OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (OerS)

Select Public Domain Resources, useful for ENGINEERING, PHARMACY, ARCHITECTURE & HUMANITIES Education and Research in Digital Environment

ABOUT PLATFORM

Electronic resources are results of the development of Information and Communication Technology. The Web portal is a collection of metadata links of Open Educational Resources useful for ENGINEERING, PHARMACY, ARCHITECTURE & HUMANITIES Education and Research in Digital Environment. The purpose to create the web portal is to make aware students, faculty members, research scholars, around the world about the existence of open educational resources protected under creative common license, open access under copyright laws or under copyright free environment. The web portal has been developed without consideration of any monetary benefits or aspects and can be used for education and research purposes, hence not liable for any breach of copyright. In case of any objection by any organisation/individual, the noted link(s) would be excluded from the portal.

Open Educational Resources

UNESCO Policy Guidelines for the Development and Promotion of Government Public Domain Information

A review of the history of the term “public domain” shows that it has traditionally been associated with public land and has never had a universally accepted meaning in the context of information. Indeed, there is little in official public documents or even in the scholarly literature that deals definitively with this subject. Most legal scholars would define public domain information by what it is not; that is, any information that is not proprietary, the yin to the proprietary yang. But such a definition is insufficient, for it does not adequately characterize or describe what public domain information in fact is, and provides no basis on which to evaluate its positive role and its value to knowledge societies, especially in the context of economic and social development.


The UNESCO Recommendation on Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace provides the following definition: “Public domain information refers to publicly accessible information, the use of which does not infringe any legal right, or any obligation of confidentiality. It thus refers on the one hand to the realm of all works or objects of related rights, which can be exploited by everybody without any authorization, for instance because protection is not granted under national or international law, or because of the expiration of the term of protection. It refers on the other hand to public data and official information Produced and voluntarily made available by governments or international organizations.”


Under this definition, information in the public domain covers two distinct notions:

  • On the one hand, “public domain information” can be defined as what is left outside the scope of any form of statutory protection including intellectual property rights, the protection of national security or public order, privacy laws and obligations of confidentiality.

  • On the other hand, “public domain information” also refers to information of an intrinsically public nature; that is, certain types of information that are produced by public authorities (“government” in the broad sense) in the course of their duties, and that are seen as a public good. This “governmental public domain information” at the national and sub- national levels, to which can be assimilated some public domain information produced by public international organizations, is not, in principle, subject to appropriation.

Source: Policy guidelines for the development and promotion of governmental public domain information - UNESCO Digital Library. (n.d.). Retrieved July 10, 2020, from https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000137363


Open Access Initiatives around the World

OPEN SCIENCE

Open Science is the movement to make scientific research and data accessible to all. It includes practices such as publishing open scientific research, campaigning for open access and generally making it easier to publish and communicate scientific knowledge. Additionally, it includes other ways to make science more transparent and accessible during the research process. This includes open notebook science, citizen science, and aspects of open source software and crowdfunded research projects.

The many advantages of this movement include:

  • Greater availability and accessibility of publicly funded scientific research outputs;

  • Possibility for rigorous peer-review processes;

  • Greater reproducibility and transparency of scientific works;

  • Greater impact of scientific research.

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