Open Educational Resources

Since the mid-1990s the phenomenal increase in the penetration of the Internet has gone hand in hand with growing public awareness of the idea of open access, i.e. making academic documents freely available either as primary or secondary publications. In Germany the idea had certainly reached the scientific community by the time of the Berlin Declaration (2003), and in 2006 the German Research Foundation (DFG) firmly embedded open access in its funding policy. In this light, the fact that only quite a select circle should be familiar with the open educational resources (OER) approach, at least in Germany, is quite surprising since the two approaches share the underlying principle of open content and are therefore closely related.