The art of re-using: TU Delft Open Educational Resources (OER) policy

We are proud to share with you the TU Delft Open Educational Resources (OER) policy.

With this policy, TU Delft not only encourages but also supports staff and students to use, create and publish OER. Here the aim is to enhance the quality of teachers’ and students’ experience, provided that resources used are fit-for-purpose and relevant. 

At some point in your reading or while using the OER policy you may notice that TU Delft recommends to publish OER with a CC-BY (Attribution only) Creative Commons license while the policy itself has a CC-BY-NC-SA (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike) license. Why does a policy document come with a more restrictive license than what is recommended for the objects – the OER – of the policy itself? 

The TU Delft OER policy wants to emphasize and stimulate the adoption and adaptation of existing materials, in line with the Open Science spirit.
What better way of illustrating the principle than implementing it in the policy-making process itself?
We searched for existing policies that had a vision close to our own.  The OER policies of the University of Leeds and of the Glasgow Caledonian University were close enough but did not cover all our goals.
Why reinventing the wheel? We built upon those existing policies by combining them and complementing them with new topics and articles specific for our university and the Netherlands.

By following this path we commit to the existing licensing model present in the policies, which is CC-BY-NC-SA. This less permissive license will certainly restrain somehow the reuse of our policy. But at the same time this story shows how important it is to choose carefully a Creative Commons license for your resource,  thinking about the future use and reuse opportunities. And that’s why TU Delft recommends for its OER, when possible, one of the most open licenses, the CC-BY.