[Joint comment endorsed by 14 organizations, listed below] We, the undersigned organizations, urge you to implement without further delay Department of Education Rule 2 C.F.R. § 3474.20 for “Open Licensing Requirement for Direct Grant Programs,” which ensures that educational resources and other copyrightable works created with Department discretionary grant funds are openly licensed. We strongly support this rule, and encourage you to move ahead with its implementation immediately upon conclusion of this extension period.

This rule supports the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER), educational materials that are freely available to the public and can be downloaded, edited and shared to better serve all learners. The Federal Government currently invests billions of taxpayer dollars each year in programs that include the creation of educational, training, and instructional materials through grants, contracts, and other cooperative agreements.

These programs result in locally-produced educational resources, ranging from workforce training materials to instructional and learning enrichment activities and other teaching tools. While these materials are created for the public good, they are often not available for wide reuse outside the program they were developed for. This rule ensures that materials created in these programs are available to members of the public.

The broader availability of these resources empowers schools — public, private and in the home — to make use of these resources, allows businesses to incorporate them into workforce training, helps entrepreneurs to build new enterprises around them, permits students to enrich themselves through lifelong learning, and more. We applaud the Department for taking an important step in this direction, and urge you to move forward with the implementation process without any further delay.

Thank you for your consideration, and please do not hesitate to contact us if we can provide more information or support.

Sincerely,

Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER)
Consortium for School Networking (CoSN)
Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO)
Creative Commons
Lumen Learning
National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE)
New America
Open Education Consortium
Open Education Group
Open Oregon
Open Textbook Network (OTN)
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
The Learning Accelerator
U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG)

Contacts:

Ethan Senack, Creative Commons USA
esenack@wcl.american.edu

Nicole Allen, SPARC
nicole@sparcopen.org