1. 1
OPEN ACCESS AND EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES:
SUSTAINABILITY IN DIGITAL ERA
Sudesh Kumar Sood
College Librarian
Postgraduate Govt. College,Una,H.P
And
Sudhir Kumar Gupta
Assistant Librarian
Dr. YS Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry
SOAN (HP)

2. 2
INTRODUCTION
The development of the information society and the widespread diffusion of information
technology give rise to new opportunities for learning. At the same time, they challenge
established views and practices regarding how teaching and learning should be organized
and carried out. Higher educational institutions have been using the Internet and other digital
technologies to develop and distribute education for several years. Yet, until recently, much
of the learning materials were locked up behind passwords within proprietary systems,
unreachable for outsiders. The open educational resource (OER) movement aims to break
down such barriers and to encourage and enable freely sharing content.
The OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) has already addressed
a number of issues regarding e-learning in higher education, publishing reports on E-
learning: The Partnership Challenge(OECD, 2001) and E-learning in Tertiary Education –
Where do we Stand? (OECD, 2005). The second of these reports concluded that e-learning
is becoming increasingly prominent in tertiary education. All available evidence points to
growing enrolments and provision, although from a low starting point. E-learning activities
across tertiary education institutions are very diverse, from trivial online presence to
programmes offered fully online. Modules accounted for the majority of e-learning activities,
reflecting the dominant characteristic of e-learning as supplementary to on campus delivery
at undergraduate level. Learning objects were said to be viewed as a promising way forward
as they can potentially cut costs and revolutionize pedagogy. Some of these issues are
further analyzed in this paper.

3. WHAT ARE OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES?
The definition of OER currently most often used is
“digitized materials offered freely and openly for
educators, students and self-learners to use and
reuse for teaching, learning and research”. OER
includes learning content, software tools to develop,
use and distribute content, and implementation
resources such as open licenses. This report
suggests that “open educational resources” refers to
accumulated digital assets that can be adjusted and
which provide benefits without restricting the
possibilities for others to enjoy them.
3

4. OPEN ACCESS RESOURCES INITIATIVES IN INDIA
Open Access is a term used to describe published academic papers, books, reports, and
other periodicals that are electronically available to readers without financial or
technological barriers. Open Access will help scientists around the globe to develop
collaborations with previously unknown colleagues and avoid repetitive research while
tackling major regional problems. Open access increases the usage and citation of the
published research. Recent studies have shown that Open Access articles are cited 25 -
50% more than non-Open Access articles from the same journal and year. The
researchers are benefited due to the Open Access policies as their research work gets
widely disseminated and can be read by anyone with Internet access without any
recurrently, major libraries only exist in urban areas and rural India doesn’t have access to
the resources present in these large libraries. Open Access remedies this problem by
allowing socially and economically disadvantaged individuals to access all the information
if there is a free internet connection. India has done fairly well in the Open Access area by
making 81 scientific journals accessible under OA. The Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore, is coordinating the Digital Library of India project along with Carnegie Mellon
University. In this project, 21 other Indian institutions are also participating and have
digitized more than 450,000 books, out of which 220,000 books are now web-accessible.
4

5. COPYRIGHT AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS ISSUUES
Copyright law takes its definition from international conventions and is similar in
most countries. Copyright primarily serves an economic function by granting
creators monopoly rights in their creations for a limited time. Intellectual
property issues are at the heart of OER. It was suggested that the issue of
copyright and ownership of material is ‘the root cause of slow development in
this field’ inhibiting some faculty members and institutions from making more
educational content available to the online community. The key issue is to find
the right balance between ‘open material to all with no control’ and ‘open to no
one’
5

6. SUSTANABILITY
The impact of implementation of the working group recommendation can be felt
only if the sustainability of the programs is ensured. The development cost of
open educational resources materials is high, but the much higher translatable,
measurable rewards resulting from an expansion of the OER universe makes it
a clear case for the government to ensure its sustainability. Initially, the
government can create a grant for the generation and distribution of OER
material to students and teachers from all over the country.
Private industry should be the second major source of funding for developing OER
The publishers of any Open Access journal will recover the cost of publishing and
maintaining the journal on the web from the individual authors. To make this
possible, the authors’ parent institution should pay the publication cost.
A second model could be that the government establishes a specific fund for Open
Access research publications.
6

7. EXPECTATIONS
No government program should be created, researched and supported unless all
involved parties have an understanding as to what the long run possibilities are
for the program. Once India embraces the concept and expands on the
available Open Access and Open Educational Resources, the intellectual
development of the nation will be accelerated. It is reasonable to expect that
after 5 years of full implementation of the above suggestions, everyone in rural
and urban areas will get the same quality training at a level that far surpasses
what is given today. This will be possible since the OA and OER resources will
create higher quality teachers with a new benchmarking standard for
themselves. Along with the benchmarks that identify successful teachers, the
OER and OA content will help teachers change their overall pedagogy for
teaching. As the nation’s teachers get better, the students will become better
students.
7

8. EXPECTATIONS
One of the expectations from the exercise of making world class teaching material and
methods available to the teachers and students freely, is that the students will develop the
skills critical to the creation of new knowledge and advancement of technology that are
necessary to maintain the tempo of economic growth. These skills include the ability to
define the problems precisely, design the solutions that are right for the country and
develop those solutions indigenously. Better teachers with the help of contemporary
material will create better students that are naturally inquisitive about their local and global
surroundings with a thirst for learning as opposed to the current paradigm of students
being spoon-fed data and information about a certain topic.
An additional benefit of adopting the above recommendations is a much larger student base
for India. Currently, many rural and socio-economically disadvantaged students cannot
gain access to any higher education institutions because the overall cost is much too high.
With the inclusion of Open Access and Open Educational Resources materials, the cost of
providing education to these students comes down drastically
8

9. CONCLUSION
Although, there are a growing number of OER initiatives and more and more
institutions and individuals are sharing their digital learning resources over the
Internet freely and openly. The importance of open access for fundamental as
well as applied research and education cannot be over emphasized. Open
Access remedies this problem by allowing socially and economically
disadvantaged individuals to access all the information if there is a free internet
connection. Once India embraces the concept and expands on the available
Open Access and Open Educational Resources, the intellectual development of
the nation will be accelerated.
There are many major issues surrounding access, quality and costs of
information and knowledge over the Internet as well as on provision of content
and learning material are emerging. Copyright and IPR issues continue to
dominate the OER initiative. Sustainability of OER is another major issue. Hence,
there is a need for institutions, organizations and governments to share common
interests and innovative approaches in providing open access to educational
material thereby achieving economic efficiency and raising the quality of teaching
and learning in higher education through a global endeavor.
9

10. 10
धन्यवाद
THANK YOU