OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES - HOW OPEN THEY ARE?

Right now the open education is a reality, distributing high quality free for use knowledge over the world. Open Educational Resources (OERs) are shared in a wide variety of forms and sizes from a learning instruction to open courses and virtual laboratories. An initiative, starting in 2001 with an announcement of Massachusetts Institute of Technology to ensure free access to many courses, nowadays it gains big popularity, involving many institutions and initiatives. At this time, it is talking about OER communities, OER platforms and OER digital repositories. Students, educators and researchers benefit from OERs reusing, remixing, revising or redistributing this treasure. Emerging the question related to the level of OERs free usage, adaptation and distribution without the user to come under the strikes of copyright law or "How open are OERs?" In this paper, the creative commons licenses are discussed in order to understand the rights from the side of copyright owners and from the other side of OERs users. For this purpose, the licenses that can be used for protection of copyright owners: Attribution (BY), Attribution-Non-Commercial (BY-NC), Attribution-Share Alike (BY-SA), Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share alike (BY-NC-SA), Attribution-No Derivatives (BY-ND), Attribution-Non-commercial-No Derivatives (BY-NC-ND) are described. Then, the case studies from educational practices are explored and analyzed in order to understand how the OERs are copyrighted. And finally, the consequences of the intellectual property law violations are examined and summarized. The paper will be useful for educational professionals who have already started OERs initiatives or who have the intention to do that. Also, it can help students when they use or share digital resources.