Open Educational Resources in the UK | Research Libraries UK

by David Prosser, Executive Director, RLUK I was recently asked to speak at the sherif event Open Educational Resources: a viable solution? I took the opportunity to look back at the headline history of OER advocacy and activity internationally with a view to see how these might inform the future of OERs in the UK. As a long-term open access advocate, I often go back to the Budapest Open Access initiative (BOAI). Published in 2002, the BOAI deliberately limited itself to journal articles. This was not because it was felt that Open Access to other types of scholarly output was unimportant, but that journal articles were considered to be ‘low-hanging fruit’. Journal articles are (almost exclusively) royalty-free and therefore authors are not being asked to forgo direct financial reward if they make their papers open access. For royalty-producing material – textbooks and some other educational resources – rights holders would need to be convinced that the benefits of open access would outweigh any loss of potential income. Therefore, for the original signatories to the BOAI the focus should be on journal articles, and once we had solved this easier problem, then we could shift to addressing the harder problems. Twenty years on, as we work our way through rights retention, transformative and transitional deals, hybrid journals, green, gold, and diamond we may wonder just how easily picked those low-hanging fruit were. But it quickly became clear that many people did not want to wait for a simple sequential approach to open access. They wanted to think about a broader range of outputs from the start. So, even from the publication of the BOAI people started to discuss what open access meant for educational resources. The arguments that had been made about the unaffordability of journals were reflected in discussions about the unaffordability of textbooks. And just as concerns were raised about the bundling effects of journals and big deals – why are you paying for one excellent paper (or journal) in amongst many mediocre papers (or journals) – so the question was asked why pay for a whole book when only one chapter had been recommended? [...]