SumDU OER

About OER
How to find SumDU OER?

One of the leading global trends in the educational and scientific space of the European Union is the movement towards Open Science, which is an important tool for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Ukraine, which has become a candidate for accession and membership in the EU, is actively involved in the implementation of Open Science Policies and Procedures. In 2022, The National Plan for Open Science was approved, which is a necessary step for the integration of Ukraine into the European Research Area and the European Higher Education Area.

The creation of Open Educational Resources (OER), which are an important component of Open Science, is gaining global scale. Numerous organizations and global educational institutions are developing programs to create educational resources and provide access to them. In Ukraine, work is underway to create a nationwide platform for OER.

Open Educational Resources are materials for learning, teaching and research in any format and medium that:

are in the public domain or copyrighted;
issued under an open licence that permits free access, re-use, re-purposing, adaptation and redistribution by others.

OER can include: full courses, course modules, open textbooks, syllabi, lectures, student handbooks, lecture notes, homework, quizzes, laboratory and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, videos, interactive materials such as simulations or role-plays, assessment tools and many other resources, software, programmes (including mobile applications) and any other educationally useful materials.

Sumy State University is an important participant in the movement towards open science through research, practical implementation of scientific results. For many years, it has been implementing the principles of open science and open access by creating and supporting an Institutional Repository, publishing its own open access journals, and developing open educational courses. In 2024, the University developed an Open Science Policy.

Sumy State University has joined the open educational environment. The University Library initiated the implementation of a new publishing model to support the educational process, namely open educational resources. Open educational resources of Sumy State University are presented in the corresponding section of the Institutional Repository ESSUIR and are available for viewing and downloading under the terms of an open license.

Since 2025 Electronic publications and electronic versions of printed publications developed by University employees in the performance of their official duties (official works) and published by the SumDU publishing house are available to everyone and are distributed in the open access under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license. (Regulations on Electronic Publications)

The Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license provides for the conditions for the distribution and use of a work for non-commercial purposes with a mandatory reference to the author, while derivative works must be distributed under the same license as the original work. It should be noted that the Open Creative Commons licenses, like the copyright sign, protect copyright and do not contradict each other.

The exception is electronic publications containing information with limited access. In this case, the part of the text of the publication to which access is not limited is placed in the open access in the Electronic Catalog of the Library.

Sumy State University’s inclusion in the formation of the state ecosystem of Open Educational Resources is designed to solve a number of important tasks:

overcoming the crisis of the lack of modern accessible educational content in the Ukrainian language and forming a pool of free, accessible, inclusive open textbooks for higher education, in particular during martial law in the state;
removing barriers in education in accordance with Sustainable Development Goal No. 4, which provides for “ensuring inclusive and equal quality education for all and promoting lifelong learning”;
sharing knowledge and creating an open educational ecosystem of the University.

In addition, this will provide our University with a wide range of opportunities for cooperation with world libraries, international organizations and Open Access platforms. Recently, the University signed a cooperation agreement with the Technical Information Library of Germany, which implements the OERSI initiative – Open Educational Resources Search Index. This is a search index of open educational resources containing over 43 thousand materials from various fields of knowledge. In the future, it is planned to integrate Open Educational Resources of our University into global educational platforms.