What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?

"Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with an intellectual property license that allows for free use, adaptation, and distribution." UNESCO, 2016

Why OER?

• provide equitable access to required content
• learners able to access course materials from day one forward
• students equitable opportunity to succeed
• enable new method and strategies for learning

Open Education Resources collections

The Ministry of Education and Culture and the Finnish National Agency for Education are developing a national service for open educational resources (OERs). The service is coordinated by CSC – IT Center for Science. The service and the OERs are free to use for teachers, learners and for all citizens.

In the Library of Open Educational Resources, you can search for, find, compile and save your own open educational resources.

More OER collections:

• Merlot
• OER Commons

Open Educational Resources and copyright

For OER, the most widely used open licenses are Creative Commons (CC) licenses

Open science and images  ImagOA guide

A few examples of finding open publications in publisher services:

De Gruyter - on the left column find "Accessible Content" where you can choose whether you want to limit the content to licensed or open content.

Elsevier ScienceDirect - you can filter the OA-content from the research results. keen

Other resources for open access material

• Helka-database of the library includes open books. You can search for them with phrase "Unrestricted online access"
• There are also open monographs and serials in Helda-repository. See also our Helda Open Books-collection!
• If you are looking for open books to used in your course, search for them in DOAB.

• Try also BASE-search machine - it is optimized to find open access material.

          

• There also many iniatives designed to offer open textbooks. Here are some of them: Open Access Textbooks, Open Textbook Library and Open SUNY Textbooks

• You can also find open books from Google Books (after searching with a keyword, go to settings > advanced search > full view only) or Internet Achive.

• OpenAiren portal includes over 83 000 open books.

• Open articles can be found from Core-database. Zenodo-repository offers all kinds of open material.

• Open resources for learning - find more information from Open Education Consortium (search Courses -> search courses)

• See also Markku Roinila's blog post Testing Alternative Access – some other ways to reach research articles

• See this 4-minute video on the topic

For more information, contact openaccess-info@helsinki.fi

Do you want to publish an open textbook or other open monograph?

It is possible in the open Helda repository of the University of Helsinki. There are two kinds of ways to do it:

• You can publish your textbook openly in Helda if you have all the rights to the work
• We can preserve an e-version of a previously published printed book if you can get the publishing rights from the publisher

In both cases we ask you to contact e-library@helsinki.fi

Editori - A platform for open journal publishing and learning publishing practices

The publishing platform Editori is based on Open Journal Systems (OJS)-platform which is already in use in Journal.fi-service of The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. With Editori you can start a new open journal or transform an existing journal to open access. All articles are shared with CC BY-license ja the service is free to use for personnel and students of University of Helsinki.

You can use Editori in teaching good scientific publishing practices as well. You can train submitting, peer reviewing, editorial work and editing with it. Editori is a suitable tool for especially Ph. D. student training.

Editori portal: https://journals.helsinki.fi
See more information from our guide: https://libraryguides.helsinki.fi/editorieng
Questions about Editori? Write editori@helsinki.fi

More information on publishing services of the library from openaccess-info@helsinki.fi