MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

There was an interesting post on the OpenFieldwork blog earlier, asking about whether OERs can go out of date.

This is a question we talked a lot about in the OOER pilot phse UKOER project, especially in relation to removing a resource when it becomes inaccurate or ceases to adhere to current best practice, which obviously evolves.

Here is the original post.

And my response below:

This is a question we have been playing with for some time. The prevailing school of thought in the clinical arena, is that resources do go out of date, which in our terms could literally be life critical (guidance from the DH and NICE changes, the British National Formulary gets updated, new treatments and drugs emerge, etc.). We have begun to think of resource redundancy in two ways – those you know are going to go out of date and can plan for – e.g. the course gets revised every year, the curriculum is due an overhaul, and those which suddenly go out of date with little warning e.g. emergency regulations come in such as with swine flu, and recent outbreaks of foot and mouth disease. Whichever scenario a change relates to, a resource goes out of date.

We have always recommended that a resource only ever resides in one place, but it’s metedata is syndicated widely. We have previously recommended that the place a resource should reside should be where you, as the resource creator can most easily access it, take it down, or mark it as out of date, in accordance with an openly stated takedown policy, and that you should only ever have to do that once for each revision. The resource should then be updated and re-uploaded as a new resource (preferably with reference to the previous version).

We have additionally recommended that should a way of easily tracking who has previously downloaded the resource (without compromising open access) become available, then ideally, you should be able to notify that person that a new version has been created and the old one is now out of date.

Personally I think there is value in old or out of date resources, for historical purposes if nothing else, but I am mindful that in my subject areas there are conflicting schools of thought relative to legal and ethical responsibility of doctors, dentists and vets to ensure treatment accuracy in accordance with current guidance and best practice.

As long as historical resources are clearly marked with a ‘sell by’ date and a statement which informs people that they use the specifically clinical resources at their own risk, and that information is included in syndicated metadata, then legally we would be covered. Ethically it may be preferable to remove out of date clinical learning and teaching resources, whilst acknowledging that there will always be copies out there.

Please do add your thoughts in the comments here, as this is a question that continues to interest us here in relation to our PORSCHE and ACTOR projects. Hearing from colleagues in both academic and clinical settings would be fantastic.