Library: OER and Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$): Open Access and OER

About Open Educational Resources and Open Access

Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials which are made available for no cost, under terms which allow educators and learners to use, share, and create new materials from them. They include all types of educational materials: textbooks, homework, assessments, courseware, videos, and anything else that can be used to support teaching and learning. OER should encourage the full utilization and growth of the OER ecosystem by permitting the "Five Rs" of open: Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute.Proprietary educational materials have cost barriers, complicate access with paywalls and logins, and often limit the term of access to a few months. Teachers can't easily and legally adapt these copyrighted materials to improve learning. OER remove barriers to both teaching and learning.

Open Access refers to scholarly output such as articles, monographs, and more. The Budapest Open Access Initiative defined Open Access in 2002 as "free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."."Closed" scholarly publishing limits access to those with institutional or personal resources, and restricts use. Because research and other scholarly activity build on existing work, Open Access removes barriers to the creation as well as the use of scholarship.

OER and OA work differently in the world of open materials. They complement each other, and may interact, for example when Open Access books or articles are assigned as course materials. One key difference is that OER, as educational materials, don't usually advance scholarship. OA refers more broadly to the process of sharing scholarly work with open licenses.

OER, OA and You

For students, OER and OA both ease the process of accessing the information you need to learn and develop your own contributions. Having access to OER textbooks and other course materials means that you can access them immediately without any cost; use them however works best for you; retain them as long as they are useful to you; and even benefit from customization your professors are able to undertake because OER have open licenses. You might even participate in open education, in which you develop and publish your own OER. As OA grows, more of the scholarly articles and data you need are available to you, without cost or other restrictions, even after you leave your educational institution.

For faculty, OER support your teaching by removing barriers that can make students unable or unwilling to access assigned course materials. The range of OER available for all disciplines and levels grows every year, and new tools support interactive and adaptive materials. If you last looked at OER a few years ago, look again! You may be able to find OA materials to teach with as well; major university presses such as MIT Press have undertaken campaigns to fund moving their titles to Open Access. As a researcher, you benefit from access to OA scholarship. If you can, commit to publish OA yourself, so that others can find your work without barriers.

Attribution and Licensing

Open Access and OER by Katherine Luce is adapted from "Open Access to Scholarship" and "OER, Open Textbooks, and Open Courses" by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0.

"Open Access Logo PLOS white" by art designer at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina, Beao, and JakobVoss, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

"Open Educational Resources (OER) logo - public domain" OERinfo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Open Access and OER by Katherine Luce is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.