I came across a tweet last week that was asking about where and what are  the OER repositories in the Global South.  This site doesn’t specifically address the Global South per se, but I read the question as where the OER repositories that aren’t easily surfaced or well known to us in the Global North.  Since the North/South is a political and economic framework, it’s important to distinguish North/South in a linguistic sense.  English is inherently tied to economic power (see also this link) , therefore the focus here is on the divide between English and Other languages.

The activity of searching for OERS in other languages has taught me thus far that repositories in other languages are usually based out of an institution. Occasionally they sit within an NGO or a NGO type initiative. I’ll continue to observe this and start a tag that references this question.

Today’s post highlights a really good effort by the UAM (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) to create – using PKP software – an institutional repository.  The great thing about this OER repository is that it goes beyond journals, and also extends to open books and open course materials.

There’s lots to explore in these 3 sites.

Open book collection

Open course materials

Open journals portal

There are a couple of takeaways I’d like to highlight with this example:  First  is the importance of open tools to allow institutions to have the infrastructure to actually DO open.  Secondly that institutional repositories in other languages are likely abundant but seem to be hard to find.