to muddle through without access to necessary teaching materials through the lockdowns,’ he said. Similarly, Prosser also believes the pandemic has shone a light on e-textbook cost issues, throwing open the door to OA alternatives. As such, he is certain UK library communities are becoming increasingly interested in OERs. ‘The current [e-textbook] pricing models have shown themselves to be so blatantly inadequate that people have had to look elsewhere,’ he asserts. ‘I believe that, in the long term, open educational resources could be one of the most significant solutions here... and RLUK hopes to play a co-ordinating role in bringing interested parties together.’ Still, much needs to be done. In June 2020, SPARC Europe, a Dutch advocate of OA, science, scholarship and education, released the results of its survey, Open Education in European Libraries of Higher Education. It revealed that few libraries reported


having the funds, grants or budgets for open educational work, while policies dedicated to OERs were sparse. Other findings included respondents split 50/50 on whether the library should take a lead in advancing OERs in their organisations and that open education was still a relatively new concept in the library.


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