Current higher education conversations about Open Educational Resources revolve around faculty or administration resistance to OER adoption (Seaman and Seaman, 2017), but fewer conversations are devoted to scholar resistance to publishing their works as OERs; the majority of the discussions are focused on why academics should consume OERs rather than why academics should produce OERs. Some scholars resist publishing OERs to share their works for several possible reasons including:
- Concerns about not being attributed by web users who repost OER publications;
- Concerns about web users disregarding OER’s open copyright requirements and misusing the published work;
- Concerns about the sustainability of OER materials; and
- Inability or unwillingness to pay predatory publishers for the privilege to publish works as OERs.

Blockchain technology, a decentralized and an almost incorruptible digital ledger that documents an accumulating list of records, could be the digital solution to address all the aforementioned problems.

Keywords

blockchain · copyright · Open Educational Resources · publication · technology