MIT's Technology Review and wrote a book that we were published through the ETC Press. So my background is sort of in this area of emerging platforms for publishing and things like that. In fact, I use some of these principles. I run a big writing collective in Indianapolis where I just moved from. We have about 400 people and we put out books and literary journals using open platforms as well. So this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart. I'm going to introduce the panelists and I'm going to try to get this as right as I can, and when I mess up, please correct me. Hopefully I'll get Drew, right, because I've known him the longest. So Dr. Drew Davidson is the director of the Entertainment Technology Center. Also the founder of the ETC Press, and he's written several books for us. Cross Media Communication, I think was the first one that I came across, and then most recently Creative Chaos, which is about the design and teaching process that goes on down at the ETC. He's done a lot of work around cross media and trans-media storytelling. He's studied and helped create makerspaces in places like museums and libraries and science centers. And did you found the well-played journal? Yes. Yes, and he's the founder of the well-played book series too as well, which is an open, the well-played journals and open access journal about games and meaning. Next to him is Dr. Don Calfeld. All right, did I get that right? Associate Vice President for Facilities Management and Campus Services has a team of 350 people that I saw. They coordinate things like university sustainability projects. He's an adjunct professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Got his PhD here, and was a graduate of the US Coast Guard Academy and is one of the co-authors of Fundamentals of Infrastructure Management, which is a graduate level textbook. And there's another co-author up here as well. Now Dr. Chris Henderson, the Hamerslog University Professor Emeritus. And I actually, as I saw your bio today, I went and looked at this. The Director of Traffic 21 Institute here at CMU, which is really awesome and cool. And I would love to do a panel just on that, but we will not do that today. Do you need some fun stuff? Multidisciplinary Research Institute to Design, Test, and Deploy Technologies related to transportation communication, as far as I could tell, and lots of other stuff the about was really long. He's the Editor-in-Chief of the ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering, and he co-authored the book Fundamentals of Infrastructure Management and three other open access texts, as well as some traditional textbooks. So that's our panel, and I want to start by asking what drew each of you to the open, because you came to open access in different ways. Drew, sort of, as a publisher and you guys as authors. So Drew, start with you, like, why open access with the ETC press? What was important about that for you? I think back when we were studying it, I was talking to several colleagues and this is probably a dozen years ago now, we were really interested in providing a forum that at the time we felt didn't exist around publishing for entertainment technologies and video games and games in particular. And as those discussions came up, something that came up repeatedly and I felt personally was the idea of having to be open access so that people could get, it was more important to have that sort of impact and influence and have the word get out, then worry about like royalties or money or locking it behind a paywall. And we are lucky to be in the car, you know, car and email. And it's a part of the conversations when we were pushing for the founding of the ETC press was this idea of having been open access and not having to worry about, you know, within a university setting and necessarily having them run for a profit. Not that we want to sit there and burn through the dollars necessarily. We do think about budgets and all of that, but this idea of it was more important that we wanted people to have the research and the writings available easily. And it's proven very successful in that regard. And I feel like, and then I want to talk from the author perspective, that there wasn't also, there wasn't many places where this kind of publishing around entertainment technology was really happening anyway. So there wasn't a tremendous amount of competition between traditional and the open access, like that sort of gave us the ability to reach an audience. So as authors, what brought you guys to the world of open access publishing? Well, I guess I'll start, since I did it earlier. So I had a traditional textbook called Project Management for Construction. It was published by Prentice Hall and it had stream of royalties and a stream of users over the years. But when we first did that book, my co-author was Tung Hau. We asked for a revision of the copyright on to the authors when the book went out of print. And back then books actually did go out of print, because they had to do a specific print run. So I got the copyright back in the mid 90s, and I decided to try something different. And that was to put the book up on the web for free open access. And it's been up now for close to two decades. And it gets a ton of use. I get emails on a regular basis from all over the world. I had one doctoral student who showed up here on campus and said, well, I use this book in teaching classes for contractors in Africa. And so it's still, if you Google Project Management for Construction, it still comes up one of the first couple of hits that you get. And that was really an eye opener to me about kind of the impact that you could have with open access. Subsequently, I did three other books and I'm starting to become more and more interested in getting just technical articles up open access. Because again, you can have much greater impact than you can under the traditional publishing routes for that kind of thing. By the way, if you try and get that reversion of copyright with publishers now, you can't do it. Nowadays, you can do digital publishing for just a copy or two. And so most publishers will not allow you to get that. So for the Fundamentals of Infrastructure Management book, we didn't even try. So when we did our book, because ours was in 2002, we actually negotiated in. They had to sell a certain amount of digital copies. It wasn't just that they were available. And if they didn't sell that, the copyright would revert to us. So that was the way we went about doing it. Because all I got to do is put it up digitally and it still exists in print. And we said, if you're not selling them, that is effectively out of print for us. I've heard that is more difficult to do these days. So what brought you to that world? So I'm not a relative novice, a complete novice. But I did my PhD here with Chris as my advisor about ten years ago. And so and as we finished that in 2008, began teaching a class, a graduate level class here in Fundamentals of Infrastructure Management and found there just were, there was no textbook available to treat the class the way that we wanted to treat it. And as we taught the class over a period of eight years, we did all of our, all of our texts were sort of journal articles, news of the day, what was going on on CNN or wherever, and just sort of compiled a text ad hoc year over year. And then about 18 months ago, Chris came up to me and said, hey, you know, why don't we should write a textbook? We've been looking for one for almost a decade. We haven't found one. We should write our own. And when we started that process, I didn't know any better than to do open access because that was, that's how Chris had published all of his books. So we started looking at, so I'm like, well, you know, what's a graduate student always a graduate student, right? So, so I followed my advisor's recommendation. I've not found out the way graduate students always be. But, but