Research Guides: Open Education: Authoring Tools and Platforms

What Publishing Tool is Right for You?

There are dozens of tools available for authoring, publishing, and sharing your OER. Consider the following questions when selecting a tool:

1. What technology platforms am I already comfortable using? Do I want to learn to use a new tool as I author my OER?

2. What technology platforms are my audience most comfortable using? Will authoring or publishing in a particular platform require them to learn a new tool?

3. If someone wants to reuse or adapt my content, will it be simple for them to do that with the format(s) I've made available?

4. Do I have budget to pay for access to a tool or for advanced features in an otherwise free tool?

OER can be in several Forms

Technology: Digital Learning Innovation
This blog by the University of Toronto provides a great introduction to tools used for open education publishing

Commercial E-book Publishers

PressBooks
A digital publisher with a variety of file types available for export. University Libraries has a subscription to Pressbooks and the books created are free for students to read and download.

Open Publishing Tools

Bookdown
Bookdown is an open source R package that structures book writing and workflow. Those who want to create statistics and programming textbooks may find it a useful fit. Supported languages include R, C/C++, Python, Fortran, Julia, Shell scripts, and SQL as well as LaTeX.
GitBook
GitBook is an online platform to create and host books. It can output your content as a website or as an ebook (PDF, EPUB or MOBI), and hosting is free if the book is open. Existing GitHub users will likely feel most comfortable with GitBook. Others may find it a bit overwhelming at first.
Jupyter Notebooks
Jupyter Notebooks is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. It supports over 40 programming languages, including Python, R, Julia, and Scala.
Open Author
Open Author helps you build Open Educational Resources, lesson plans, and courses (on your own, or with others) — and then publish them, to the benefit of educators and learners everywhere. Powered by OER Commons.
Open Monographs Press
Open Monograph Press is an open source software platform for managing the editorial workflow required to see monographs, edited volumes and, scholarly editions through internal and external review, editing, cataloguing, production, and publication. OMP can operate, as well, as a press website with catalog, distribution, and sales capacities.
PreTeXt
A lightweight XML application for authors of research articles, textbooks and monographs. The best of DocBook, LaTeX, and HTML. Outputs: print, PDF, web, and soon, EPUB, Jupyter Notebooks, …
(Before June 2017, PreTeXt was called “MathBook XML”, so many of those references remain.)
The Rebus Community Press
A platform that allows members of the Rebus Community to create Open Textbooks. The site provides hosting.
Scalar
Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required.
Wikibooks
This open authoring platform is a sister project of Wikipedia and looks a lot like that. You will need to use Wikitext markup language to create it, but this has a relatively short learning curve, especially if you have HTML experience. The biggest thing to know about Wikibooks is that like Wikipedia, all content is open to editing. If you're interested in crowdsourcing the content, this may be the right tool for you, but avoid it if you want to retain a high level of control over the original copy.