Open Publishing Management Manual

The Enterprise Commons:
Growing Sustainable Open Content for South Africa.

To start of a series of OpenBusiness Guides our South African partner has conducted a survey of Open Publishing. The result is a highly practical guide outlining strategies for sustainable Open Publishing ventures. The guide is based on an investigation of open publishing projects in South Africa.

Download the PDF version of the manual.

From the introduction: In an age where competition for funding resources is growing, organisations need to be aware of how to get the greatest impact from dwindling resources. For this reason, the area of open content has become a critical issue for both donors and educational organisations.

The word “business” may be a bit distracting when talking about educational projects. Unlike traditional business models that rely solely on commercial transactions between the company and its customers, the funding of open content education products comes mostly from public foundations, international donors and government departments. Although open educational publishing projects are typically not developed around pure business or commercial goals, all of them require a strategy that addresses long-term viability in order to sustain themselves after what is usually only an initial period of funding.Sustainability of open educational content projects is referred to further in this manual as an elusive “golden egg” that is dependent on a range of interdependent factors. Projects partnerships; the development, licensing and procurement of content; content dissemination; interactivity and user statistics; innovative and entrepreneurial scope and, lastly, project finding are analysed through the lens of “openness” in this guide. From this perspective, the guide has attempted to analyse to what extent “openness” plays a part in the project’s sustainability and whether there are any clear trends that similar projects could follow in achieving success in providing accessible, quality educational services.