It has become increasingly common for sponsors of research (e.g. the EPSRC in the UK) to mandate that the publications from that research are ‘open access’ that is, available freely to anyone who wants them. Rightly so – public money has funded this work and it was ridiculous that this was locked away in expensive journals.
Yet public money also funds teaching but if we look for teaching resources on the web we find that few institutions (in the UK at least) seem to have policies to make their course material available. Some (including, I am ashamed to say, my own department) have a policy of locking away material so that no-one outside the institution can see it.
