Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Ed content repository goes OA

Jorum to move to open access, press release, April 21, 2008. (Thanks to Phil Vaughan.)

... Jorum, the UK national repository for learning and teaching materials funded by JISC, is to offer open educational resources. This will make it easier for lecturers and teaching staff to share and re-use each other's teaching resources. JorumOpen - as it will be called - will also provide a showcase for UK universities and colleges on the international stage.

This move comes at a time when there is a global shift towards open access across all education and research, a development actively supported by JISC and one that is bringing about major changes in the ways that learners, teachers, lecturers and researchers make available and access learning materials and other digital resources such as research papers and data.

... During the first phase of Jorum's development, the focus has been on building a system that safeguards investment in digital learning resources and offers controlled access to licensed materials. The result is a service that supports access to over 2,500 learning resources for download for direct use in the classroom and within virtual learning environments (VLEs).

Through the development of JorumOpen, lecturers and teachers will be able to share materials under the Creative Commons licence framework: this makes sharing easier, granting users greater rights for use and re-use of online content and easier to understand. Importantly, it does not require prior registration. As a result availability is global as well as across UK universities and colleges. JorumOpen will run alongside a 'members only' facility, JorumEducationUK, that will support sharing of material just within the UK educational sector; this will be available only to registered users and contributors, as is currently the case. ...