Welcome to the Proctor Library's Open Educational Resources (OER) Guide. This comprehensive resource is designed to support faculty, students, and staff in discovering, evaluating, and implementing open educational resources and low-cost textbook alternatives across all disciplines. Whether you're looking to reduce textbook costs for your students, enhance your course materials, or create your own open content, this guide provides the tools and information you need to navigate the world of OER successfully.
Upon exploring this guide, you will be able to:
We encourage you to begin with our "Getting Started with OER" section if you're new to open educational resources, or navigate directly to specific sections that address your current needs.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation, and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Often, people will refer to "Open Access" materials when referencing the sources that are used to create OERs.
The Open Access movement began in 2012 in response to the journal pricing crisis. Open Access uses Creative Commons licenses to enable legal sharing, which led to broader academic resource sharing.
Budapest Open Access Initiative Definition of Open Access
"By "open access" to this literature [peer-reviewed journal articles and preprints], we mean its 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." (JLIS.it, Redazione, 2012. )
The 5 Rs of OER
