Author: Sam Winemiller

Q&A: Open Educational Resources as a New High-Impact Practice

This project has major implications for the future of open education in the U.S.

If you follow open education news, you probably heard over the summer that AAC&U recognized Open Educational Resources (OER) as a High-Impact Practice (HIP). OER’s addition to the roster of 12 teaching and learning practices means AAC&U has deemed there to be “…significant educational benefits for students who participate in them—including and especially those from demographic groups historically underserved by higher education.” To achieve the requisite degree of evidence, AAC&U commissioned what it describes as “the largest examination of OER to date.” Over two years, their research team examined around 700,000 student records along with qualitative responses from over 200 instructors who had implemented OER in their courses, drawn from 15 institutions across six Carnegie classifications.

This project has major implications for the future of open education in the U.S., not only as the path to OER’s recognition as a HIP, but also via rich, multifaceted data that requires so much labor to collect and analyze at scale. The insights from this study are valuable both as rationale for institutional support of OER and as practical considerations for open education advocates and instructors. Whether you consider open education a passion, a moral obligation, or a job responsibility, the full report is worth a deep dive. (And a quick unsolicited plug for Open Education Conference, where the AAC&U team shared early results from this study last year). My institution has an office dedicated to promoting HIPs on campus, as I imagine is true at many other colleges and universities. The opportunity to embed support for open education beyond traditional advocacy units (e.g. libraries, teaching centers) may be truly game-changing at institutions where that hasn’t yet happened.

Heather Miceli, Assistant Director of the Institute on Open Educational Resources and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at AAC&U, kindly answered a few questions about their study and High-Impact Practices for ACRLog.

I’m sure there are many possible practices that could be studied as potential high-impact practices. Why OER? In other words, what led to the initiation of this study, including but also beyond the guiding research questions?

Open Education, as we know it currently, is celebrating a milestone anniversary this year. Twenty-five years, a quarter of a century. And yet, the practice is still fairly siloed, sometimes completely unknown to faculty and instructors whose students would benefit from even just the affordability argument. However, we knew from multiple smaller scale studies that the potential to impact student success was there. But we also knew that there were small sample sizes, confounding variables, and conflicting results. So, we decided to take a shot at trying to gather as much data as possible, from as many different types of institutions as possible, to push forward the conversation on how OER impact student success. At the same time, one of the foundation pieces of high-impact practices (HIPs) is that they are most impactful “when done well.” We wanted to capture the instructor experience and connect it as much as we could with what we were seeing in the quantitative data.

The report describes some differences in instructors’ experiences between those who adopted an OER without revision vs. those who revised, remixed, or created OERs. How would you summarize/synthesize some those differences and what they might mean for librarians who support instructors making course material decisions?

We found considerable evidence across multiple contexts that when instructors choose to revise, remix, or create their own OER (high-level implementation), the withdrawal rates in the course are significantly lower than those who chose to simply adopt (low-level implementation). We attribute this to the fact that higher-level implementation of OER allows instructors to customize the texts specifically for their students, courses, and context – which has been shown in the literature to have a positive impact on student belonging and success.

We also found some interesting correlation in the instructor survey around high- vs. low-level implementation. 52% of instructors that simply adopted their OER as is were externally motivated, meaning that they were required to adopt the text by the institution or the department, as opposed to only 12% that revised/remixed/created their OER. Of those that adopted because they were externally motivated, 34% perceived their first implementation went poorly. We also found that 31% of those who adopted and had no support also perceived their first implementation as poor. These results did not surprise us—we know that support and internal motivation are going to be key variables in the quality of implementation. However, when we looked at instructors who adopted and who perceived their first OER implementation to be poor, we found that they overwhelmingly did not engage in any other teaching practice changes as a result of using OER.

Could you highlight a few other takeaways from the study that might be especially relevant to librarians and other open education advocates?

One of the most significant findings was that at doctoral institutions, withdrawal rates decreased at much higher rates than any of the other institutions when OER was implemented. It was especially impactful for students with a high intersectionality of historically minoritized characteristics. Doctoral institutions are likely the most heterogenous institutions in our study, and this result suggests that OER, on its own, could be a compelling retention strategy for students in their first year courses (the majority of courses in our sample from doctoral institutions were lower-level courses).

In terms of grades, we found that A grades increased across the board, with a small increase also in F grades—we attribute the increase in F grades to students finishing a course when without OER, they might have withdrawn from the course, putting their enrollment in jeopardy.