part of that process was then researching open access licenses and what copyrights were available and how to sort of, how were we, how were we going to copyright the book? Where were we going to list it? Where are we going to host it? How are we going to sort of put it out there for, for consumption? And I went through this whole discovery process, really, with Creative Commons and Kilt Hub and online textbook libraries that has been really sort of eye-opening for me. So there's, so I come from the world of professional writing, right? Like I've got, I made my living as a writer before I did this. And so one of the things that drew me to the ETC press and I think Drew and I sort of come at this a little bit differently is the, like you put in work to write something and impact is important. And it's part of the tenure process as part of the academic process. But also, I would like to get paid for that, the work that I've done. And so we're working with models that sort of combined. It's the, it's the old sort of, you know, freemium that you get, you can get this for free, but you can also pay for it in different forms. Have you guys as authors thought about, like, is it only free? Like, do you offer it, are there ways that people can buy the book if they want to, or is it straight, free PDF? So, at least for the Fundamentals of Infrastructure Management Book, it's share and share alike, free download. We keep the instructor's manual for instructors only. So you can't just, the student can't just download the instructor's manual, but. So I probably, there's probably, there's probably some money to be made there, I think probably, but no, it's just strictly available for free download. So, one of the things I, you sort of came to my mind, I remember when this panel came, I was like, I'm not going to have much to say, but I think I'm wrong. I actually worked in the publishing industry at Holder-Ryne Hunter in Winston, which, while I was there, got acquired by Hartcart, which then I got acquired by Elsevier. So then I was like in the belly of the beast and have published a couple other publishing houses as well, and just looking at the contracts and working through those contracts and kind of getting to your point about reversion. Like some of those are locked tight, you can't get it ever back, ever. And so, and part of like the impetus of the ETC press is like, I've been on both sides where it felt like it was not a good experience for anybody involved. And so we're like, well, the ETC press, we wanted to be good for the authors. We want to, you know, like there, because as Brad was saying, you know, we want people to have not just impact, which we think is really important, and we could talk about the variety of ways we're trying to measure that, because back in the day when we started it, we're like, well, let's just get it out there. So we're having like, we cut a relationship with ACM Digital Libraries or stuff goes in the ACM DL, there are a couple other websites out there that we're like, oh, we'll do, we'll let them host it, we'll let them host it. And then once a PDF is free, it's kind of hard to track when other people start sharing it. But that was one of the impetus is like, how can we get into there? And then we cut a deal. We were actually doing research back in the day with Creative Commons as well. Working directly, because they're actually working on licenses towards variety. So we're like, hey, we'll sort of play test with you on licenses that our author seemed interested in. And it's sort of narrowed down to the share alike. And some people are really interested in actually letting people edit it. And we thought, oh, we could do digital text that people can edit on the fly. And that is still theoretically been interesting. I remember we were also talking about, we'll do media publishing. That'd be awesome. It drew more than I'm like, let's just do this one thing. One wants to play with all the different formats. Well, 99% of our authors are like, no, we want to publish a book. Yeah. And so we also worked with lulu.com to be somebody to help us towards getting something that there's a print copy in for a lot of our academics. And we are in the library. There's sort of like this, they like books. Let me talk to your reward. The project management for construction textbook was very successful as a commercial product. Got adopted a lot of places. I got a stream of royalty checks. But I would have been better off doing consulting rather than writing that book. If I was only interested in monetary return. Absolutely no question about it. And so the motivation for doing it was really to have impact. We had a particular viewpoint in that book, the owner's viewpoint and all the textbooks on the market at the time were all contractor oriented. Same thing with the infrastructure management. Don and I had a particular viewpoint of people who would be practicing facilities management and most of the textbooks that existed were either very narrow on one slice of infrastructure or they were much more research oriented rather than practitioner oriented. And I mean, at the end of the day, some of the open acts have taught some workshops on this and I always tell authors if you're if what you want to say is more important than having the book that open access in the sort of self and indie publishing is always a better option because as soon as you get into the beast, there's going to be you lose control over some of the way it's marketed and the editing and stuff know for us. So our book, the book that I wrote, I was pretty adamant that all of our books are for sale and anybody can go out and buy them and we price them at just above cost. Like it's not to it's not necessarily as a money making venture, but it's to offer multiple formats and to cover the basic costs. But we ended up selling, I think we did some what was the what was the bundle? Humble bundle. So because we use this system that allowed us to publish, not just the PDF, but the EPUB, we ended up selling five thousand copies of our book through this bundle, even though the free version of it was available. So I think some of the ETC presses about experimenting with distribution channels and models and things like that. But like I'm curious, like for us, too, and it's interesting to hear from an author, it's like impacts really interesting, them like hearing that people are using it and understanding how they use it so you could change it with something that we find really inspiring when you hear people like, oh, my God, we're downloading your stuff and using it in classes in Africa. Like how do you go about? I know how we're sort of thinking about measuring impact, but how do you like as an author who did this or authors who did this, how do you measure what impact actually means outside of emails or things like that? Go ahead, John. Yeah. I mean, I. So I want to I want to come back to the I'll look at that, but I don't want to forget this other comment. So my other I have a unique, maybe I think it probably is unique perspective in that my primary role here is not as a member of the faculty. That's my probably my favorite role, but that's not that's not really what what Andrew Carnegie expects me to do most of my day. But but another part of my job is actually the University Bookstore and University Copy Centers are in a part of my portfolio. And those two groups manage, obviously, the bookstore sells books, both ebooks and print books. And the Copy Centers actually produces does our copyright certification. So if you're if you're trying to get copyright clearances for for a lecture or for, you know, the Harvard Press or whatever, that all runs through that through those operations. So I learned a whole lot about this as I started the process of going through to the book. I could I could have the the PDF file of my book turned into a hard copy book any sort of any time I want. And I think anyone