Education Department to Strengthen OER Options

The Education Department is going open.

EdSurge reports that resources created by the department's competitive grant funds will be required in the fiscal year 2018 to be openly licensed for public use, reproduction and distribution.

"It is the Department's experience, however, that copyrightable works created under competitive grants made by the Department generally have not been disseminated widely to the public," reads the new regulation. "We believe that the open licensing regulation we are adopting here will address these key problems."

The regulation states the Education Department believes these new policies will allow more resources to get to more educators.

Open educational resource provider, Creative Commons, applauds the regulation as a step forward for OER.

However, this ruling does not apply to funding that goes to individual research scholarships and peer-review publications.