Open Educational Resources OERs Education and Research in ICT Era

Electronic resources are results of the development of ICT. The web portal is a collection of metadata links of open access resources useful for education and research. The purpose to create the web portal is to make aware students, faculty members, research scholars, government officials and law clerks about the existence of open access resources protected under creative common licences and under copyright free environment. The web portal is an effort to provides access to information available under pubic domain worldwide. Information resources of international organizations have also been indexed for better visibility of their publications and research reports. These resources are also useful for colleges and universities having limited financial resources restricting subscribing costly databases. The web portal has been developed with a view to provide information resources available in public domain and under open access (Creative Common Licences) without consideration of any Monterey aspects and can be used for educational and research purpose, hence not liable for any breach of copyright. In case of any objection by any organization/ individual, the noted link(s) would be excluded from the portal.

UNESCO Policy Guidelines for the Development and Promotion of Government Public Domain Information

A review of the history of the term “public domain” shows that it has traditionally been associated with public land and has never had a universally accepted meaning in the context of information. Indeed, there is little in official public documents or even in the scholarly literature that deals definitively with this subject. Most legal scholars would define public domain information by what it is not; that is, any information that is not proprietary, the yin to the proprietary yang. But such a definition is insufficient, for it does not adequately characterize or describe what public domain information in fact is, and provides no basis on which to evaluate its positive role and its value to knowledge societies, especially in the context of economic and social development.

The UNESCO Recommendation on Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace provides the following definition: “Public domain information refers to publicly accessible information, the use of which does not infringe any legal right, or any obligation of confidentiality. It thus refers on the one hand to the realm of all works or objects of related rights, which can be exploited by everybody without any authorization, for instance because protection is not granted under national or international law, or because of the expiration of the term of protection. It refers on the other hand to public data and official information Produced and voluntarily made available by governments or international organizations.”

Under this definition, information in the public domain covers two distinct notions: On the one hand, “public domain information” can be defined as what is left outside the scope of any form of statutory protection including intellectual property rights, the protection of national security or public order, privacy laws and obligations of confidentiality. (Text taken from UNESCO Policy Guidelines for Governmental Public Information contributed by Paul F. Uhlir) full text link