Published in February, 2011, the authors offer a recommendation to review the policies of OPENAIRE. Specifically, they recommend that the policy should "require that a work deposited in a repository in compliance with the European Comission policy, should be placed under a non-exclusive license that allows full use of the work".
Highlights:
The OpenAIRE initiative seeks to "provide the necessary infrastructure for sharing the knowledge resulting from the EC’s funding of research in Europe".
The authors states that OpenAIRE "represents a first step, in advancing open access, with additional work needed in other areas to achieve a broader opening of research, scholarship, and learning".
In the case of education, access to recent research results will greatly increase the vividness and richness of teaching materials, while also providing opportunities for integrating high-quality research activities into classrooms.
The authors pose some questions to future answer:
What new lessons will students and educators need to learn to take advantage of this new openness, and what greater richness will their educational experience consist in, given the wealth of original studies, archives, instruments and tools that openness could make available to them?
They also state that
"Opening access and re-use to the results of research is also an important necessary condition for the proper locating of knowledge in our societies."
Finally, it offers an interesting perspective over the users of OER. We must consider that people are neither total experts or complete ignorants. Therefore, knowledge should be accessible to everyone as "no one knows where the good idea might come from" This is a clear proof of an open, visionary society that recognizes the importance of sharing and the power of collaborative work.
