Open Educational Resources

The year 2020 shone a light on many issues in our sector. Amongst these was the challenge of equitable access to research and learning resources. The benefits of open access are blindingly obvious in the context of a global pandemic, where timely and universal sharing of research findings is critical in the race to find solutions. A challenge for 2021 must be to build on this knowledge, and improve access to all our publicly-funded research.

Open access advocates such as the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group (AOASG) work to highlight the path to open access publishing amongst researchers, policymakers and funders. We already have the infrastructure to make research FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), and this is an opportunity to acknowledge the Australian university open access research repositories that are enabling this change.