Defending the Promise of Open Resources

"Open Up Resources was born out of a demand from educators to make a quality education accessible to each student, in every classroom, by providing high-quality, standards-aligned curriculum for free.

We released Open Up Resources 6–8 Math under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC-BY License), which enables anyone to “copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format” as well as “remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially,” so long as attribution to Open Up Resources is provided and a few other simple license terms are followed.

 Our grant of the CC-BY License is conditioned upon the simple requirement that every copy shared with the public by a licensee includes on each physical page of any printed material, and every format page view of digital material, the attribution statement “Download for free at openupresources.org.”

While we encourage widespread distribution of our curriculum, we also believe that the attribution requirement of the CC-BY License must be followed by anyone sharing our curriculum or derivatives of our curriculum.

Major for-profit publishers are taking our free curriculum, paying for a “certification” from a non-profit in the OER community, and selling the result without providing attribution that would make it clear no payment is necessary.

This destroys the promise of open by making open materials private and limiting access...."