Open Education Resource - There's no official definition, but generally....
OPEN =Open license
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RESOURCE
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Are Library Resources OERs?
Library resources are usually not free of copyright restrictions so they cannot be adapted, copied, or distributed without the permission of the copyright holder, even for educational purposes, so technically speaking, they aren't OERs. However, since library resources are free to use and many electronic resources have unlimited users, they can fill the same needs as OERs in many situations
Our thanks to Mary Ann Cullen at Georgia Perimeter College, who compiled much of the information in this Guide!
Why OERs?
Concerns....
There are many sources for OERs, but here are a few popular sites. (There is often a fair amount of overlap in the materials in these sites.)
Selection Criteria
Some of the factors the ENGL 1101 textbook committee considered when selecting a text to adapt:
Other OER projects also consider availability of supplementary materials such as exercises and exams and peer review of the content.
Many OERs use Creative Commons Licenses to communicate just how "open" the resource is.
Copyright law grants, by default, "all rights reserved" to authors (or other copyright holders) to protect their claim to a work and profits generated from it.
Creative Commons is a popular way for copyright holders to modify these rights to allow others to reuse, modify, distribute, or even profit from their works without asking permission. The works are still copyrighted and must be cited when used as an information source in a research paper, but the author has opted to allow others to use the work within selected restrictions.
The particular combination of restrictions is selected by the copyright holder and is usually represented in code and/or image. For example,
This license specifies that you may modify, distribute, and reuse the work as long as you give attribution (credit) to the original author and you use the work non-commercially.
Guide from ProQuest (PDF with clickable links)