Then They Fight You…

Most of us are familiar with the inspiring phrase attributed to Mahatma Gandhi:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

For years, while we worked on creating open access to educational resources, research articles, etc., the various commercial industries ignored us. Then in press releases and on conference panels they mocked open educational resources as “low quality” and not particularly useful.

While things reached stage three with the open access movement a few years ago, we seem to finally be arriving there on the open educational resources front. Today’s Chronicle contained the story, Publishers Criticize Federal Investment in Open Educational Resources. So now it gets interesting (aka difficult) for a while, but if we persevere and continue pressing forward stage four will shortly come into sight…