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Triggered by the advancement of information and communications technology, open access repositories (a variant of digital libraries) is one of the important changes impacting library services. In the context of openness to a wider community to access free resources, Wawasan Open University Library initiated a research project to build open access repositories on open educational resources. Open educational resources (OER) is an area of a multifaceted open movement in education. The purpose of this paper is to show how two web portal repositories on OER materials were developed adopting a Japanese open source software, called WEKO.

The design approach is based on a pull to push strategy whereby metadata of scholarly open access materials kept within the institution and network communities’ digital databases were harvested using the Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting method into another open knowledge platform for discovery by other users.

Positive results emanating from the university open access repositories development showed how it strengthen the role of the librarian as manager of institutional assets and successfully making the content freely available from this open knowledge platform for reuse in learning and teaching.

Developing further programmes to encourage, influence faculty members and prospective stakeholders to use and contribute content to the valuable repositories is indeed a challenging task.

This paper provides insight for academic libraries on how open access repositories development and metadata analysis can enhance new professional challenges for information professionals in the field of data management, data quality and intricacies of supporting data repositories and build new open models of collaboration across institutions and libraries. This paper also describes future collaboration work with institutions in sharing their open access resources.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning materials openly licensed so that others may retain, reuse, revise, remix or redistribute (the 5Rs) these materials. This paper aims to raise awareness of OER by providing a rationale for using these learning materials and a strategy for educators to get started with OER during the collective crisis and beyond.

Using a broad research base and anecdotes from personal experience, the authors make the case that OER improves student access to learning materials and improves the learning experience in both PK-12 and higher education contexts.

The authors define and describe the benefits of OER to provide practical suggestions educators can implement during the pandemic and beyond.

To support educators in finding and using OER, this paper highlights repositories that include a breadth of various learning materials across subject areas and educational contexts. The authors provide specific suggestions for finding, personalizing and contextualizing OER.

This work not only provides an overview of OER with particular considerations for educators during the COVID-19 pandemic but also makes the case that OER should be integrated into classrooms beyond the pandemic.

Open access (OA) is often considered as particularly beneficial to researchers in the global south. However, research into awareness of and attitudes to OA has been largely dominated by voices from the global north. A survey was conducted of 507 researchers from the developing world and connected to INASP's AuthorAID project to ascertain experiences and attitudes to OA publishing. The survey revealed problems for the researchers in gaining access to research literature in the first place. There was a very positive attitude to OA research and OA journals, but when selecting a journal in which to publish, OA was seen as a much less important criterion than factors relating to international reputation. Overall, a majority of respondents had published in an OA journal and most of these had paid an article processing charge. Knowledge and use of self-archiving via repositories varied, and only around 20% had deposited their research in an institutional repository. The study also examined attitudes to copyright, revealing most respondents had heard of Creative Commons licences and were positive about the sharing of research for educational use and dissemination, but there was unease about research being used for commercial purposes. Respondents revealed a surprisingly positive stance towards openly sharing research data, although many revealed that they would need further guidance on how to do so. The survey also revealed that the majority had received emails from so called “predatory” publishers and that a small minority had published in them.

The purpose of this paper is to present mobile solutions that aid in accessing open educational resources (OERs) in areas that have limited bandwidth resulting in poor internet connectivity and a gap between those with ready access to the online OERs and those without such access.

A system architecture was designed to support the repository-based, mobile-friendly, and hybrid online/offline characteristics of OERs. In a hybrid online/offline setup, the learner connects to the internet to obtain OERs from the repository via a process called syncing. Afterward, he may view any OER content regardless of whether he is online or offline. Mobile solutions based on Browser-Like Android App (BLAP)/HTTrack and Worona/Corona approaches were successfully implemented and evaluated by 139 respondents using the System Usability Scale.

BLAP/HTTrack and Worona/Corona solutions were well received. These were found to be both relatively usable, acquiring above-average usability scores of 73.2374 and 71.6546, respectively.

