5 Rs” of OER (Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix,Redistribute)

Hints for Preparing Documents Most documents go through several versions (always more than you expected) before they are finally finished. Accordingly, you should do whatever possible to make the job of changing them easy. First, when you do the purely mechanical operations of typing, type so subsequent editing will be easy. Start each sentence on a new line. Make lines short, and break lines at natural places, such as after commas and semicolons, rather than randomly. Since most people change documents by rewriting phrases and adding, deleting and rearranging sentences, these precautions simplify any editing you have to do later. — Brian W. Kernighan, 1974

Fifty years ago, coinciding with the centennial of the release of Darwin’s manuscript, author Morse Peckham collected all six editions into a single “variorum” text. Peckham painstakingly created a reference system that denotes the modifications and changes between editions. The text was created by Peckham’s careful enumeration of every sentence from every edition, copied onto index cards; from these cards, he carefully assembled them into a final text.

“Digital technology allows us to be far more adventurous in the ways we read and view and live in our texts,” she said. “Why aren’t we doing more to explore that?”

Everything Lives in GitWith a Jamstack project, anyone should be able to do a git clone, install any needed dependencies with a standard procedure (like npm install), and be ready to run the full project locally. No databases to clone, no complex installs. This reduces contributor friction, and also simplifies staging and testing workflows.

I kept losing content that I edited out and then wanted to put it back in.

Add back the Gemfile.lock We want to every clone of this repository to have a set of dependencies that we are sure will have green tests. We remove the lock in CI to make sure we are always running tests with the latest version.

Legislative staff members had finished rewriting AB 375, and a deal seemed imminent. That Friday, as he drank his morning coffee, Mactaggart decided to read the new bill — the fine print — one more time. He noticed a seemingly minor alteration in one section, the kind of thing most people would skip over. Mactaggart realized it would completely gut what remained of the private right of action. Furious, he called Hertzberg and Chau and told them the deal was off. Neither lawmaker could explain who made the change, Mactaggart told me, but Hertzberg scrambled to fix it. “In most negotiations, you are talking to all these different interest groups,” Hertzberg told me recently. “This is a situation where we had to go and reach out to everyone and bring that information to Mr. Mactaggart and ask him what he wanted to do.”

Contrary to paper notes, computer files do not display the traces or versions that led to their final state.

I think there is a need to develop a system to track the draft of a manuscript from the beginning to the end of the process.

a lack of version control over the vast majority of the research literature makes actually ‘adapting’ papers to include post-publication comments is impossible.