The ACRL Women and Gender Studies Collections Committee is charged with monitoring ongoing and emerging issues related to collections for women and gender studies.
The OA/OER information found in this LibGuide is a result of the work done by the 2019-2020 WGSS Collections Committee.
This LibGuide is under the charge of the current committee. For questions, please contact the committee chair(s).
This guide contains resources in Women’s and Gender Studies as compiled by the Collections Subcommittee of the ACRL Women's and Gender Studies Section. Selections are based on our own work and interests, and not mean to be comprehensive or indicative of every resource available; rather, please use this guide as a starting point and please contact the committee if you have suggestions or need suggestions.
Regarding OA/OER materials:
Open Access (OA) materials are distributed in a manner that makes them openly accessible, and free of cost to all who have the technology available to view the materials. The main principle of OA is to remove the financial barrier to accessing these materials. This promotes Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) by opening up the free-flow of information and increasing its accessibility, making research more available to a greater number of people regardless of status and/or resources. This approach to information distribution has become increasingly important as publisher fees have increased exponentially, placing the purchase of materials out of reach for many institutions and individuals, concentrating information in the hands of the few. This guide seeks to highlight open access resources specifically in the area of women’s and gender studies. OA resources here are broadly defined, and include journals, research guides/LibGuides, books, websites.
This guide also provides links to Open Educational Resources (OER), the broad category of digital teaching/learning materials that includes textbooks, videos, images, quiz banks, curriculum, activities, and course modules. OER can be widely-used in higher education by faculty in all disciplines to provide students with low-cost and free alternatives to expensive textbooks and course packages. OER adoption and creation also allow faculty to have the flexibility to create and customize course materials. Each OER is governed by a license, set by the creator, that allows the user certain levels of the 5R activities: retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute (Opencontent.org). For more information on the types of licenses that can be applied to each work and their restrictions, see Creative Commons Licenses. WGSS Collections Committee members have not investigated each individual work in this guide or the license applied; it is up to the user to investigate this on their own.
