A Government Policy Development Template to Progress Effective Implementation of Open Educational Resources (OER)

At its core, Open Educational Resources (OER) is a simple legal concept: it describes educational resources that are openly available for use by educators and students, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or licence fees. Different options are emerging that can be used to define how OER are licensed for use (and adaptation as appropriate), some of which simply allow copying and others that make provision for users to adapt the resources that they use. The best known of these are the Creative Commons licences, which provide legal mechanisms to ensure that people can retain acknowledgement for their work while allowing it to be shared, and can choose to restrict commercial activity if they so wish or prevent people from adapting work if appropriate (although this may be legally difficult to enforce)