[Oer-community] educational policy and OER

[Paul Lefrere]

On Oct 9, 2010, at 3:22 AM, Sabyasachi Bose wrote:


>  Are there any other areas in OER where enterprise can add value?
 
> ...I do think enterprise policies can co-exist with OER. In fact I believe
they can go hand in hand.


- Yes, Sabya, enterprise can add value. This co-existence is already happening
in a couple of areas that could be relevant to OER:


1. Blending Grey-Literature approaches (as in Open Access pre-prints in
Science) with Charged-for Archives. 

Example: ScienceDirect. Some publishers use ScienceDirect to offer Open Access
(free) to "Articles in Press", which are "accepted, peer reviewed articles that
are not yet assigned to an issue, but are citable using DOI". And some
publishers who offer Open Access also offer immediate links to related and free
"in press" Open Access papers in many other journals. All the cross-linking
information is free. It is up to date and very useful. Some universities (eg
Open University) have established collections of Open Access articles,
available free now and intended to be free in the long term as well. To
generate the income needed to cover the costs of their part of the Open Access
system, publishers who support Open Access also run value-added services that
they charge for. For example they list relevant non-free links to OLDER
articles,  meaning articles that have already appeared in print; most of those
older articles are available only to subscribers to their archives, meaning
libraries.  In principle, the OER community could set up a similar
cross-linking system to provide free and perpetual access to any item of OER in
university-based collections that include Open Access papers as well as OER.
The maintenance costs of such an archive would be considerable unless such a
system used volunteer labor or found sponsors such as foundations. If there are
not enough volunteers or sponsors, we will likely see an OER version of the
ScienceDirect route: the publishers provide long-term access to all materials
in their databases, in return for charging libraries for subscriptions to the
archive. 


2. Publicizing value-added services that help people to use innovations to good
effect.

Example: As part of the process of awarding patents, patents are made available
for free download. In some countries, that free access is without time limit.
The patent databases run by public agencies are often duplicated by commercial
publishers, who then add some information to the patents. Some of those
database publishers include advertisements for services from information
intermediaries such as technology transfer companies, that cover every aspect
of making effective use of the information in the patent, from licensing it
(usually for-free but sometimes for-free), to finding out how to use it well in
your context (how to "appropriate" the knowledge in the patent, with the
approval of the patent holder). 

Paul



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