OER Commons vs Pressbooks
OER Commons
oercommons.org
Pressbooks
pressbooks.comSide by side
| Figure | OER Commons | Pressbooks |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $10/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 7 |
| Spec score · Open Educational Resource Platforms | 7.6 (#14) | 8.6 (#5) |
| Accessibility | Open Author includes an accessibility checker, requires alt text for embedded images, and automatically captions videos uploaded to an Open Author resource. | Pressbooks says its platform helps creators meet accessibility standards and its paid plans can produce WCAG 2.2 compliant books. |
| Audience | The library serves K–12 and higher education educators, librarians, and homeschooling parents. | Its platform serves individual creators, educational institutions, consortia, independent and university presses, and DIY creators. |
| Founded | 2007 | 2011 |
| Purpose | OER Commons is an openly accessible digital library for educators to find high-quality open educational resources and collaborate around their use, evaluation, and improvement. | Pressbooks helps authors and educational institutions create, adapt, and share accessible digital books and learning materials. |
| Support | ISKME provides content curation by digital librarians and directs organizations to contact [email protected] about product and service offerings. | Enterprise customers receive personalized onboarding, end-user training, troubleshooting, responsive service, and webinars. |
Plans
Pressbooks
- Free TrialFree
- Single Author$12 a month
- Collaboration$40 a month
- Single Author$120 a year
- Collaboration$400 a year
- Institutional Network$5,999 a year
- Shared Network$15,999 a year
In their own words
OER Commons
OER Commons is a free web-based digital library for finding open educational resources and collaborating on their use, evaluation and improvement. It serves K–12 and higher education educators, librarians and homeschooling parents. A free account, priced at free, provides library access, Open Author for creating or publishing resources, groups, collaboration to curate or remix content, and a personal profile for saved resources. Organizations can use Hubs to develop collections, manage content and facilitate conversations. Custom microsites can have their own libraries and domains, tailored metadata and content creation, and analytics dashboards. Open Author includes an accessibility checker, requires alt text for embedded images and automatically captions videos uploaded to a resource. ISKME offers data and API integration services for learning management systems; its tools can receive and provide harvestable content feeds in Dublin Core, IEEE Learning Object Metadata and RSS. ISKME reports completed accessibility audits and another review underway, but authors and users remain responsible for resource accessibility, and many indexed materials are hosted externally. Resources created in legacy Open Author 1 are scheduled for removal on December 31, 2026; Open Author 2 resources are unaffected.
Pressbooks
Pressbooks has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.