Community Review (Foto: Dave Parker, CC-BY)

After months of writing and wrangling, we are very happy to open up the first draft chapter of our textbook for open community review: “Open Education & Science“. From now on, we invite scholars and practitioners interested in these two closely related topics to comment on the first version of our manuscript. While working on further chapters, we will engage regularly with these comments and follow suggestions where they seem to fit the overall goal of our project. We understand this process as highly experimental: We have no idea if and how many people are interested in contributing to this textbook-in-progress. Also, we haven’t entirely figured out a routine on how to deal with comments and how to engage with commentators. Hopefully we know more about this in a few weeks time.

We decided to make the manuscript available through Google Docs. This way, the interested audience can not only make suggestions to the manuscript, but also have a look at earlier versions of the manuscript to get an impression of our writing process. However, if we find out that Google Docs has certain limitations we did not anticipate, we’re also open to experimenting with another platform for one of the next chapters. To further ease the process of community review, we added some soft guidance for our reviewers on the first page of the manuscript:

Guiding principle:

• Read the chapter through the eyes of a student, not an expert.

Guiding questions:

• Are there any logical inconsistencies or gaps?
• Is the chapter well balanced (e.g., pro/con; general input/case studies)?
• Are there sections that need further elaboration (e.g., examples, figures)?
• Are there sections you find boring or redundant?
• Can you spot any language issues or factual mistakes?