Check out Professor Roberts' OER titled "Writing for Strategic Communication Industries."

Sara Benson:   Copyright chat is a podcast dedicated to discussing important copyright matters. Host Sara Benson, the copyright librarian from the university of Illinois converses with experts from across the globe to engage the public with rights issues relevant to their daily lives. Hello and welcome to another episode of copyright chat. Today I have with me live in studio, Dr. Jasmine Roberts. She's from the Ohio state university. She is a lecturer in communications and an OER champion. She actually did her master's degree here at the University of Illinois. So, welcome Jasmine.

 

Jasmine:  Thank you so much Sara. I'm really excited to be here.

 

Sara:  So for those listening, I just usee the term OER. A lot of folks don't exactly know what that is. Can you tell us a little bit more about it?

Jasmine:  Yeah, absolutely. So OER stands for open educational resources and essentially that means that these resources are free and available for the most part to the general public. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're free to create. I definitely want to say that because there are foundations and institutions that definitely provide the financial backing behind this. But they are free to the user and also they are openly licensed, due to creative comments. So creative commons is a nonprofit organization that helps to openly license one's work. And that's the really cool part about OER. They're not just free digital resources. A lot of times when I tell people about OER, and you know, they oftentimes think if they do know about OER, they oftentimes think, Oh, those are the free digital resources that I can just find online. But it's not just that, it's the permissions piece, right?

So you can customize the content, you can take out content and put it, you know, remix it with another OER if you wanted to, to make that content a little more relevant to your students or to the learner. Um, you can keep it for as long as you want. So unlike, um, some of the inclusive access, um, things that we're seeing from some of the major publishers. Um, I can have access to an OER for a very long time forever. Ideally, there is no paywall that prevents me from having access, you know, longterm. And it's really cool not only for the students, but also for educators again, because of the faculty autonomy. Again, one can make sure that the course materials are more in line in terms of what the instructor truly wants to get out of that classroom experience. So that's basically OER in a nutshell.

Sara:  That's awesome. That was a really thorough explanation. So one of the reasons that I'm interested in OER as a copyright person and copyright librarian is, is the licensing, right? What exactly does that allow people to do? And like, can you talk about the difference between something that is free versus licensed openly, a little bit more?

Jasmine:  Yeah. So, a really good example would be, for example, library resources, right? So to students that is free and I put that in quotes, because they don't have to pay to use a textbook that's on course reserves for instance. But that's not free to the library. That's not free to the university and what have you. And in terms of access and permissions piece, the students still can't, for example, customize the content if they want it to, to make it more relevant to them.  They can't remix it with another OER. I mean, it's still a copyright textbook. They're just able to access it. You know, more than you would if you would have to go out and buy it. Uh, but even then the access is limited if it is on, for example, in course reserves, usually it's, you know, you could have access to it for about, you know, minimum two hours to, you know, full day, depending upon, you know, the timeframe that the instructor puts on that. And so there's a still a little bit of restriction, right when i