The broader meaning of the term Open Content refers to releasing copyrighted materials under a more relax licence. It is also commonly referred to as “Some Rights Reserved” by Creative Commons Advocates. Materials released under this category of licenses will provide users of the material to the right(s) to reproduce or modify under certain conditions such as attribution, non-commercial use and share-alike. Prime examples of Open Content are Open Data and Open Educational Resources.
Open Data can be defined by the 3 laws of Open Government Data – Findable(from Search Engines), Usable(Machine Readable) & Sharable(released under a suitable Open Content License). According to the Global Open Data Index of 2014, 97 countries already shared their public data online.
According to Wikipedia, Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. From the Open Education Consortium, there are about 80 Universities worldwide that open up their educational resources.
Related Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_content
http://creativecommons.org/
http://freedomdefined.org/
http://eaves.ca/2009/09/30/three-law-of-open-government-data/
Global Open Data Index
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources
http://www.oercommons.org/
http://www.oeconsortium.org/