In today's world of online publishing the challenges of staying in business are manifold. Online resource providers have to ensure quality that can be accessed by various means and devices to retain their client base. We have seen that an important part of the OER project sustenance strategy lies in quality assurance which includes keeping material up to date and accessible.

At the end of this unit you will be able to understand

• that we need to evolve a method to ensure continuous updation of content to avoid becoming obsolete 
• the role of archiving and version control in document management

If you examine the resources posted by existing OER projects, you will find that they are collaborative in nature; there are multiple team members who have contributed to material development in a collaborative environment. This is not only an efficient way to build resources but also more effective in terms of ensuring deliverables. The technolgies available today permit more collaboration in the web space. There are systems that permit collaborative writing of documents - with attribution to the author contributors; collaborative review and editing of content and the content sharing/management system that your project uses may also allow users of your resources to post their views and comments. The online education environment can be very dynamic, both from the user as well as the project team member's perspective. OER projects are able to sustain only if the dynamics of the web world can be planned and interwoven into the project, so that project materials remain useful for their intended users over time.

Let us consider the example of traditional book publishing companies which have moved to the web. Learning from online resources such as blogs and wikis, popular book publishers O'Reilly now make the first draft of their books available online for the public to read and post feedback. This is part of the improvement of in-progress books. The authors are out in the open, the whole manuscript is published in HTML with a comment box under every paragraph, figure or table(http://labs.oreilly.com/2009/05/collaborative-publishing-based-on-community-feedback.html).