Teaching Open Source Practices / opensource.com / CC BY-SA

It is an exciting time for the global open educational resources (OER) movement. In the past few months, several governments and institutions have shown their support for OER:

• California Passes Groundbreaking Open Textbook Legislation
• National ‘Digital School’ Program in Poland
• British Columbia Government Lends Support to Open Textbooks
• US Department of Labor Invests in Open Educational Resources
• UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration

Creative Commons believes that there is a clear role for government support of OER. When governments require open licenses on publicly funded resources, they ensure those resources benefit the most people possible. Publicly funded resources should be openly licensed resources. The public should have access to what it paid for.

Advocating for government OER policies is not always easy or straightforward. Earlier this year, CC announced that we would coordinate and steward a collection of OER open policies. Since then, many members of the global OER community have been working together to compile a database of OER policies as well as toolkits, presentations, and other supporting materials. We call it the OER Policy Registry.

The policies in the OER Policy Registry are specific to OER, but may include general open access, ICT, or online learning policies that directly enable OER. There are currently over 60 policies, but we need your help to improve the registry.

First, please add new or edit existing OER open policies. We’ve put together some instructions for navigating, editing, and adding to the policy registry. If you have any questions, please email: anna@creativecommons.org

Second, please help us spread the word! We need you and your networks to help the OER Policy Registry grow and flourish. Click Retweet below to share with your followers:

60+ open policies in the new #OER Policy Registry. Find out how you can help. bit.ly/SIQKgi

— creativecommons (@creativecommons) November 5, 2012

You can also share this announcement via identi.ca or Facebook.

Sharing our collective knowledge of existing OER open policies, in the same way we share open educational resources, will help OER advocates and policymakers learn about, craft and adopt their own OER open policies. Thank you for your help! If you have any suggestions or feedback please let us know.