The following may represent potential barriers to the release of open educational resources:
- Existing teaching and learning materials tend to be rich in third party content.
Although this may very well improve their quality as teaching and learning materials, it is a significant barrier to their release as an open educational resource. In some cases, the third party material may be included without permission (in infringement of copyright), but even if it is validly licensed for its current use, it is unlikely that licence will extend to relicensing under Creative Commons.
- Staff are possessive of their teaching materials and/or claim intellectual property rights in them even in a situation where the institution has legal ownership
Beyond the legal issues, institutions will nonetheless have to deal with cultural issues. Approaches may include: making staff more aware of the benefits of open educational resources; making staff aware that whereas their teaching materials would never realise their value through commercialisation outside the institution in most cases, they will represent a valuable contribution to the educational community (and perhaps the community at large) through dissemination as an OER; ensuring adequate reward and recognition for the creation of such materials, acknowledging the value of the benefit to the institution’s reputation, and the general benefits of a growing community of shared learning resources.
- Reluctance to take an irreversible decision
The application of a Creative Commons licence to a work is irreversible, and, in a changing world, there may be reluctance to take such a decision, therefore. However, current change is towards greater sharing, and towards greater efficiency – both achieved by the adoption of an open educational resource strategy. The institution is free to pick and choose which of its resources it makes available this way, and an important policy decision will be to decide what materials will be released, or by what process that decision will be taken.
In most cases, learning materials have their greatest value when produced, with diminishing value as they age (potentially going out-of-date). The release of materials as an open educational resource, provided there is no “No Derivative” (ND) element to the licence, may actually contribute to the materials becoming a dynamic resource being updated frequently by the community, and therefore saving this being done by individual staff. The use of the “ShareAlike” (SA) element will ensure that derivative works made by other are re-released to the community for further reuse.
It is also true that, in relation to teaching materials, there is rarely realisation of an external commercial value. Except in the case of top-selling textbooks, there is unlikely to be significant income reward. Therefore, the potential loss of income from adopting an open educational resource strategy is likely to be low.