Open Education and Open Educational Resources

Using open resources is guided by good scientific practice. The resources used are carefully cited when doing research, teaching and studying.

• Always follow the applicable citing guidelines and familiarise yourself with the instructions of the source providing the material.
• Always mention the original author.

Remember that not all scientific or artistic publications, data and educational resources are published openly and the amount varies by discipline.

Open resources are either released for public use (Public domain) or licensed, which guides their further use. Licences give you the right to access and use the material free of charge. Depending on the licence given, it is also possible to edit and distribute the material.

• Creative Commons licences (CC) are most commonly used, but the terms of use may be described in other ways as well.
• The most common and recommended licences for OER are CC BY (Attribution) and CC BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike).

When using CC-licenced material:

• Make sure the licence fits your purpose.
• Follow with licence terms.
• Always mention the author. The CC 0 licence does not require mentioning the author, but it is still in line with good scientific practice.
• Cite carefully and include a link to the original work, if possible.
• Attach a link to the licence and its short name into the resource you are using.
• When remixing, adapting or building upon the work of others, mention both the original author and the author of the variation and indicate how the work has been modified.

You are always responsible for having the right to use resources produced by others for example in publications or in teaching.

In addition to open resources, you can use resources or parts of them prepared by others in teaching and in research by asking the author or copyright holder for permission. It is also possible to use Kopiosto copying licence for teaching, research and administration operations.

Open access publications can be searched directly from LUC-Finna and from the repositories of various universities and publishers. More extensive searches can be made from a variety of databases and search services, some of which are focused on specific disciplines. Their contents overlap in part, but no service covers all open publications. Articles, book chapters as well as books are all being published open access.

Help in selecting suitable search services can be found in the library's information retrieval guides.

Finnish publications and search tools

International databases and search tools

Base, Core, Oaister search form the repositories of research institutions