OER and OA for Business

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are freely available teaching materials, such as e-textbooks, lesson plans, activities, media, and supporting content. They're a type of open access material.

For scholarly work Open Access (OA) means free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of peer reviewed literature for anyone connected to the internet. 

Open Access or OA seeks to grant free and open online access to academic information, like publications and data. A publication is defined as "open access" when there are no legal, financial, or technical barriers to accessing it. This means that anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for and search within the information or use it for education or in any way the legal agreements allow. Source: Openaccess.nl 

See OA tab on the left to find resources for OA for business and accounting, as well as journals and other electronic resources available to USC faculty, staff and students (non-OER) 

There are several models for OA publishing, but the two most commonly utilized are:

Gold Open Access: Gold OA is ensuring that the final version of an article is permanently accessible for everyone after publication. The author retains the copyright and most of the permission barriers are removed. These articles can be published in completely OA journals or hybrid-journals (a subscription-based journal that offers an OA option which authors can chose if they wish).

Green Open Access: Green OA, which can also be referred to as self-archiving, is when the author's manuscript is placed into an open and accessible archive or repository for open access. The version that is uploaded to the archive or repository is dependent on the publisher or author. This kind of open access, the copyright usually is kept by the publisher and there are typically restrictions as to how the work can be utilized. 

Source: Springer

For more types of Open Access publishing please look here: Open Access Academy

Open Educational Resources or OER  are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Source: Hewlett Foundation (March 11, 2019) 

See OER tab on the left to find resources for OER for business and accounting, as well as eBooks and other electronic resources available to USC faculty, staff and students (non-OER) 

Licensing and Types  - OER resources can have some restrictions related to intellectual property rights, but are often more flexible and less restrictive.  The Creative Commons a non-profit agency provides ready made licensing agreements at various levels. If you are creating content you can use the Creative Commons 'Share Your Work' site to help you understand the agreements and make your work available. This site can also help you understand how to use OER resources. There the Attribution types, here is summary as described by Creative Commons:

• CC0 - No rights Reserved: completely in the public domain
• CC BY - Allows others to distribute, remix, tweak and build upon your work, even commercial as long as the owner is given credit
• BY-SA - This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
• CC BY-ND - This license lets others reuse the work for any purpose, including commercially; however, it cannot be shared with others in adapted form, and credit must be provided to you.
• CC BY-NC - This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
• CC BY-NC-SA - This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
• CC BY-NC-ND -  This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.