Abstract
WikiVet (www.wikivet.net) is a collaborative initiative to develop a free online veterinary teaching and learning resource. As well as aiming to provide extensive content relevant to the international veterinary curriculum, it plays a major role in a number of other initiatives. Recently, one of these initiatives was a new model for collaboration with publishers in developing open educational resources (OERs). Due to the current economic challenges, students and institutions find it harder to afford expensive text books and are looking for alternatives. Sample content released as OERs, which then links to the full paid-for resource, is a way to provide benefit to both students and publishers. A number of strategies were developed in order to drive extra traffic to these new resources; including translation of the content into French and Spanish, publishing podcast versions of key content on iTunes and promoting resources using Facebook , Twitter and e-newsletter feeds. WikiVet aims to drive collaboration between universities worldwide but this is not a straightforward task without providing more guidance. Trying to solve this problem has led to another initiative aiming to build a veterinary anatomy museum combining resources from both academic institutions and commercial publishers. The overarching idea is to share resource development effectively without unnecessary duplication. To start with, the aim is to collect all the appropriate anatomy resources that are available to date. The museum is currently under development; many institutions have already expressed interest and more are joining the WikiVet initiative as a result.