Scientific production about Open Educational Resources

Abstract

The present research identifies articles published in journals indexed in the Web of Science to characterize the scientific production on Open Educational Resources, in the higher education area. Descriptive and exploratory methodology of a quantitative and qualitative approach used mixed methods, constituting the research corpus by a survey strategy whose data was analyzed descriptively and through content analysis technique. As a result, it was possible to identify 115 articles of 243 researchers, published in 43 journals between 2008 and 2014. It was found that 67% of the journals with Open Educational Resources publications are of paid access, concentrating 56% of the articles in a restricted access. Institutions in the United Kingdom, Spain and Canada with researchers who have published on Open Educational Resources are all specialized in Distance Education. There was a predominance of authors working in the area of Education (48%), Computing (22%) and Engineering (11%) in comparison to other areas. In the qualitative stage, six articles were discarded so that the content analysis focused on 99 articles in English, eight in Spanish and two in Portuguese, totaling 109 articles analyzed in full. The articles were divided into seven categories: 21% of recovery and repositories, 19% of challenges, 16% of technologies, 14% of production, 13% on incentive policies and sustainability, 10% of adaptation and reuse and 4% on open courseware. It is possible to conclude that publications core focuses on a Canadian journal and 26 journals about education.

Keywords:
Open access; Scientific production; Open educational resources.