The impact of proprietary and closed-source educational resources and technologies is inherently damped by the lack of access by the students, instructors, and institutions who cannot afford to pay, that is, the audiences who need these resources the most.
Furthermore, open-source projects have the potential for additional impacts unanticipated by the original project team, due to the ability for external scholars to freely reuse, remix, and redistribute these works.
Additionally, open-source projects allow for the free sharing of ideas and collaboration by diverse audiences to build common goods available to the nation's teachers and learners.
In order to maximize its investment for innovating US undergraduate education, the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) solicitation makes open-licensing of funded products a requirement for the program:
Developers of new materials are required to license all work (except for computer software source code, discussed below) created with the support of the grant under either the 3.0 Unported or 3.0 United States version of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), or Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.
These licenses allow subsequent users to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the copyrighted work and requires such users to attribute the work in the manner specified by the grantee. Notice of the specific license used would be affixed to the work, and displayed clearly when the work is made available online. For general information on these Creative Commons licenses, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/.
It is expected that computer software source code developed or created with IUSE grant funds be released under an intellectual property license that allows others to use and build upon the work. The grantee may release all new source code developed or created with IUSE grant funds under an open license acceptable to the Free Software Foundation (http://gnu.org/licenses/) and/or the Open Source Initiative (https://opensource.org/licenses/).
Note that IUSE program officers have clarified in direct communications with the IUSE Open Workshop organizers that "The IUSE program will accept any mechanism to `allow subsequent users to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the copyrighted work and requires such users to attribute the work in the manner specified by the grantee`. We had included CC3.0 in the solicitation because at the time of publication, that was the most up-to-date open license."