Open Source Definition from the OER Commons website: Open Education Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials freely available for everyone to use, whether you are a teacher or a learner. This includes full courses, modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world.
The Texas Education Code, (TEC) §31.002 defines Open-Source Materials as electronic textbooks that are available for downloading from the Internet at no charge to a student and without requiring the purchase of an unlock code, membership, or other access or use charge, except for a charge to order an optional printed copy of all or part of the textbook. The term includes a state-developed open-source textbook purchased under the TEC, Chapter 31, Subchapter B-1.
Open Access by
A concise introduction to the basics of open access, describing what it is (and isn't) and showing that it is easy, fast, inexpensive, legal, and beneficial. The Internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work "open access": digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access is made possible by the Internet and copyright-holder consent, and many authors, musicians, filmmakers, and other creators who depend on royalties are understandably unwilling to give their consent. But for 350 years, scholars have written peer-reviewed journal articles for impact, not for money, and are free to consent to open access without losing revenue. In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn't, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold. Distilling a decade of Suber's influential writing and thinking about open access, this is the indispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, and policy makers.
Open Divide by
Open access has transformed the traditional way of scientific communication. Open repositories and open access journals provide large and free access to articles, theses and dissertations, reports, working papers, proceedings and books but also to other unpublished items, multimedia files and raw data. Fifteen years after the landmark Budapest Declaration, this book invites the reader to a critical assessment of the concept and the reality of open access, with a special attention to its impact in the countries of the Global South. The success of open access for the dissemination of scientific information cannot be denied. Yet, the growing numbers of OA journals, articles and books should not keep the scientists and librarians from a critical posture towards the reality beyond figures and statistics. Most publications on open access give the impression that there are only benefits and no alternatives to open access. It is time to abandon this blend of marketing, politics and technology-driven ideology and to return to a more scientific and critical stance. This book brings together seventeen short critical studies by scientists and librarians from different continents, all interested in open access, most of them supporting and accompanying the open access projects and initiatives since many years, each one with the motivation to better understand (and make understood) the ongoing transformation of scientific communication. Some topics: the discursive staging of open access, mis/trusting open access, the promise of reducing digital divide, open access and the Global South, business models of open access, predatory publishing, open access as a symbolic gift. ULRICH HERB is project manager and scientific publishing expert at Saarland University and State Library (Germany). His focus areas are electronic publishing, science communication & infrastructure, scientific publishing, scientometrics and science research. He is publishing regularly in a variety of professional bodies in the fields of Information Science and Science Research. JOACHIM SCH PFEL is lecture of Library and Information Sciences at the University of Lille 3 (France), director of the French Digitization Centre for PhD theses (ANRT) and member of the GERiiCO research laboratory. He was manager of the INIST (CNRS) scientific library from 1999 to 2008. He teaches library marketing, auditing, intellectual property and information science. His research interests are scientific information and communication, especially open access, grey literature and research data.
The Sustainable Library's Cookbook by 
Open Education by 
Gold OA
Gold publishing the author, institution, or research funder pays an Open Access fee and publisher make the published version free to read.
Green OA
Green publishing readers pay to read.
Authors self-archive pre-print¹ or post-print² copies of their articles or conference papers in:
(Croft, N.D. and Vanderbilt 2020)
Most OA publishing prefer Creative Commons licenses of CC BY set by the Budapest Open Access Declaration. When using OER material look for Creative Commons license of CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, or CC BY-NC-SA.
(College, 2022)
These websites give more information about the OER movement, new developments, and offer tips and links to resources.
Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Access (OA), and Library Resources all offer text/assignment materials that are free or low cost for students. The difference can be important for you as instructor.
OER: For material to qualify as OER, it has to not only free to access, but users should also be able to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the content.
Open Access: This can be any material that is freely accessible. This includes material out of copyright, but also material that has been published as open access. Material published as Open Access can still be under copyright and cannot be edited without permission.
Library Resources: The library subscribes to many online resources which are free to access on and off campus by PAC students, faculty, or staff. Copyright and fair use restrictions apply and this should be kept in mind when using library material in class. All our streaming videos come with permission to show in class or assign to all students. Most of our eBooks now allow for an unlimited number of simultaneous users and can be used as textbooks; however, we still have many that can only be viewed by 1 - 3 users at a time.
College of coastal Georgia library guide. 2022. Creative Commons: OA and OER. https://libguides.ccga.edu/CC/OER
Creative commons for educators and librarians (Creative Commons, Comp.) [PDF]. (2020). Unit 5: Creative Commons for Librarians . pp. 91 - 130. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w2Kz8c7xpf-fRIqRvkUjqt9drSRl7MRG/view
Croft, D. Elsevier, King, H. (N.D.). The different models of open access. https://brookesoa.blog/open-access/the-different-models-of-open-access
Library Services. 2022. Open Access (OA) & OER. Fox Valley Technical College. https://library.fvtc.edu/OA/vsOER
Stacey, P. 2018.Starting Anew In The Landscape Of Open. https://edtechfrontier.com/ CC BY
Vanderbilt university library research guide. 2020. Open access publishing models. https://researchguides.library.vanderbilt.edu/c.php?g=144567&p=946137 