who's who's working at a university has got a got a unit somewhere on campus that can take that hard copy book and print as many hard copies, whether you want them spiral bound or whether you want them hard bound or however you want them produced. They have those capabilities. We just sort of those two operations are a bit disconnected, right? So that so that I just want to put that out there as Dave and I were talking earlier about, you know, first you, you know, 10 years ago, you hosted a book like this on your website and it was hosted on the department server and there was a link to it on your website. And now we're hosting it on Kilt Hub and we're there are refertories out there like the OTL that will will point towards it. And you can get a DOI for your book. And so now you have a durable, durable reference. But and now I can send that link to our print shop and have if I want if, you know, 10 of my students want hard copy books because they want something they can take back with them when they go home. We can make that happen, too. So this whole industry has changed in an incredibly short period of time. So back to your to your impact question. For me, having people use the book, having downloads, having its having citations, having it from so selfishly from a reputational standpoint, that's way more valuable to me than than what the royalty stream might look like. And I only say that in part with with knowledge because talking to the manager of the bookstore, unless you're unless you're sourcing large numbers of copies, you're starving to death on royalties on textbooks, right? That's not where the money is not going to go. So when you think about impact, when you think about how do you think about measuring it? Oh, I would say there's a multiple ways of measuring. Downloads is a good good one. Adoptions by other faculty and you kind of hear about some of those, but not all of those community building. I mean, I'll go to a conference and people talk about using books. And things like moving up in the Google search is an indicator of some sort of impact that you're having. But do you guys go out of your way to sort of measure what that is? Or is it just the thing that you sort of do informally because of the world that you're in, you sort of know what's happening with it? Yeah, I've been really bad at that. So, for example, the project management for construction book, I don't have statistics on how many downloads there have been. I think it depends on where you are in the process, because this was my first book and it's only been out for like three months. I'm pretty obsessed about keeping track of people are using it. And when when, you know, we know that the University of Delaware, for instance, is using the book this semester. And so when you get it, when you find out about an adoption like that, I think it's really the reinforcement there is really quite powerful. So how do you think about it? Because this has been going on for like 12 years. I remember because we adjusted because I remember like I was saying earlier, like we were like, let's get it out everywhere. And then it became really hard to like it take a lot of effort. Like if an author reached out to me and go, well, how many downloads do I have? I'm like, all right, give me half a day. They like dig around and look in all the places I tried to seed it. All good intentions and, you know, sort of led me astray in that regard. It became hard to track. Because we have like 90 something publications that we put out now. So you imagine there's like 160 authors who get obsessed with their thing. We want to know. And so it's difficult. I think one of the things we struggled with is. How do we measure what impact actually means? Right. So we started working with the library here around Kilt Hub and having a repository in the same way makes it a little easier to track and centralize just one place. And I mean, it used to be we would give the library our digital copy. We'd still host it to copy. So we were double dipping in a weird ways. So now we're like, no, all digital copies will be at the library point to there. It has a DOI, ACMDL is actually going to link to ours since it has DOI and has a durable link. They'll actually link to ours so it won't split there either. And that we feel like that's going to give us more control and at least be able to measure it in some way since we get so many requests to ask is sometimes, you know, it's like, oh, God, a lot. I don't know. Yeah, or not any. Like we sort of unclear. And this is sort of one of the problems, I think, with there's a few problems with open access and small publishing. And one of it is, I think it's it's a good like the joke we make when I was covering technology at Wired was we said technology is going to change and democratize everything. And then you jump to 2017, you're like, oh, crap, it democratized everything. Right. And they're like, now we don't know what's happening. And open access is the same way. Like you can control your copyright and you can say it has impact. But actually understanding the impact is one of the things that traditional publishing did pretty well was to tell you the reach of where things were and what kind of impact you were having. So as you guys sat down to to do this, the benefit for you was being able to say what you wanted to say. Was that do you think that was the biggest? Sure. And I think Don's point about reputation is well taken. And that wouldn't have been served through a traditional publishing route, you don't think, or wasn't wouldn't or traditional publishers didn't offer you guys what you needed. I think we're getting a lot more use out of the open access books than anything out of a traditional publisher. Well, you know, you think about what's the market for the kind of F2, you know, so a big publisher isn't going to want to. They don't see a revenue stream there. It didn't be harder. They either want you to expand the scope of the book or to do something else that's going to kind of in their view increase. This this isn't an AP physics book, right? That's going to get right. Every high school is going to be right, right. You know, they they want Chris's old book, the one before Prentice the Prentice Hall one, you know, it was easily adopted as a text book and they could project what they would be. But now everything's up in the air and the ability to customize something either by taking a narrow focus, but going deep into it is a real value that allows you to customize that way. Something I was curious about, actually, because I've looked at lots of different self at least in the libraries, just to talk about vanity presses. And you know what those were. Some of you say, yeah, I've got I want to have this book and then pay you pay somebody to publish it for you. You know, so you got what you paid for. But in this environment, how do you keep the quality at the kind of level you really desire? People can be good writers, but you always need editors. Well, here's cost money. So when you're doing a book, how do you address sort of that editorial? So and before you answer, there's this is this is my eternal fight with librarians because vanity vanity presses are different than small presses are different from independent presses, right? And so all self publishing isn't necessarily you're all right, right. But it's a lot of times those things get lumped together and people say independent presses. We sort of call a week, or at least I call it professionalized amateurism, right? Like we're like I'm a professional editor. Like I work like that's that's what I did. I made my career out of that. And so when we work at the ETC press, there's a professional editorial layer. We have an advisory board that goes through stuff. We have a professional designer. So for us, I think review boards, we have review boards like there is a level that is sort of there. That's easier for the ETC press than maybe for