The Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project has developed an open research toolkit to profile the conceptual and other tools utilised in the meta-synthesis of the sub-project chapters presented in the edited volume, Adoption and Impact of OER in the Global South.
The “Bibliography” brief is the third in a series of three open research briefs. It discusses the purposes, processes, characteristics and lessons learned from establishing a network-wide bibliographic database. Serving as a record of OER research in the Global South – and of foundational literature on OER originating from the Global North – the ROER4D bibliography consists of a curated reference list emanating primarily (though not exclusively) from sub-project research reports and the chapters comprising the project’s edited volume, Adoption and Impact of OER in the Global South. It examines features of the bibliography’s 1 471 sources, particularly as relates to publication type, language, accessibility and region.
The key insights from the bibliography are that ROER4D researchers for the most part utilised English-language journal articles and reports on OER, with only 9% of sources cited in other languages. The vast majority of resources (84%) were accessible without having to navigate paywalls, and, despite the inherent focus of the bibliography on the Global South, just over half (51%) of the references were authored by Global North scholars – primarily from North America and Europe, with a small number from Australasia.
The ROER4D “Bibliography” brief highlights the fact that online resources from the Global South (particularly government reports) are not always well curated or archived, and that websites come and go, meaning that useful documents originating in the Global South are often not accessible in the long term. The use of established and well-supported repositories is recommended for projects that cannot ensure long-term stability in terms of their website hosting solutions.
The live version of the bibliography continues to be developed and can be accessed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sHFNzg6QlFSN0geTWjKkMIPSdqEiywybCsEoMjriX8g/edit#gid=