A frankly jaw-dropping finding at community colleges was that when students who had been enrolled for 4 or more years took 6 or more OER courses, their time-to-completion dropped by over a calendar year. This finding shows that institutionalized OER could be a monumental strategy in shortening time-to-completion for nontraditional students.

With the understanding that their operationalization might look different campus-to-campus, why does it matter for something to be recognized as a high-impact practice by AAC&U? What opportunities can that recognition present?

Since their inception almost twenty years ago, high impact practices (HIPs) have shaped the experiences of millions of students in the US and abroad. We know that when students participate in HIPs, especially those from historically minoritized groups in higher education, they report positive cumulative, additive effects on student success. However, when you look at the list of HIPs, a lot of the experiences require time and resources that aren’t available to all students. For example, not all internships are paid, and there are many students who can’t afford to give their free labor to companies to advance their education; study abroad programs are inaccessible to students that have familial or parenting responsibilities. So, we are starting to look to the future of HIPs knowing that a practice that is included on this list is valued highly by administrators and curriculum developers, so much so that some institutions require participation in HIPs for graduation. We hope that in adding OER to the list, with substantial evidence to support their use in many contexts, we can begin to see a shift towards further institutionalization of OER on campuses, including the necessary instructor support to ensure optimal implementation.

Thank you to Heather for her responses, and thank you to Heather and her research team for this study. We may not understand the full scope of this work’s impact on the field for a while, but I expect it will be significant.

The academe is people and people are complicated

To fully understand the intricacies of your institution’s internal politics, you’d need a graduate level course on the subject.

For introverted librarians (like me) in public facing positions, the parts of our jobs that require the most face time are often the most exhausting (although some folks learn to love it). I try to appreciate invitations to speak to groups/at events, but those calendar holds remain my primary source of professional anxiety, even if they’ve generally gone well in the past. The more you practice something, the better at it you become, so maybe public speaking gets to be old hat for liaison/subject librarians.

In my scholarly-communications-focused role, I very rarely speak to groups of students. Most of my external interactions are with faculty and administration, and not often in large groups. Through these interactions I’ve come to see myself and the library as responsible for, or at least involved in, connecting folks from across campus to work toward shared goals. This type of work presents different relational challenges from public speaking. I usually like this focused, small group work, particularly when shared with other librarians who think alike and speak the same technical language (turns out, most librarians are pretty nice!), but I’ve noticed how much that dynamic can change when working with folks outside the library.

If cross-departmental/interdisciplinary work were easily initiated or naturally occurring, we probably wouldn’t see as many calls for more of it or rewards for pursuing it. Much of that discourse refers to interdisciplinary research endeavors, but many of the same challenges hold true for work meant to improve the functioning of our institutions. My area of librarianship is geared toward those types of behind-the-scenes operations. As I’ve met and worked on shared goals with folks from other units across campus, I’ve come to realize how complicated it can be to navigate the human aspect of the university machine. The relationships in a cross-departmental group are influenced by years of reorganizations and budget reallocations and disappointments and hurt feelings and wrong impressions and conflicting philosophies, very little of which can be prepared for—and if you do know about those dynamics, you’re probably less likely to bring that group together in the first place, even if those people could provide the right mix of knowledge to address a given problem. To fully understand the intricacies of your institution’s internal politics, you’d need a graduate level course on the subject.

I know messy human relationships aren’t unique to the academe, but the academe does tend to attract many smart and opinionated cooks to a pretty complicated kitchen. As an early career librarian, I don’t think I’ve appreciated how insulated I’ve been from those rough seas outside the library, but sometimes our work can (and should) bring us into cooperative spaces with folks from other units. When I’ve found myself in such situations where the vibes are distinctly not good, my natural conflict aversion makes it more difficult to contribute. Over the past several years, reminding myself of a few truths has helped me push through these emotional challenges:

  • Notwithstanding the widespread need for better funding, academic libraries/librarians are generally well liked (Fagan et al., 2022;  Weng & Murray, 2020). This reputation positions us well as arbiters in groups with complicated dynamics.
  • Librarians have unique disciplinary expertise about the information lifecycle and information systems. We have valuable insights that will not be considered without our contribution.
  • In situations with higher-than-normal levels of conflict, I try to remember to challenge cognitive distortions like personalization (“I am somehow responsible for how badly this is going”) or emotional reasoning (“This feels bad; therefore it must be bad/dangerous”) with reality-checking strategies (e.g. identifying the distortion; examining the evidence; thinking in shades of gray).

I’m not sure I have a clear thesis to share, other than to acknowledge: the human part of library work (or maybe all work?) can be hard, especially when you care about the work. I’m sure we’ve all felt that way at some point and it’s good to name the things that we find hard or stressful. How have you learned to handle complicated institutional politics in your work? Feel free to share in the comments.

Let’s cultivate copyright confidence

Copyright competency is about more than knowing the rules. It’s about knowing what the rules are trying to achieve and how libraries contribute to those goals.

If you have a legally inclined librarian in your life, you may have heard them lament the state of copyright education in MLIS programs. If not, then allow me. Several studies have highlighted the widespread lack of sufficient copyright education across MLIS programs, both in North America and abroad (Cross & Edwards, 2011; Dryden, 2010; Fernández-Molina et al., 2022; Gathegi & Burke, 2008; Schmidt & English, 2015). These studies also point out that, even in the LIS programs that do offer some form of copyright-focused course, many are elective as opposed to a requirement for matriculation; few of the courses are “rigorous” or are regularly updated alongside the evolving copyright environment (Kawooya et al., 2019); and ultimately, “very few courses at the master’s level provide for the minimal requirements in terms of copyright literacy for professionals —whether to carry out their own tasks and functions, or else to aid co-workers or users as effectively as possible” (Fernández-Molina et al., 2022, p. 6). In a 2014 survey, only 49% of academic librarians felt prepared to provide copyright support to library patrons (Charbonneau & Priehs, 2014), and those librarians—along with library deans (Eye, 2013)—expressed a desire for additional copyright training. I’d guess the results would be similar in 2026. My MLIS program did offer a copyright-focused course and I still needed several copyright professional development courses to feel competent.

Copyright competency is about more than knowing and following (and often over-complying with) the rules. It’s about knowing why the rules exist—what goals the law is trying to accomplish so as to benefit society, and how the current legal framework is or is not helping society reach those goals. Libraries can locate their contributions to these larger societal goals and thereby understand why and how copyright law allows us to do what we do. And we can often do more than we might think (e.g. thank you, fair use).

On the other side of the coin, copyright law can also restrict libraries from being able to do what they should be able to do. Contractual override of library exceptions and fair use rights, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act’s restrictive amendments to library copyright exceptions (17 U.S. Code § 108 b(2) and c(2)), and the Second Circuit’s unfortunate decision in the Internet Archive case on controlled digital lending are just a few examples of a tightening belt on libraries and our mission of sharing information for the public good. Libraries (read: librarians) need to know how to make their own case. We contribute in unique ways to the societal goals copyright is trying to accomplish. Yet, in conversations with copyright experts, I’ve heard this sentiment shared several times: “If someone proposed the idea of libraries today, they’d be laughed out of the room.” I don’t think they’re wrong.

So, yes, we need to pay more attention to copyright in MLIS programs. We need ongoing professional development about copyright as it evolves. We need to feel more prepared to inform folks about how copyright affects their work (for example, authors’ propensity to sign away their journal article copyrights with abandon is the “original sin” of the serials crisis). Fortunately, there are very smart people and organizations working hard in this arena. I’m sharing a few of my favorite resources here, in hopes that they help someone take a step toward more copyright confidence:

Quick Reference Resources

  • All things from Authors Alliance: Super reliable advisors on all things copyright, specializing in issues affecting higher ed and in support of authors “who want to serve the public good by sharing their creations broadly.” Along with their public-facing news, analysis, and updates about copyright, they also work directly with academic libraries, if you know of an interested dean.
  • Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OER: An explanation of how fair use allows authors to reference/include content/diagrams from other works in new noncommercial texts (even if those other works are all-rights-reserved). Generally helpful examples of how fair use can be applied to authorship
  • Fair Use Fundamentals from Fair Use Week: A tidy and LibGuide-friendly infographic on how fair use supports the fundamental purpose of copyright and makes possible lots of uses we rely on every day. Also, consider celebrating Fair Use Week in February!
  • Steps in the Analysis of a U.S. Copyright Case (Enriquez, 2013): Even though the risk of legal action and legal penalty is quite low for academic libraries, for those who want to understand all possible outcomes of their copyright-related actions, this document is a simple overview of court procedures for copyright infringement cases.

Professional Development

  • Creative Commons Certificate Curriculum: The ultimate authority on how CC licenses work. This certificate program is great, and in the spirit of open sharing, CC also makes their curriculum materials publicly available.
  • Open Copyright Education Advisory Network (OCEAN): OCEAN is carrying forth the mantel of regular copyright professional development for cultural heritage institutions. Not copyright 101, but if you have a baseline understanding, their events are great.

The Read & Publish Dilemma

Is this a losing proposition?

Read & Publish (R&P) agreements (referred to by many names, but most commonly “transformative agreements”) are package subscription deals offered to academic libraries by publishers, sometimes by way of library consortium negotiation. What distinguishes an R&P agreement from the classic “big deal” is the allure of open access (OA) publishing support: as part of the agreement, an institution’s affiliated authors can receive coverage for article processing charges (APCs) required to publish OA in a portfolio of the publisher’s academic journals. This can look a few ways: a limited pool of APC-dedicated funds that replenishes annually; or a limited pool of credits or tokens; or rarely, an uncapped automatic waiver for all accepted articles; and these funds or credits might be limited to hybrid OA journals (journals that allow authors to either publish their articles behind a subscription paywall without direct cost, or publish OA for a fee) or gold OA journals (journals that require all articles be published OA for a fee).

The premise of R&P agreements was first proposed by faculty at the Max Planck Digital Library in 2015. It quickly captured the imagination of many influential OA advocates as a potential path toward mass conversion of the academic publishing system away from the traditional subscription model to a fully OA future, and R&P agreements have since proliferated across Europe and the U.S. After reflecting on how events have unfolded over the past decade, many of those same proponents (e.g. cOAlitionS, Jisc) are no longer confident in the promise of R&P agreements. 

The question of R&P agreements asks whether the ends justify the means. On one hand, R&P agreements and the APC model upon which they are based have significantly increased the overall market share of OA publications over the past 10 years, now up to around 50% of all journal articles published annually (although that trajectory has plateaued over the past several years). R&P agreements also provide a neat solution for federally funded authors who are worried about potential caps on the amount of grant dollars they can spend on APCs.

On the other hand, many smart folks have pointed out that, under the hood, R&P agreements with large publishers are still the same big deals with the same big deal problems. R&P agreements help sustain the APC model, which has essentially moved the cost barrier from readers to authors, naturally excluding authors from underfunded disciplines, from institutions without R&P agreements, and largely from the Global South. The APC model also incentivizes journals to publish more articles and generate more revenue, which causes additional stress on the peer review system and contributes to higher retraction rates. Hybrid OA journals provide publishers a “double dip” revenue stream by charging libraries for subscription access while also reaping APCs, without reducing journal subscription costs when articles are published OA. Publishers don’t seem keen to speed up the rate of transition from hybrid to gold (it would take 70 years to reach fully gold OA at the 2018-2022 journal flipping rate, per Jisc). And why would publicly traded publishers change anything about their behavior when they’re enjoying tidy returns (to the tune of a 38% profit margin worth $1.5 billion annually, for instance)?

Of course, not all publishers behave in the same way, and not all R&P agreements are created equally. Dér recently raised the point that, to be truly “transitional/transformative,” the Max Planck team always envisioned that R&P agreements would evolve through regular negotiations, and eventually, libraries would “…unbundle fixed lump-sum OA payments or capped OA article allowances and adopt a post-payment model. This way, investments can be linked, objectively, to the actual number of articles published…” Although university presses and society publishers seem more willing to explore alternative R&P conceptions, this goal has ostensibly been lost in the shuffle during negotiations with big publishers. 

Ultimately, in their current common form, big R&P agreements ask research institutions to further sacrifice control of the scholarly communication system to for-profit publishers by incentivizing submissions to their journals. This relationship undercuts efforts to promote author and/or institutional engagement with other OA publishing and distribution models (e.g. diamond OA, pre-prints, self-archiving). When factoring in the bloated subscription packages attached to these distorted OA perks, it seems increasingly difficult for the ends to justify the means.

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For those interested, here is some more leisure reading in addition to the links scattered above:

OpenAlex and values-aligned tools

It is within our sphere of influence to learn about and use values-aligned infrastructure and leverage our positions as information professionals to teach and encourage others to use values-aligned infrastructure as well.

