The Open University has announced that it is making a large selection of its learning materials available free online to educators and learners around the world.
The Open Educational Resource (OER) project is costing £5.65m of which £3.09m is being funded by the OU with the balance (£2.56m) coming from a US$4.45m grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. All OER material will be created under a Creative Commons licence, although no details have yet been disclosed as to which of the several types of licences the material will be made available under. The types of licence include:
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Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives
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Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike
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Attribution Non-commercial
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Attribution No derivatives
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Attribution Share Alike
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Attribution
Given the OU’s close relationship with the BBC, many from the publishing community are asking whether this is yet another example of where the government is stifling innovation and investment from the private sector, although Creative Commons would argue that the reverse is true and that stifling of innovation is actually due to the vested commercial interests of publishers. Their website says their system is trying to redress the balance by building, ‘a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules’.
Creative Commons is a bit like Google Books in that it fails to understand that it is commercial publishers who make the most investment in bringing IP to market and so want reasonable control to protect their investments. However, large commercial publishers understand they also have a role to play in helping developing nations.
For 36 years (1960-96) publishers worked with the government on the Education Low Priced Book Scheme (ELBS), which provided over 30m books to developing nations, primarily in Africa. In the intervening decade a much smaller charity scheme called Book Power attempted to bridge the gap. However many government and development organisations have argued that what is needed is a far more ambitious scheme. UK publishers have responded with the launch of AccessBooks, a strategic public private partnership designed to support African learners with books and to help develop a more robust local publishing industry (via training and assistance programmes).