individual authors. So I think to like, how did you guys work on your book? Well, I can for the Prentice Hall book, we had that layer of editing. I can tell you the best editing I had was getting emails from people who were using the book. They would tell you exactly stuff that isn't clear, that's ambiguous, there are typos. And I got a lot more useful feedback from people who were using the book than I did from the Prentice Hall editorial staff. And you would make edits and then just update the PDF sort of as you go. I'd do it once a year. Yeah, that's awesome. And for the infrastructure management book, we essentially took advantage of professional colleagues to do a review and we're expecting to get comments from students. Yeah, I mean, we did. I also used the book in draft last spring. So so we had had the book ready, sort of ready, right? And then used it in draft to teach the class last spring and then took feedback from that group of students and from having sort of been through the text and end as a part of the course program to do. I spent a lot of time over the summer making edits and revisions and Dave and I are working through sort of a revision to the to addition number one now to to address. What I think is probably the biggest, the biggest gap that I noticed personally between sort of what we did and what you see sort of on the bookshelf and a bookstore is our quality issues related to like things like images. So the resolution of a particular image, you know, you might grab an image from because, again, we're trying to work from in an open access environment. So you have wiki commons and other sort of you have sort of common access sort of sources and the resolution of that image may not be what you want, really, if you were trying to do publication quality. But you reach a point where you're going to say, you know, what that image says, what I want to say or illustrates what I want to illustrate and it's good enough. And you do to a certain extent get what you pay for. So a free download book may not have every nuance that a book that you pay one hundred and fifty dollars for is going to have a book. Actually, to just because I was thinking about what are the illustrations in there? And I could see that you picked a lot of open access or government resources to, you know, which would be free to put that in. It was that it was that an easy thing to do? Or did you wish you could have captured something that was what is it, the American Society of Civil Engineering? Or have something you want to put in, but you would have had to pay for it? It was a ton of work to do. I think it would have been impossible. Yeah, I think I think it would have probably been impossible. Five years ago, we would have had to the images that we wanted to use. We would have had to create, you know, it would have been source authors, source authors. There's a lot of that in there that we took a lot of our own photographs. We did a lot of our own figures and graphs. But the numbers of resources that are available now to do to do open source are really have changed significantly. And as Dave knows, I went back through the book in September and October and went back through and changed probably another 40 or 50 images that I thought were not clean enough or as clean as I would have liked them to be to and to because I do want it widely listed and I want it readily available. And so we're trying to make it as clean as we can. But it was, yes, it's it's a it's a pretty big lift. Go ahead, go. Yeah, you're absolutely right. We had to take out figures that we would have liked to have had. Just couldn't do it. I know, again, so at the Collective, not at the ETC Press, but like we actually hire designers to go do stuff that we that because if you need to cover to look good and you need your images to look good, like we can edit, but we can't make anything. And that does cost. It doesn't cost a lot, but it does cost something. And if you have a textbook, ours are, I think, different. They're not meant to be textbooks. But I imagine you could give it a pretty substantial amount of cost as you begin to try to make graphs and designs and things like that. We don't really do it at the ETC Press. That's not we put the impetus on the authors. Like that's not. Oh, yeah. In terms of image. Yeah. I mean, like in building on your question, that was like from the outset, I didn't want it to become like Druze Press. You know, where everything I say goes. So we were like setting up a board that had like see new people on it and also external colleagues and authors, you know, various levels of reputation, you know, being very careful and strategic about looking for people within the field to help us one with our reputation, but also with our rigor. And I think that's been very successful in terms of helping us guide the vision of the press and getting that type of feedback and that type of input and setting up processes that initially was sort of like I do everything. And then it became like, well, no, here's what we do with a book. And like in Brad, just when he started getting involved, pre even hiring was probably the most engaged volunteer editor that we had. And so I start thinking about, well, here's what we're going to do to create an author packet helps them understand our process because we are a little unique and different the way we do it. Because part of our open access publishing philosophy is we're also we templatize a lot of our design to help us work within a smaller sort of makes us more agile so we can get things out more quickly, which was a big impetus for a lot of unlike infrastructure, which I think could be timeless in some ways, as you guys update it. We have some people like we want to do a textbook on teaching with mobile and the iPhone just came out. You know, that actually happened to one of our authors. So they were talking about the Palm Pilot, if you all remember. Seven to five was the. And so like they they need to make a quick pivot and change to keep it. And so a lot of people come to us because we can get things out quickly. And there's something, particularly when you're talking technology, you want to try to write a textbook or some sort of academic something that you want to have it in a timely manner, having that sort of templatized, but with a rigor and a review process around it as well. We can get things out pretty quick. I mean, when I get a book, we can use that we use press books. We use a template. We can have it for sale in Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, like in about four hours, like and have it out and designed. That's the digital layout. Like there's the pre-process of them. Yeah, that however long it takes to make it. Yeah, like so one of the things that I want to talk about, Drew, with you is why we have both paid versions and books that you can go pay money for in these free versions as well. Like this is a question that I get asked all the time. Don't you have? No, I do. But nobody wants nobody cares about what I have to say. No, my idea at the time was like this experiment of trying to do multimodal publishing and see if they referenced each other. And sometimes if there was some sort of synergy between them two. And again, I was like, oh, we'll play with a lot. And some of the digital stuff can be interactive and updated. And we can have videos embedded in the print book would be great. And what it really turned out in the law. So the experiment, that was my hope. And some people still reach it like Jen reached out to a colleague of Brad's reached out going, I want to do this interactive textbook around physics. So there's going to be videos that will highlight the concepts I'm talking about, whereas mostly people wanted something about a physical copy of the book means they've published. And we've noticed I think historically, because we could track our sales, it's not it's not bad for like a small academic like most of our copies fell 200 to 500 sales. But then you can times 10 to times 10,000 in terms of downloads. And so like the well played the first well played book last time I was tracking it really carefully when I was sort of obsessing about it, it was up to like 500,000 downloads. And we're like, we're on to something with this idea. Sort of like it was like critical close readings of video games. By the way, the National Academy's Press has the same model thing. They'll do digital downloads for free and print copies cost. And we always said like the less design you had, the freer it would be. So originally, our books, you download as text files. Now it's a PDF. And if you wanted the digital book, that costs a small amount. And if you wanted the physical book, that costs a little more. But we were sort of experimenting on that line. Yeah, I was just going to say the net with how you pay the National Academy, they always ask why you're using it. You want to share that information. So they're trying to sort of get some data gathering information. Anyone is like, why are you doing this? The impact, right? Yeah. And of course, my cynicism is, you know, well, people download a lot of stuff. I can tell you millions of things, see them in downloads. Do we really know if people read them? How do we use them? I mean, so there's certain, it's just like checking out a book. You don't know what happens when people take it home or whatever. So your comment, Chris, about having people or done people write to you about it or say they're adopting it. That's actually kind of a nice kind of thing to do because that gives you a different kind of qualitative sense about how what sort of impact it might really have in a meaningful way. We were joking with David, a pre-killed hub, we use Google Analytics. So a download was really just the file had been touched. You know, we have no idea if they really even downloaded it. It was just somebody clicked on that link. Yeah. And then at least with Killed Hub, we can track that. They would know it was downloaded. You touched on it briefly, but I wanted to see if you could talk a little about the interactivity and how you've done that or if it's been successful or. I mean, it's still sitting in there as part of our philosophy of like, we were interested, but it takes more effort. And then on the game, we kind of lean on the author. If they're like, we're not somebody who, oh, yes, we will make that game for you. We've actually talked about publishing games because, you know, and we published a board game as one of our tied in with the textbook. Well, one of our books we were writing, and so that was an interesting exercise. So we're like, we're part of it. It's like we're interested in playing around that. And one of our books, and it didn't prove true. Like at the time, Lulu was, Lulu was young when we started. And they actually had, we had a direct sales rep in there. They actually added features for us. We were one of the first users of Lulu that, like, yeah, I don't know if anybody's used something like they allow us to, like, if we all wanted to write a book, I can make sure that I put us all in there as authors and you'd have accounts to be able to log in. And that was, at first it was just like one person, one account, one book. And now I can hold a, and I was trying to convince them into what if, because I've heard from colleagues, like they like using our sort of portfolio. But they use this chapter here, and this chapter here, and this chapter here. And they're like, is there any way we can help them shuffle together the chapters they're grabbing into one. And Lulu was like, oh, we're interested. And then, and then they blew up, like it all blew up. And like, so they, they're like, that's pain in the butt. No, I'm sorry. Because they really try to automate everything. Like when we try, some of our authors come to us and they struggle with the images because black and white is four cents a page. Color is 40 cents a page. Like, yeah, but I only want one color image. And like, they're going to run the whole book through the printer. Because nobody touches that book. So every page is going through the color printer. So times 40, you know, in terms of cost. So we keep talking about it, but so far it hasn't happened. I'm open to talking. I mean, like we've heard ideas, but the authors tend to drop the ball. You mentioned the the editing services that traditional publishers provide. And I think there are substitutes. Yes, you should provide. One thing that I do miss out of the traditional from the traditional publishers was their marketing activity. And you're on your own with an open access book. And we used to be there would be publishers reps who would come and visit departments and push their books and that sort of thing. So that doesn't exist for open access. And it doesn't for us. For that, like it's us and grassroots and social media. And we're really honest about that. And then somebody goes, so I want to do a print run of posters. Like, no, no, we don't do that. Yeah, I hope you have money and can make the poster. One of the things about particularly about multimedia, which we haven't done, but largely because the authors would have to come up with that is when we use press books, we can actually make digital books with embedded videos in them. Like, you don't want to make a digital book that has the video in it because the download will be gigantic and nobody will ever do it. But it really is just a matter of an author being able to create or find videos that are like we can do that. And then we could make them as interactive PDFs and we can make them as digital books that are ePubs, Kindle files. Like we can actually do it as an export of WordPress, X, H, X, HTML so that they can embed it on their site. It's just a matter of them coming to us. So it's not that we can't. It's that most folks aren't thinking about books in that way. Like there's a kind of weird, like the just to having that forum, like 99 percent of people just want books, which we're finding having to do. But I thought we were going to be like, you can do media. Like, especially for what you're writing and what your books are about. I mean, it's a discussion that we have, like we should have games embedded in the things that when people are doing games. But and we're we've been with a digital humanities group here, Carnegie Mellon, we've been talking with them a bit more about ways we could do some different stuff and even some visualizations. And Brad's brought some ideas of like different exploring, not just books. Like, what if we do podcasts? What if we do short video series? What if we do this and different ways to stitch together so there's talk about reputation building in just different ways to get the word out and again, get the ideas out and do short little singles that you can get out quickly. And so we're we're very open to formatted exploration. Getting the textbook notice. I mean, there's kind of like there's a lot of little things that are going on that there are a lot of little streams like. New York State has mandated that the state system look to create open textbooks and they have a program called Open NYS Open, you know, Ness. Nice. Nice has a textbook program called Open Stacks and go around. And what happens is there's a lot of different things that are going on. And I think that kind of could obscure some of the things that that might not show up as readily. But there is the open educational resource group at the Spark that's trying to bring these together. And then Minnesota's Open Task Book Networker Library. I can't remember which one, but people are trying to put things in there to foster adoption of open textbooks. And it prior to hiring Brad, part of like the the range of conferences I attend, man, I wasn't going to a lot of open access things because it wasn't necessarily like it's like, yay, let me squeeze another conference into my