Two different kinds of bridges crossing a river. Photo by Katelyn G on Unsplash

Academia needs to untangle from corporate entities our ability to understand and evaluate scholarly activity. Companies like Elsevier and Clarivate have effectively embedded evaluation methods into academia that rely on their proprietary tools (Scopus and SciVal; Web of Science and Journal Citation Reports and InCites, respectively). Conveniently, these products also cast judgement on the “legitimacy” of scholarly publication venues and whether they are valuable as lines in a tenure portfolio and/or in library subscription decisions, which raises questions about conflict of interest. One would assume journals owned by Elsevier are rarely excluded from the Scopus corpus, for example.

The need to sever indexing and evaluation of scholarly activity from corporate control dovetails with the need to regain a degree of control over the entire scholarly publishing enterprise. One path might look like a significant shift toward venues that are owned-and-operated by academic institutions or scholarly societies or academic alliances as opposed to for-profit publishers, but a basic barrier to this shift is the inconsistent and incomplete indexing of such venues in scientific knowledge graphs like Scopus and Web of Science. In their recent article on the subject, Nazarovets et al. (2026) conclude with this suggestion: “…the uneven visibility of UJs [university journals] highlights a structural blind spot in global research assessment: unless more inclusive infrastructures like DOAJ and OpenAlex are more widely recognized and further improved in terms of comprehensiveness in coverage and metadata reliability, large parts of scholarly production will remain invisible even if a move is made away from using WoS [Web of Science] and Scopus.” This is just one possible benefit of investing in open infrastructure like OpenAlex (as recommended by UNESCO). Open infrastructure can be defined as free, foundational tools and resources upon which open science/scholarship can be conducted, shared, and explored.

For those unfamiliar with OpenAlex, it is essentially a large database of scholarly works and related metadata. OpenAlex focuses on comprehensive inclusion of scholarly works as opposed to “curation” of legitimate sources as practiced by proprietary services. It has a web interface and can be queried using an API, but at its core, it is a piece of infrastructure dedicated to the public domain via CC0 and actively maintained by a 501(c)3 nonprofit. Of course, relying on publisher-reported citation data may be a dubious proposition to begin with, but in the meantime, as we work to recognize and reward other types of research impact evidence, let’s at least try to use comprehensive citation data.

Is OpenAlex as good as its competitors? In my experience, it has usually been as good or better for most purposes, like generating a list of an authors’ publications inclusive of preprints, or charting an institution’s open access publishing trends over time. Most folks who have taken a deep dive seem to agree. Culbert et al. (2024) analyzed OpenAlex reference coverage in comparison to Web of Science and Scopus and found it to be “comparable” even before OpenAlex’s recent improvements, which included an addition of over 50 million new works. In a Katina review, Ho (2025) called OpenAlex “…a promising and reliable alternative to traditional subscription-based citation databases for researchers, university administrators, research institutions, and government funding bodies that are interested in research activities and potential collaborations.” Other scholarly discovery tools like Overton are using OpenAlex for foundational data.

Folks will need to try it for themselves to see if the usability holds up to their standards, but for those on the fence, consider how simply using such tools might be a tiny contribution to a different future for research infrastructure. Coordinators involved in the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information had this to say about the declaration’s commitment to supporting infrastructures for open research information:

“What we think is important for organizations is to take seriously their responsibility for supporting these infrastructures—which can only continue to exist, and develop further, if they are both used and supported. That includes financial support but could also involve participating in governance and in-kind efforts, e.g., contributing data and helping improve data quality. Regarding financial contributions, here again Sorbonne University is a great example—when they unsubscribed from Web of Science, they redirected part of that budget to supporting OpenAlex. In general, we advocate making investments in open infrastructure an integral part of institutional budgets.”

For many of us in academic libraries, we don’t have significant resources to invest or divest, although voting with our money is still worth considering if we have authorization to do so. However, what is certainly within our sphere of influence is to learn about and use values-aligned infrastructure and leverage our positions as information professionals to teach and encourage others to use values-aligned infrastructure as well. At my institution, we’ve begun with small projects like integrating OpenAlex into our local scholarly profile platform and working to add our institutional repository as a source of OpenAlex data. Whether it be OpenAlex or another values-aligned tool, we can vote with our usage as a small daily act of support and/or resistance. By teaching about these tools, separate small acts become collective power.