Open Educational Resources

Digital reserve material can include scanned book chapters and journal articles, links to electronic databases and eBooks, and links to full length or excerpted audiovisual material. The libraries can help you provide access to UMass Amherst Libraries digital course material directly to your Moodle or Blackboard page.

The Research Impact Indicators & Metrics guide is a collection of tools, resources and contextual narrative to help you present a picture of how your scholarship is received and used within your field and beyond.

Open Scholarship is about transparently and publicly sharing research processes and outputs through openly accessible tools and platforms for the purpose of building collective knowledge within and across disciplines and communities. It is an umbrella term for open access, open data, open educational resources, open research, open science, etc. It is based in the belief in the fundamental value of knowledge as a public, common good that is most positively impactful when its production and distribution are equitable, inclusive, open and transparent.

The Open Education program at Creative Commons works to minimize barriers to effective education, supporting the CC mission through education, training, advocacy and outreach on using open licenses and open policies to maximize the benefits of open education (content, practices and policy).

COT Education is a registered 501(c)(3) in the state of California, and started its life as CollegeOpenTextbooks.org. Initially funded by a grant from the Hewlett Foundation and through various initiatives, the organization has been a pioneer in open education resources.

The Open Education Consortium (OEC) is a non-profit, global, members-based network of open education institutions and organizations. OEC represents its members and provides advocacy and leadership around advancement of open education globally.

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education. As a catalyst for action, SPARC focuses on collaborating with other stakeholders—including authors, publishers, libraries, students, funders, policymakers and the public—to build on the opportunities created by the Internet, promoting changes to both infrastructure and culture needed to make open the default for research and education.

An open future means knowledge is shared by all – freely available to everyone, a world where people are able to fulfil their potential and live happy and healthy lives. A closed future is one where knowledge is exclusively owned and controlled leading to greater inequality and a closed future.