life. It's hard to stomach. Well, I mean, even that, even with those groups out there, it still puts the impetus on us for authors. I mean, it's a little bit easier for, I think, the ETC press because we have some people power to at least go explore. And it's, I think, probably harder for one. It's not like, at least in my case, it's not like that's my natural skill set. Right. You know, marketing and advertising. And, you know, I'm just like everyone else at Carnegie Mellon. I'm an introvert and would prefer to speak for yourself. Yeah, everyone, not at the ETC. OK. That's what they made me moderate. And it's I mean, part of what we're doing, I think is trying to to work with CMU. So not only with the library, but also with the marketing and communication department and looking at different ways that we can take the books that we make and shoot minute long videos that talk about was going like things that can be distributed out in social spaces so that and then using our advisory board as a way to sort of amplify that out, which, again, is easier for the press and probably a little bit harder for individual authors to go do. So talk to me about from a teaching perspective, since we've sort of talked a little bit high level, what kind of benefits do your students get from the open access publishing from what you guys are doing? Well, certainly there's a obvious, pretty obvious financial benefit. I think, you know, I think the other couple of things that I mean, I've only used the book once, but I can also sort of reflect back on my own experience as a student. They're more likely to get the book, right? If the text books are 100 bucks or 150 bucks or 200 bucks, they're more likely to borrow it from a friend or copy the chapter that they need. Or so they're more likely to actually have the textbook in their hands when the time comes to use it. The other thing is that, you know, Chris and I's approach to this course, as he said, was quite a bit different than sort of the traditional approach as well. We're going to teach infrastructure management. It's going to be all about roads all the time that and and our perspective was much broader than that. And so we're able to design a course, design a text. So around the course, the way we believe it should have been taught. And so it's a very customized approach. The last piece I would say is there's a difference in the interaction between the professor and the student when the student knows the professor wrote the book. From their point of view, literally, right, it quotes my professor wrote the book. There's there's a presumption of competence there that may be undeserved, but you get it anyway when I wrote it because you wrote it. Yeah, you talked a little bit about it being edited by colleagues and stuff in the field, like were you getting feedback? Like the first time you presented it had students seen it before that or had it stayed at a high level with colleagues editing it before students. In other words, how much interaction went back and forth with the ways in which the text was developed? Well, the the same text that Don used in the classroom got sent out to our colleagues for comments. So you were getting both the students and and from colleagues. Now I'm expecting to get a whole flock of emails on the on the topic, too. Well, like, for instance, one. So we sort of did an informal peer review. We know who our peers are that are working in this in this space, sent it out to them. And in a couple of cases said, you know, you have a whole chapter, you're missing a whole chapter on on X. And so we went back and looked at the book and you're right. It really is it really falls short of where it needs to be without this content in it. And so we inserted it wasn't ended up not being a whole chapter, but it was a half a chapter, addition, additional material and content that we had just not not seen the need to incorporate because we're doing it a different way. And then I already know from from faculty that are using it now that they're accumulating comments for me. I told them to to send them all in. I'd rather have them one at a time than than give a three page book. But we know there are edits. There are typos. There are areas that were unclear or, you know, example problems that really didn't work that we thought would work. But when they tried to use them in class, they didn't. So I think this this first this first year of using the book will really provide us with a lot of feedback. Can I ask you a question? Those of you who have done a textbook. When students get what have you what are your observations about how they how they since it's free? What have they done with it? In two ways, there are these surveys where people will say in students will attest. Oh, I'd rather read it in paper. They love the open access book because it's free. But I also know that a lot of people would turn around and print it out so they can do stuff with it. So number one, is that what they're doing? And have you observed if they're doing it all in E? How is it that they're using it? Do you have any observations on how they engage with the material? Is there a student who's been using books right there? Julie? So you can dig to address that one. So when I was a student of mine, I was using textbook, I was the TA for that class for four years, for different semesters. And then based on my observation, the students print them out. They do print them out. And then they come to my office hour with one chapter, it's like a couple pages, and then pointing out this is the part I don't understand and then this is the part you want to explain more or something like that. And then they actually gave feedback that is very useful for Scott Matthews with the, and then Chris, they're the co-authors of the textbook, Life Semper Assessment. So the student come back with some comments, oh, this is probably wrong, may they check it out. And then we actually correct something from their comments. And then this, what's the second part of the question? Oh, well if they were only reading it in E, how did it? This is kind of waiting. What is E? Electronics, sorry. This is a Carnegie Mellon thing. I don't know about it. But maybe it's not. I just got the inter-cuting language. No, but how did they, if they were actually reading it as an E textbook without printing it out, what did they do in terms of kind of engaging with it? You know, like when you're in paper you make notes, you highlight it. Are students applying sort of tools to kind of take greater advantage of that, kind of connection to learning? Because it's one thing to read, but it's another thing to learn. So I will say when I taught, I only use digital books. I only use books that were in digital forms. One of the reasons I like the ETC Press. I would make my notes, I would make all my notes in the book and then so that kids could access what notes I thought were important about the books, like as they were reading it, and then we would aggregate the stuff that they brought together that they thought were interesting. I had to add those to the digital text. So there was- The way of teaching. I mean, it's the same way of teaching as just using digital stuff, but teaching them how those tools work, like we expect students to understand that and I thought it was more important to teach them. You can highlight, make notes, share collaboratively in ways that you can't if it's paper. Because that's just yours, but that digital format allows you to sort of read in person. So that's different than what they did, but I think there are ways to do that. How difficult was it to write a book in public? Right, because you're writing it, people are seeing drafts, students are using it, you know there's problems with it. Like this is a different way to think about writing a book. Well, as Julie was saying, it was really useful to get feedback. I feel sorry for the kids going through the first version of