Your Librarian
Sarah Morehouse
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Subjects: Art and Art History, Business, Management & Economics, Cultural Studies, Education, Emergency and Fire Services, Gender and Women's Studies, History, Labor, Language and Literature, Law and Criminal Justice, Philosophy and Religion, Politics & Policy, Science, Mathematics & Technology, Social Science
Open means more than Free
Open Educational Resources are so much more than free online educational resources.
You don’t have to pay for Open Educational Resources, but they are also free in the sense that you can do whatever you want with them without having to get a license from the copyright owner (because they are already openly licensed.)
The Five Rs
OERs are free to:
- Retain - The right to make and keep your own copy of a resource. This copy is under your control, not the control of the original author or publisher. This is important to ensure ongoing access, even after the original source of the content has lost interest or disappeared. Keeping track of versions and provenance becomes important.
- Reuse - The right to use the content in its unaltered form. You can not only keep it, but also use it, including in ways that involve sharing or distributing copies. You can do this with the source files as well as the final product.
- Revise - The right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content. You can make a translation, add content, delete content, or change content. You can make a sequel, spinoff, or supplementary materials. You can adjust it to be more appropriate for a different audience. You can tweak it to address the exact topic that you want to cover. You can put it in a new medium.
- Remix - The right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new. You can take art and music and make a music video, or take a short story about a real event and turn it into a play with video footage from the event playing in the background.
- Redistribute - The right to share copies of the original content, or your revisions or remixes, with others. You can email it to someone, hand out hard copies, perform or display in public, upload the file to your course, or put it on your web site or blog.
All of these things you are free to do without having to ask permission or pay anything.
Here is a comparison of Open, Free and Fee resources.
| Open | Free | Fee |
| You don't need permission for any use covered by the Creative Commons License | You have to get permission for any use that's permitted by the terms of use | You have to get permission for any use. |
| You don't need to pay for any use covered by the Creative Commons license | You do not have to pay for some uses, but there may be ads. | You have to pay for any use. |
| You can keep and distribute copies, create derivative works. | No keeping and distributing copies, no derivative works. Just a link. | No distributing copies, no derivative works. You may have a link or you may be authorized to keep a copy in a way that nobody else can access it. |
References
Wiley, D. (n.d.). Clarifying the 5th R. Retrieved from https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3251.
Wiley, D. (n.d.). Defining the open in open content. Retrieved from http://opencontent.org/definition/
