The article presents and analyzes how health libraries can cooperate in the production, access, and dissemination of open educational resources in their information competence programs, as well as in the training processes of health science students.
As a background, the research calls on Brazilian librarians, showing that they must engage in the open education movement and relate their informational practices to the initiatives and guidelines of the front.
A study from Prudencio, Bernardi, and Biolchini (2020) shows that academic production in Library Sciences, either from Brazil or written in Portuguese, relating library practices and open educational resources is incipient, perhaps scarce. Thus, the present research is justified.
This study, for the purposes and means of investigation, is characterized as exploratory, bibliographic, and field research. We collected the data in our empirical area, that is, public university libraries that offer Medicine and Biomedicine courses in Brazil. We conducted an empirical investigation to expand our understanding of the research object, the domain studied, and its population.
In a second step, we consulted the institutional repositories of the federal higher education institutions (HEIs) from Brazil to check if there was the category “open educational resource” (OER) as a source of information available in their catalogs.
It observes that only 12.5% (15) of the 120 HEIs have OER indications in their catalogs. It notes that, in libraries, OERs operate as sources of information, collection, stock, and repository of information and didactic resources. It points out that health information literacy practices should contribute to a culture of users more aware of issues of licensing, authorship, and cost related to these resources.
Finally, it understands that the librarian must incorporate and encourage the use of OERs in the instructions given to students in health degrees, and also in lifelong educational practices.
OERs are an attractive and sustainable tool, adequate to the financial scarcity of public university libraries in Brazil. This is especially important in Health Sciences, a field with collections that tend to be quite expensive.
Learning Outcomes: 1. Only 12.5% of Brazilian public universities with a Health Sciences program have OER indications in their catalogs. 2. There’s little scientific production assessing intersections between Librarianship, open education, and open educational resources, especially when applying to Health Sciences libraries. 3. Brazilian librarians are hardly engaged in the production, use, or sharing of OERs. 4. This theme is poorly addressed in Brazilian Librarianship programs.