this, but we thought it was better than what was out there as alternatives. So you didn't have a problem sort of, you didn't feel that you were undermining your authority by having something written that wasn't done and complete. I don't think it ever even occurred to me. And maybe it was just my, so I did my masters at Illinois. And while I was there, I think almost more than half of my classes were taught out of textbooks that were in draft that my professors were writing. That was just a function of that place. And I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. So the fact that I was getting a chance to do it myself, I just was sort of picked up on that experience. And then one thing to add is that Scott always is like, oh, I can know who are really paying attention to the class. Yeah. You'll see that, Jim. I'm so narrow. Scott, Ian, and I did the environmental life cycle that I sent you before. I just remember I'm gonna just totally bust myself doing my master's thesis way back at University of North Carolina where you had to do it like on 100% cotton paper and all that rigmarole. Oh yeah. Back in the day. And then it was just gonna go in the library. So I put in there on some page. If you were reading this, please email me at. And I've never gotten an email in the copy that's sitting somewhere in that library. But it's on really nice paper. Yeah, it's on really good paper. But I was just curious and I was like a punk at the time. I guess I still am. Like I'm building on one thing I've heard from colleagues with our books is they like to buy the book and have several copies. And they get all the students to have the digital version and they go through it chapter by chapter and they've noticed that some of them print them out and some of them do sort of like what Brad does and they use the digital version to share in some way so they can see like a little palimpsest of the class commentary around a digital version in ways that they find powerful. But that's what's so inspiring to me is when you hear about how they're using it and you're like, oh, it's worth doing open access because people use it more. And that was, and we felt lucky. And I feel the charge, and this is what I put, I remember when I was talking to Mark Campbell and Cohen at the time, the president and the provost at the time going, here's my idea and here's why I think it should be open access because I believe it's in within the university's charter to be somebody who shares information with the world and how are you gonna say no to that? So like we made this case, like we're gonna try to run as close to the black as we can but we're not about trying to make money. We're about trying to have an impact and steer conversations in ways that we feel like Carnegie Mellon's uniquely positioned because of this university to be the leader in that. And we can drive those costs way down using emerging technologies. So what a traditional press would lose, seven figures trying to do stuff. We're nowhere near any of that stuff just by using. Yeah, we're close to black. Yeah, so I wanna ask one more question because we've been going at it for about an hour and I don't wanna keep everybody here all day. So how important was it that you work with a library as you guys were doing this and as we've sort of moved? How has the library been a partner and how has that been helpful in the open access process for you? Go ahead. He keeps sending it to you. Well, yeah, I mean I. I mean I. Once, yeah, once is your advisers, always your advisers, right? Let's see how you answer this. Exactly. No, I mean I think so when we started this, the library was not even a part of the conversation. So Chris and I started the process in December of last year, right? Sort of had this idea at the All India Buffet one afternoon and lots of good work gets done there. And so I think we were, it was in draft, year, two years ago December, right? Nearly a complete draft. We had nearly a complete draft and then started talking about, so we sort of worked our way through what we wanted to do with respect to the copyrights and started talking about, well, where are we gonna host it? And then started this conversation with the library and it was right about the time that Kilt Hub was sort of standing up, at least from my point of view, it was like I'd never heard about it and then all of a sudden it was a thing. And when we looked at sort of talk, went back to Dave Zambak, the head of civil environmental engineering and looked at where other books written by the civil engineering department were being hosted. Said, you know, I think this is an opportunity for us to host it with the library and sort of made an intentional decision to work through that process in the hopes that it would pave way for other books that are written by College of Engineering faculty to also host them there. So they would become a first choice, again, because you can, now it's a durable location. I don't have to worry about the book. I know right where it is, it's fine. I didn't have to deal with the, I don't even remember what the acronym DOI stands for, but it was important. And the library was able to, yeah, the library was able to- I had the same conversation, like, what is that? The library was able to take care of all that. And then- It was all object identified. Right. And then even the conversations with the OTL in terms of talking to other referatories, librarian to librarian, as opposed to sort of me trying to manage a conversation in a space where I don't really have the expertise, so. So I'm taking the project management book and doing an update. I don't probably do it under kill tub when that gets done. Same kind of reason? Yeah. Well, when we first started, it was literally just like, we want to make sure to see me use library. We did the same thing with the bookstore. We want to make sure the bookstore has a copy. And it started there, just like every time something came out, I make sure I passed them a copy. And at some point in the process, somebody here said, oh, we looked at your website, you have digital copies. We could host them. We're like, oh, then I'd pass you the PDF too. And as it's evolved, the library's technology's evolved, it's become much more of a relationship in terms of the strategy of what we're doing and how we're going to do it. I'd say it's been outside of the people. It's been a great working relationship. Ha ha ha. For Carolyn on Facebook and anyone else who tuned in after the introductions were done, can you go back through and tell who everyone is? And if you want to introduce yourselves, that would be great too. I can do that. Great. Actually, what I'm going to do instead of me, I'm going to have you all do it. I can do it again, but Drew, tell the people who you are. Hi, I'm Drew Davidson. I'm the director of the Entertainment Technology Center and the founder of ETC Press. I just was waiting to see if you're going on from there, yeah. Short speech, yeah, they always... Hi, Don Cofelt, Associate Vice President for Facilities Management and Campus Services and Adjunct Faculty in the Civil and Environmental Engineering. And one of the two authors of... Oh, yeah, while we're advertising our book, one of the two authors of Fundamentals of Infrastructure Management, available from your local Carnegie Mellon Library. And I'm Chris Hedrickson. I'm a long-standing faculty member here at Carnegie Mellon University with appointments in Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering and Public Policy and Heinz School. I'm now Emeritus in part-time and I still have a role as director of our Traffic 21 Institute. And I have four books out of the Fundamentals of Infrastructure Management, Project Management for Construction, Environmental Life Cycle Assessment and Civil Systems, Pricing and Investment. And I'm Brad King. I'm the director and editor of the ETC Press, working for that guy at the far left. That's why we're