Open Educational Resource (OER) Asia is an Asian Forum to share information and knowledge resources in addition to guidelines and toolkits on good practices on and about Open Education Resources in the Asian Region.  

Now available on their website is the OER Toolkit to support a self-directed, activity-based approach to understanding how open education resources (OER) can be used to support teaching and learning in open and distance learning contexts.
The toolkit consists of 5 modules, each module contains both information and activities. The material was sponsored by the International Development Research Centre of Canada (IDRC - CRDI) and produced by the Wawasan Open University (Malaysia).

Under OER resources you can find more freely available resources, contributed by the OER community.

Wikiversity contains learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university.

Wikiversity summarized

• It is a Wikimedia Foundation project.
• Its community is devoted to collaborative learning.
• It currently contains 18,189 learning resources
• Everybody can add learning resources, edit pages and also add links to existing internet resources.
• Its scope is to create open educational resources and collaborative learning communities.
• It uses wiki software to make collaboration easy.

Browse learning resources

The resources are categorized and thus browsable by one of the following six categories:

The European Commission has two policies on Open Access in practice with the aim of ensuring that research results funded by the EU citizen are made available to the population at large for free.

• In December 2007, the ERC Scientific Council published Guidelines for Open Access
• In August 2008, the European Commission launched the Open Access Pilot in FP7 with the scope of providing open access to articles resulting from research funded in areas participating in the pilot.

Researchers required to provide open access to EC funded research

These initiatives require that the researcher provides open access to articles resulting from EC funded research, within a specified time period. This has resulted since August 2008 in the following numbers in our area:

The Click4it wiki is an extensive knowledge base repository of learning and training industry’s terms, methodologies and tools.

The Access to Research for Development and Innovation (ARDI) program provides free online access to major scientific and technical journals to local, not-for-profit institutions in least-developed countries and low-cost access to industrial property offices in developing countries across the world.

Publishers provide free online access

The ARDI program was launched in 2009 by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in cooperation with 12 major publishers:

EIFL hosted on January 31, 2012 in the context of its Open Access programme a webcast with Nick Shockey, Director of Right to Research Coalition and of Student Advocacy, SPARC.

Involve students more in Open Access advocacy

The target audience of the webcast was students and young researchers who want to get engaged in Open Access; educate their peers on the severe barriers to access the latest research and the benefits of Open Access. The objective: involve students more in Open Access advocacy.

The Session recordings and slides are available on the EIFL website.

Oxfam is best known for its anti-poverty programme and campaigning work, but the organization also produces research and policy materials from its experience across the world. To provide open access to their published research, Oxfam GB adopted the Open Repository system based on DSpace.

The Oxfam iLibrary provides a single, secure deposit location for Oxfam’s large and ever evolving output of research and policy information.

With all the research that is now available online, why are academics still saying that they don’t have access to journals? This was the starting question of a research project initiated by ACU in east and southern Africa. Four campus case studies later the report "Growing Knowledge: Access to research in east and southern African universities"(1) was published.

Findings: “These resources simply weren’t being used”

In the article "Breaking down the barriers: Building an African working group on research information"(2) in the INASP Newsletter, Jonathan Harle writes the following about the findings:

Advocating open access to promote knowledge sharing EIFL-Open Access is one of the main programmes of EIFL. Most research is published in commercial e-journals, but because of high subscription costs researchers in developing and transition countries  are disadvantaged. Open access is the immediate, online, free and unrestricted availability of peer-reviewed, research literature. It provides the means to maximize the visibility and use of research output.