University of Edinburgh teachers, learners and researchers have long been creating and sharing Open Educational Resources (OER) to the world, allowing high-quality teaching and learning resources to be reused and re-purposed to benefit all.  What happens though when Gen AI is used to help create a resource?  Can it still be an OER? 

Our OER Policy, now ten years old, has just been updated to provide the following advice and guidance on OER, copyright and AI.  

• If you use an AI model to generate a resource, with little or no human input, the policy recommends that you share it under CC0, as no copyright applies.   

• On the other hand, if you largely create the resource yourself, albeit with some assistance from an AI model in, for example, planning it or refining it, you can apply a Creative Commons licence and share it as an OER.   

• We also recommend that it’s a good idea to attribute the AI model and say how it’s been used in the creation of the resource. 

We’re all – including the UK Government (recent Government report) – grappling hard with this issue.  There remain lots of concerns about how Gen AI models are trained, and whether their outputs might infringe other creators’ intellectual property rights if they reproduce copyright works too closely.  In addition, it is not always easy to distinguish between AI-generated and AI-assisted works.   How much human creative input is required before an AI created resource can be copyright?   

To help address some of these thorny issues, the OER Service is working on new advice and guidance about copyright, AI and open licensing to accompany the updated OER Policy, which will be available here shortly. The Library also provides useful advice on citing and attributing AI-generated and AI-assisted works in their Using Generative AI Tools in Academic Work guide. The University’s Copyright Enquiries Service and OER Service and the Association for Learning Technology’s Copyright in Online Learning Special Interest Group are keeping a close eye on proceedings, so that you can carry on creating exciting open educational resources that can be shared and reused by everyone. 

Like all our open policies, the new OER Policy has been shared under CC BY-NC-SA licence and added to our award-winning collection of Open Policies for Learning and Teaching.

Thanks go to the wise colleagues from across the University who contributed to the 2026 OER Policy review. 

Header image: Adapted from Policy by Nick Youngson, CC BY-SA 3.0, Alpha Stock Images