Increasing Education Access with Open Educational Resources: Leveraging Global and Local Libraries with Open Education Initiative Programs

Textbook prices continue to soar, with content in the hands of multi-million-dollar publishing companies. College and university administrators are frequently seeking ways to defray costs for students, including exploring the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). The prohibitive cost of educational materials under copyright can make students turn away from or miss out on essential learning materials. Preventing access to students, scholarship under copyright additionally can restrict faculty flexibility in how they wish to use their own intellectual property in teaching. Publishing under an open license allows faculty authors not only to maintain copyright and ownership of their own work, and allows for the broader dissemination and global recognition that OA publishing can provide. Unleashing scholarly content is only the first step toward openness in education; though publishing open can push against traditional faculty promotion and tenure cycles, as well as requiring time-consuming curriculum overhaul for the instructor. This presentation provides an overview of incentivization models, using the Open Education Initiative at UMass Amherst as a case study, to show how academic libraries can support the transition of scholarship and pedagogy to open models