What are open educational resources (OER)?
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open licence (UNESCO, 2024).
Textbooks are one form of OER. They are published digitally with an open licence that allows them to be freely used, shared and, depending on the open licence applied, can be modified by others to suit the needs of their teaching if permission is granted.
Creating open textbooks or open monographs as OERs supports open education, an UN Sustainable Development Goal 4 to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
Publishing open access textbooks and open educational resources
Imperial does not have a policy on creating and sharing open educational resources, however the Library is happy to assist colleagues in developing these materials.
Please visit Introduction to OERs - Open Educational Resources - Library Guides at Imperial College London for detailed guidance and support.
Library Services now have a subscription to Pressbooks publishing platform. Pressbooks can be used to publish long-form outputs, such as monographs and textbooks. You can contact the library team for more information about how to use Pressbooks if you wish to consider open access for your book: openeducationalresources@imperial.ac.uk
You can find more information about Pressbooks in this link: How to publish OERs - Open Educational Resources - Library Guides at Imperial College London.
Guidance for publishing open educational resources
- Consider your audience and learning objectives, could you expand the resource to help others beyond your current students?
- How would you like the resource to be made available and distributed? You may want to approach an academic publisher or create the resource directly via an open educational resources platform.
- Consider third-party copyright. You will need to seek permission for third-party copyright holders to include content created by others within the resource that isn't within the public domain. See the section Licensing, copyright and third-party material for more information.
- Research which publishing tools for your textbook would meet the needs of your planned content and format. The format of the textbook or resource will vary between publishers and platforms.
- How will you ensure the accessibility of the textbook to readers (such as users who utilise screenreaders)? Consider which open licence to apply to the textbook. This will dictate how others can use and reuse your work. See the section Licensing, copyright and third-party material for more information.