Author teams just completed an intense year of outlining, writing, and revising to get your manuscript ready to pilot. Authors should plan a break from the project during Year 2. You’ll work with the Project Manager to determine when, during the year, it makes sense to come back and make changes in your working documents.

At the end of Year 1, a draft of your manuscript reached the point that we call “pencils down.” That means no more edits to this version of your textbook so that reviewers, pilot instructors, and students have a stable textbook to work with this year. The leadership team moved this version into Pressbooks, our publishing platform. Your chapter docs are still working documents, but any changes you make there will not be reflected in the pilot edition of your book.

At the end of Year 1, you had to finish in the available time so that your book could be piloted with students. However, you very likely weren’t really done with your chapters. Now you have time to revisit your priorities. During Year 2, you will make four separate one-month passes through your chapter docs for important cleanup:

• First pass: Re-read your chapters and fill content gaps
• Second pass: Multimedia figures
• Third pass: H5P development
• Fourth pass: Cleaning up licenses, attributions, and references sections

Please plan to spend at least one month per pass. Your Project Manager will help you stay on track.

Year 2 Author Deadline

Each author must finish their work by the end of Year 2, Month 10. Because we’re asking you to make four 1-month passes through your chapters, this means that you must get started by the beginning of Month 7.

The most important thing you can do to improve your chapters this year is: don’t rush. Put time on your calendar during your scheduled time to work on this project so that you can engage at a regular cadence. Schedule check-ins with the Project Manager or other team members to keep yourself accountable. A writing group like VOWəL [Website] can also help you protect your writing time and stay accountable to your goals.

You could take one long break from Months 1-6 and then dive back in at Month 7. However, we recommend starting earlier and building in some breaks and cushions because life happens. Here is an example of what we mean by needing a cushion:

• You give yourself a deadline of January 31 for one of your chapter passes.
• Life happens and now it’s January 28 and you’re just getting started. However, we do not want you to cram a month’s worth of work into one weekend because that doesn’t honor all the effort you have put into this project so far.
• Instead, contact the Project Manager and reschedule for a time that you have a whole month to spend on this pass.
• If now is a good time, your new deadline will be February 28 so that you have a whole month to work.

Keep in mind, too, that you might start pulling on a loose thread and suddenly have more than a month’s worth of work in mind for one pass. For example, you might search for more diverse scholars to cite (Year 2, Unit 9) and see a way to rewrite an entire section foregrounding different perspectives. Or you might have a great media idea (Year 2, Unit 7) that would take more than 4 weeks of collaboration with a Media Developer to create. If it’s early in the year, you and your Project Manager may be able to build in time for new ideas. But the closer we are to the deadline, the more important it will be to limit your scope.

Manuscript Handoff to Revising Author and Early Adoption Instructors

The author team’s Year 2 goal is to further develop the manuscript so that it is in the best possible shape to hand off to the Revising Author and Early Adoption Instructors.

As we said above, we don’t change the pilot edition of the book during Year 2 because we want reviewers, instructors, and students to have a stable textbook to use this year. The leadership team will make a Year 3 Pressbook reflecting the author team’s Year 2 revisions for use by Early Adoption Instructors next year.

The Lead Author has one month (Year 2, Month 11) to ensure that all documents are ready to include in the packet. Lead Authors can review materials from Year 1, Unit 10 for a reminder about tools and communication guidelines for this process. The table below shows the full packet of documents that each author team will hand off by the end of Year 2.

Revising Author Role

This might sound counterintuitive, but the original author team might not be the people who make final revisions to the textbook in Year 3. Who will the Revising Author be? As with so many questions about these projects, the answer is “it depends.”

Usually the leadership team will first approach the current lead author and offer them the role. If the lead author is not going to be the Revising Author, our next step is usually to offer it to one of the project’s contributing authors. We also may reach out to people outside the current project team. The approach that the leadership team takes will vary based on the project’s needs. You can read more about the role in the Revising Author unit.

The current author team has invested a ton of hard work and care into the project so far. It can be unsettling to imagine a different author joining the project next year and making changes to that work. Here are a few reasons that the original Lead Author or other members of the current project team may not take the Revising Author role next year:

• The current author team members may not have capacity to do the Revising Author role next year.
• The current author team members may decide that the project will benefit from a new perspective.
• The leadership team may determine that it’s not feasible for members of the current team to align with the project goals in the available time.

In our experience so far, however, the more likely scenario is that the current Lead Author will continue on the project as the Revising Author next year.

One last note: every team should work on their manuscript during Year 2, even if you are 100 percent certain that the Revising Author role on your project will be filled by your current Lead Author. Next year, the Revising Author’s focus will be on implementing the feedback from our external reviewers according to their revision plan – not manuscript development. Year 2 is your time to bring your chapters closer to the goals of the About This Book document.

Reintroducing the Open Curriculum Development Project Textbook Criteria for Success

We developed the Open Curriculum Development Project Textbook Criteria for Success to describe concretely what we mean by high-quality course materials. You worked with the criteria extensively in Year 1 of this project, and they are included below as a reminder. You will recognize principles from Transparency in Learning and Teaching, Culturally Responsive Teaching, Universal Design for Learning, and Open Educational Practices that we introduced in the Matrix of Approaches for Equity-Minded Design in Year 2, Unit 1.

Licenses and Attributions for Manuscript Development in Year 2

“Manuscript Development in Year 2” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under CC BY 4.0.