Article
Open Access, Open Data and Open Educational Resources: What are the implications for research, learning and teaching?
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Authors
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Jasmin Schmitz
- ZB MED - Information Centre for Life Sciences, Open Access Publishing and Advisory Services, Cologne, Germany
| Published: | March 7, 2017 |
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Outline
Text
Introduction: "Open by default" can be considered as a new paradigm – basically propagated by funding agencies as well as by many scientific communities or organizations like UNESCO. It affects both research in general and the publication of research results as well as learning and teaching.
Objectives: The presentation will give an overview of the different aspects of "openness" and their implications for research, learning and teaching.
Materials & methods: The implications of different aspects of "openness" can be summarized as follows: open access can improve the availability and visibility of publications of any kind, quality assurance and possibilities to share information. Open data allows the reuse of data sets and can therefore lead to more efficiency because data does not have to be collected twice. Open educational resources can facilitate teaching and learning since materials – both for teachers and learners – are accessible online and can be reused free of charge. Since open access publications and open educational resources are usually available in digital format, there are several possibilities to enhance text with additional files such as audio or videos to improve the experience. Nevertheless, challenges are the amount of texts, data and other resources that leads to a certain complexity. Furthermore the different sources are scattered. While scientific open access publications undergo a peer review process, these or other forms of quality assurance are not necessarily applied to other resources.
Results: Along with definitions and elaboration on the implications of "openness", tools or platforms are presented that either support open access publication of texts or data (e.g. Directory of Open Access Journals, re3data.org) or help to retrieve openly accessible resources for learning and teaching (e.g. BASE).
Conclusion: The presentation will show that the new "open by default" paradigm has the potential to improve the transparency of research as well as to support teachers and learners.