The findings of this study aim to contribute to the literature of hybrid online/offline model that addresses low bandwidth access of OERs in developing countries, which is not historically well provided.

The mobile solutions were designed to help those learners who experience internet connectivity difficulties in accessing OERs efficiently and updating them conveniently.

Open-access repositories (OARs) are essential for openly disseminating intellectual knowledge on the internet and providing free access to it. The current study aims to evaluate the growth and development of OARs in the field of technology by investigating several characteristics such as coverage, OA policies, software type, content type, yearly growth, repository type and geographic contribution.

The directory of OARs acts as the source for data harvesting, which provides a quality-assured list of OARs across the globe.

The study found that 125 nations contributed a total of 4,045 repositories in the field of research, with the USA leading the list with the most repositories. Maximum repositories were operated by institutions having multidisciplinary approaches. The DSpace and Eprints were the preferred software types for repositories. The preferred upload content by contributors was “research articles” and “electronic thesis and dissertations”.

The study is limited to the subject area technology as listed in OpenDOAR; therefore, the results may differ in other subject areas.

The work can benefit researchers across disciplines and, interested researchers can take this study as a base for evaluating online repositories. Moreover, policymakers and repository managers could also get benefitted from this study.

The study is the first of its kind, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to investigate the repositories of subject technology in the open-access platform.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate ways in which educator preparation programs can influence educator and administrator support of Open Education Resources (OER). OER is still not used as widely as the researchers would like, even though it was introduced in the year 2002 (Bliss and Smith, 2017). While it is rarely used to a large extent, it is especially lacking in K-12 schools. By introducing OER to educator candidates (including future principals) in their own programs, they may be supportive of OER and invest in them when they work in schools.

The research was conducted when an OER project was required in educator preparation programs. Two classes totaling 27 students engaged in a group project, creating OER materials and receptacles over the course of the semester.

Research showed that educator candidates were in favor of using OER thoroughly. Through building their own OER resources, educator candidates understood the importance of creating socially just and equitable learning environments, aligning with diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, a project like this has not been researched before. This research supports the idea that usage of OER and investment in it should happen for all educator candidates (teachers and administrators).

The purpose of this paper is to make an assessment of the challenges in disseminating higher education to the learners in tribal communities, and problems solving capacity of Open and Distance Learning (ODL) by strategically making use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) taking a case of Madhya Pradesh (MP), which is the most tribal dominated state of India. The paper offers valuable insight in to the usage of ICT as a strategy for the ODL system presenting an account of how it can be utilized effectively to disseminate higher education in tribal communities.

Exploratory and descriptive techniques were utilized in this paper adopting the research strategy of case study in terms of the strategic potentialities of ICT in disseminating higher education in tribal communities by ODL using it as a strategy for their empowerment and development.

The findings of the paper reveal that dissemination of higher education in tribal areas is a challenging task especially due to their socioeconomic conditions and ethno cultural settings in addition to numerous infrastructural and access related issues. In view of the need of integrating education with the Indigenous perspectives, ICT can be used as an effective strategy by ODL for disseminating higher education amongst learners in those communities by reaching out to them.

This paper concludes that ICT can help ODL immensely in developing countries such as India strategically in reaching the tribal learners surpassing financial and geographical constraints with a learner centric approach increasing the capacity, quality and cost effectiveness of education system bringing the concept of strategy to center stage, at a time when ICT has fundamentally changed the strategies of different sectors including education with the unprecedented growth in its use.

This paper concludes that ICT has fundamentally changed the strategies of different sectors including higher education with the unprecedented growth in its use. It also concludes that Indian higher educational sector faced with multitude of challenges is not insulated from the effect of ICT, and its emancipatory and transformative potentials in higher education can play a major substantive role by extending support to meet the increasing higher educational needs of the tribal communities by sufficiently embedding it so that their greater contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can be ensured.