Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials that are shared at no cost with legal permissions for the public to freely use, share, and build upon the content (either in the public domain or under a CC licence permitting derivative works, such as CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, or CC BY-NC-SA.

Educational resources are open when providing the public with permission to engage in the 5R activities:

  1. Retain – permission to make, own and control copies of the content (download, duplicate, store and manage)
  2. Reuse – permission to use the content in many ways (class, study group, website and video)
  3. Revise – permission to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (translate into another language)
  4. Remix – permission to combine content with other material to create something new (mashup)
  5. Redistribute – permission to share the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others

The author takes no responsibility for the content of this page, which is not intended as binding legal advice. The views are about copyright in the UK Higher Education sector context.