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"For both writers and adopters, if you're a teacher, the issue is time," Jacky Hood, co-director of the Open Doors Group and College Open Textbooks, told the Chronicle of Higher Education in January. "You're going to need a term off to either author or adopt a textbook, and that requires some kind of funding."

But David Wiley, a professor on leave from Brigham Young University who studied use of open textbooks at Utah's public schools, said there are already enough resources to teach lower-level courses. "If any university in the country today just wanted to ... say, 'We're never going to require students to pay for a textbook for a general education course again,' any school in the country could say that today," he said. In a study, Wiley found there was "basically no difference in the amount students learned" using open textbooks — and it saved the districts about 60 percent in book costs.

can all commercial materials be replaced with open educational resources? The answer to this question is no, but perhaps not for the reason you suspect.

In summary, in circumstances where (1) the primary object of study is not an idea, but is a specific creative work which is still under copyright and (2) the copyright holder has chosen not to publish the work under an open license, it is literally impossible to replace all the commercial content in that course with OER.

The library may be able to purchase or license copies of these commercial materials and make them available to students for free. In fact, they may have already purchased or licensed copies which are just waiting to be used. The library is a trusted, capable, and unfortunately often overlooked potential partner for closing the access gap to commercial materials. (Your library may also be curating OER you don’t know about – libraries are actually leading the charge toward OER on some campuses.)

We need to tell the OER story in a wide range of ways. Most importantly, we have to know who we’re talking to and what language they speak. For some audiences, we will need to speak the language of experimental design and quantitative efficacy studies published in peer reviewed outlets. For others, we will need to use the language of anecdotes combined with first hand student accounts. Legislators and administrators will care about funding, costs, and parent and student attitudes. Faculty will care about efficacy and academic freedom. Students will care about costs, grades, and time to graduation. As a community we must be conversant in these different languages so that the stories we tell are both comprehensible and compelling.

I cannot stress this point enough – telling the OER story in terms that speak to us personally will only work on those rare occasions when we’re speaking to other people just like us. We can only create recognition of the value of OER by telling the OER story in terms of the values of our immediate audience.

Who controls the incentive architectures for faculty and students? How might we nudge them toward adjusting incentives to become supportive of OER-related work? Once they have recognized the value of OER, we need to provide them with models for the kinds of incentives they might include in their broader incentive architectures.