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citation levels of articles that are published online versus those that are in closed access journals. Hajjem, Harnad and Gingras (2005) compared 1,307,038 articles across a range of disciplines and found that open access articles have a higher citation impact of between 36 and 172 per cent. So publishing in an online, open manner aids in the traditional measures of citation.

This section will look at the most concrete realisation of the open education movement, namely that of open education resources. In particular I want to revisit the notion of granularity and how changes in this, afforded by new technologies, are changing scholarly behaviour.

Zittrain (2008) terms ‘generativity’, which he defines as ‘a system's capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences’. Little OERs are high in generativity because they can easily be used in different contexts, whereas the context is embedded within big OERs, which in turn means they are better at meeting a specific learning aim.

Big OER projects have a variety of models of funding, and Wiley highlights three of these demonstrating a range of centralisation: a centralised team funded by donors and grants (such as MIT), linking it into teaching responsibilities (as practised at Utah State University) and a decentralised collaborative authoring approach (e.g. Rice Connexions, http://cnx.org).

The reasons for this are varied, including technical complexity and motivation. One other reason which the OpenLearn team suggest is that the ‘content provided on the site was of high quality and so discouraged alteration’.

defining an “open educational resource” in terms of copyright status is that the definition implies that all OER belong to the universe of copyrightable things. This explicitly precludes ideas, concepts, methods, people, places, events, and other non-copyrightable entities from being OER. (This helps us avoid some of the nonsense that went on with “learning object” definitions.)

onsequently, every community, individual, or institution’s ideal OER will be different, and it is important that we pause and acknowledge this.

Below, I work from the position that “an ideal OER would help every person in the world attain all the education they desire.” In this specific context, I believe the ideal OER would have three characteristics. It would: 1. Be always, immediately, and freely accessible by every person in the world 2. Grant the user the legal permissions necessary to engage in each and every possible usage of the resource with no restrictions whatsoever 3. Effectively support the educational goals of the user

The notion of access, and whether or not a specific OER is accessible, is highly context-dependent.

If a digital artifact released under a CC BY license is posted on a public website it would qualify as an open educational resource for everyone with internet access. However, if a teacher downloaded a copy of the OER and placed it inside a learning management system it would suddenly cease to be an open educational resource – even though the resource hadn’t changed.

Note, however, that a student with access to the high school library and enrolled in the class using the LMS still has access to these materials, so those copies of the resources simultaneously are OER to her while they are not an OER for others.

some definitions limit OER to “high-quality” materials. However quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

it is meaningless to talk about OER being “high quality” without simultaneous reference to the user

much of what makes an OER ideal is context specific

ideal to whom, for what purpose, to be accessed in what way, to be used in what fashion, etc