From the Mina Rees library’s website:

Open Educational Resources (OER) are “free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes.” They are part of a wider movement to provide alternatives to the restrictions of traditional publishing models.

Many types of educational content fall can fall under this category, but the two key components are: 

Free, meaning simply that materials that are free of charge. There are no associated costs with the item for the user, and institutions do not pay a subscriber’s fee for access. 

Open, as in “openly licensed.” When something is openly licensed, it means that the creator allows others to use and share their work, and potentially modify the content. Under traditional copyright, this type of sharing would not be permitted. Creative Commons Licenses are a way to extend more rights to users, in a sense “opening” the resource to others. [Source: https://libguides.gc.cuny.edu/OER].

I wanted to create this website this an awareness of OER, even though not all of the materials linked here will be openly licensed. They will, however, almost always be free of charge. I think this is crucial for building more awareness of, and access to, experimental poetry.

While it is easy enough to find poems/artworks online, it can be very difficult to discern whether or not the content is openly licensed. The invisible boundary of licensure creates a conundrum for this project.

Some content linked here is likely not open access– a disclaimer I would like to be upfront about.