this far apart. You're right, stage left. Are there any questions? Something from the internet crowd. Rick is pointing a finger and it looks like there's gonna be a question. I have a couple, but I'll ask you one specific one. Since you changed over to an entirely digital infrastructure for making these discoverable, you're working with a library, offering a copy as proof of it. Unlike a print book that you print, it sits on a shelf. What are your concerns for sustainability? In terms of format or in terms of the digital object remaining viable beyond a certain amount of time? That's almost a librarian question. I think there's people out here who have more expertise than I do. That's why they work with a library. So I just looked at my Project Management for Construction book. I have it in three different forms. I have it in HTML, I have it in PDF, and I have it in an old format called .mss. I do not have it in Word. Now fortunately, you can take the PDF and convert it to Word without it much trouble. So you got to rely on those sorts of conversions going forward to be able to work. And I can say at the EDZ Press, we have almost all of our books in press books which separates content from design. So we have, it's WordPress backend, right? That exports in nine different formats. So we have all the content existing as just HTML content that we can export in a variety of files. So depending on as things change and move, we can export them and put them in the new formats and it takes a half hour. Although like a longer term answer, because we've had some like, someday there might not be press books or something for instance. Some of our earlier partners no longer exist in. And the same thing, maybe someday a PDF's no longer a readable file. And so there's something we try to keep on, not even that, just sometimes like, and they've improved their interface. Nothing works anymore. Take out a feature that you were using all the time. Things like that have happened to us and we adjust and pivot and we try to just be open and honest about sometimes things will change that we have little to no control over. And we have every original file. So we have every word document, every individual. Like we have, sort of we're going through and organizing all of our backend files. So we have everything. So hopefully we can keep updating it. There's only so much you can do though, right? Like there's only so much that you can prepare for. So have it each one laid out in Gutenberg press style. Yeah. Actually so a follow on question. Since you're looking at each of the elements as part of these publications, you were talking earlier about the additional affordances. So let's say an embedded VR segment, three dimensional orthogonal or rotational interface or something, you have more elements you need to track going forward to refresh whatever that final document is. Give you the example of you being incorporated flash before, well, that's a problem now. So is this, does this just cover project management in terms of a textbook? Does this require a tighter interaction with editors who are technically savvy than you might have needed in more traditional presses? Well, I guess I have a preference for trying to avoid those sorts of problems. So trying to do a fairly clean textbook without flash and think about anything fancy that's on the side. For example, our environmental lifecycle assessment book has a whole bunch of affiliated spreadsheets and computational tools associated with it. And those going forward might be a problem to try and update. I mean, we've worked with, we have actually a small book coming out at the ETC Press at some point here about time-based media and the ways in which that's archived because that's a massive problem. You've asked a problem that the government spent millions of dollars at the Library of Congress trying to figure out and they came up with this answer. Yeah, we don't know. So trying to figure out what those standards are going to be so that they can move forward is a problem that everybody is trying to deal with right now because there's so many new emerging technologies that are built around interactivity and VR and things like how do you archive those? How do you archive them in a way that they're usable 20 years from now and there's not really an answer? There's a lot of questions about how to do that. So the best we can do is be honest with our authors and say, the more you do cutting-edge stuff, the more likely it is going to become a problem to archive it and use it 10 years from now. Yeah, and this isn't, I think, a problem that's specific to open access at all. And I know from working with the director of our bookstore, we have faculty who want calculus, for example, with the digital content, it is on the side. In that case, you get the book or you get the book plus the digital content and some want them together, some don't want the digital content at all. So these are problems, I think, that are challenging traditional publishers as well. I mean, I've seen stuff like the OLLIP project here currently emailing and the idea of having everything emulated so that you can have this little capsule that it will run no matter what. And the stuff out at Stanford with Henry Lowwood, like ways that you do these sort of digital archives, like one of the things we struggled with is imagine doing something like my master's thesis, I was trying to make the point that a lot of us might support it. I was in the communication department, and I was like, I wanted my academic scholarly research to be a performance. So it was gonna be ephemeral and the only documentation was gonna be the script and the video. And my committee said yes and the grad school said no. They wouldn't let me graduate till I turned in a paper. So what you meant, we bring in all of it, especially the issue of emulation. I think this is one of the issues that I'd heard in some comments about the surrender of the Library Press Coalition and the, oh no, sorry, forgotten the other organization, the American Association of University Presses, talking about the possible need for greater infrastructure from for-profit publishers, especially, they're having the ability to develop this technology or develop standards and share the simulation technology, but the smaller leaner things like DTC Press and others, especially those who are more OA and operating in the black, but just to get content out there, that they might not have access to that kind of technology. And archive.org is doing some really interesting stuff now with interactive emulation. We're gonna run old Mac or old Amiga stuff right there on the website. But what's interesting is that not everybody who makes things wants it to be emulated. Like this is part of the time-based media is that somebody says, look, I've made it in this format and when you emulate it, you've taken it out of that format and that's not the same and artists and people that make those won't allow that to happen, right? So there's lots of layers going on to like, this is what the digital archive is here have told me, is that it becomes sort of an individual working with the people that are making whatever this sort of interactive stuff is to work with them to say, do you want this emulated in the future? Can we manipulate it so that it can be moved forward? Or is this just a thing that at some point will no longer be accessible? And sometimes people make the decision that they have made the artifact and the thing that they've wanted to be the way that it is and when you can't view it anymore, that's what happens. So I think some of that's gonna be and there'll be texts where you say, once a putted text. Right. Yeah, it'll just be like an X. Because books will last. They were all designed those books. That is a good way to end. Oh. They're both designed. Thank you guys for coming out. Thank you guys for talking and Thanks for the crowd speak. Bye Facebook. Yeah.