Open Services Suite & Open Content

The Open Knowledge Foundation defines open for open data and open content as works "anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness).”

Openness allows for sharing and free access to ideas, knowledge, and resources within research and educational communities worldwide.

This benefit can especially be felt by students, faculty, and others when they leave an institution and no longer have access to their previous institution's subscriptions and licensed materials, as they may encounter paywall and other barriers to materials they are wishing to access.

Publishing and sharing open data, open access eBooks and journal articles, open educational resources (OER), and other open works helps to reduce or eliminate these paywalls and other barriers to accessing content.

Along with being able to access open content for free, open content can be re-purposed and adapted when they fulfill the 5R's of Open. The 5R's of Open as defined by David Wiley include:

Retain: the right to make, own, and control copies of the content.

Reuse: the right to use the content in a wide range of ways

Revise: the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content

Remix: the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new

Redistribute: the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, and your remixes with others.

To assist in providing explicit permissions for open content, Creative Commons have developed open licenses that can be applied by creators (i.e. the copyright holder) to give advanced permission for how they would like their work to be used by others.

To find out more about Creative Commons open licensing, visit the Copyright & Open Licensing Research Guide

Open licences, whether they allow for the adaptation and re-purposing of the original content or allow for the sharing the original content as-is, provide the opportunity for copyright holders to share access to their knowledge and resources free of cost for the benefit of research and educational communities across the world.