8.2 OER Librarians Facilitating Open Science

Universities supporting open science choose to share their research results, data and publications, but also embrace the fundamental principle of ‘open’ as a core value of science. With this core value comes open education. Although less often focused on, open education is actually the third pillar of open science, next to open access and open data.

To organize the third pillar, libraries are a powerful facilitator. On the one hand because they have proven to be successful advocates of open access and open data and can promote and lobby for open policies for education as well. The other strength of the library to support open education is their ability to facilitate the required practical processes to adopt open educational resources. Practical support actually derives naturally from traditional supporting roles of the library, on copyright, information discovery, information literacy skills and curation of information.

When a teacher sets up his reading list, very often the library is involved, checking reading rights, advising on open alternatives and helping to prevent copyright violations by teachers sharing articles with their class. Once the librarian and teacher start talking on impossibilities, they move on to discuss possibilities: how to share and use open educational materials? The OER librarian is born.

And then the OER librarian starts expanding his library core competency of discovery towards educational resources. What is out there? What can be reused? In close contact with the teacher, librarians can help find more than books to study, they can identify suitable open courses, knowledge video’s and kinds of other materials to (re-)use. Setting up a portal to search and find OER is a logical next step.

Librarians are teachers themselves, teaching information literacy skills and all kinds of other trainings. In this role the librarians teach and train about open education and as teachers themselves, they can use their own experiences when helping others. What is involved in sharing OER? What is keeping us from using each other’s materials? That experience helps the librarian to help teachers going ‘open’.

The library manages collections, keeps information safe, findable and reusable. More and more, they are doing that for educational materials as well as for publications and data. Starting practical within the closed environment of the university, just being efficient in saving work for reuse the next year, an educational repository is set up. That repository could then be used for opening up, and the library helps making the materials findable.

The OER librarian is a known concept in the United States, but in Europe, this role of librarians still has to be further developed. In the Netherlands, a working group of librarians supporting education works on defining the role and facilitates knowledge sharing to enhance the support for open education. With the growing recognition of the importance of excellent education in research intensive universities, research libraries start to focus more and more on education support. And then it is obvious, that for a librarian, that education should be open.