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Why Openness in Education
ocw.mit.edu). More recent examples include the state of Washington’s Open
Course Library (http://www.opencourselibrary.org).
Open educational resources represent multiple opportunities to innovate in
the teaching and learning context, including the ability to dramatically improve
the affordability of education and enable better personalization of instruction.
Open Access
“Open access” refers to research articles that are freely and openly available
to the public for reading, reviewing, and building upon. From one perspective
it can be seen as a special case of the “buy one, get one” example
just described. But there are other reasons why many support the open access
model. A brief parable illustrates the point:
Once upon a time there was a brilliant inventor who one day had a
“eureka!” moment. She sketched out the design of her breakthrough
product and worked and reworked the design. When she was satisfied
that the design was ready to take to production, she began contacting
potential funders. After a long process, she acquired the funding
needed to put her ideas to work.
Money in hand, she began searching for employees—production specialists,
designers, marketing experts, and others. They all set to work.
They persevered through false starts and breakthroughs, and finally
the day arrived when they had a product ready to ship! Relieved, the
inventor began contacting shipping companies. To her disbelief, the
shipping companies would only deliver her goods under the following
conditions:
• The inventor had to agree to ship her product via the one shipping
company exclusively.
• This exclusive shipping deal had to be a perpetual deal, never
subject to review or cancelation.
• The inventor had to sign over to the shipping company all of
the legal rights to her product.
• The shipping company would be the seller of her product to the
public, and it would retain all the profits from these sales.
The parable is, of course, analogous to a researcher and her interactions
with the academic-journal publishing industry. Under the traditional system,
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