As the cost of textbooks continues to rise academic institutions are choosing to identify lower cost and free scholarly works and other educational materials with which to educate students. Since they are the primary developers of their courses, the identification of low cost and free materials has naturally fallen to Faculty. What constitutes Fair Use, Copyright, Open Access, and Open Educational Resources are very murky waters. Thus, Faculty often struggle to adopt, adapt, or create alternatives to expensive textbooks. Sometimes they will reach out to librarians for help and we want to encourage this practice!
The terms "open content" and "open educational resources" describe any copyrightable work (traditionally excluding software, which is described by other terms like "open source") that is licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:
This material was created by David Wiley and published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at opencontent.org .
As defined by UNESCO (2002 Forum on Open Courseware):
As defined by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation: