Act 125/SB117 is a bipartisan bill signed into law in June 2019, requiring transparency in textbook pricing for students and creating an incentive model for the wide-scale adoption of low and no-cost course materials.  As a result of Act 125/SB117, Louisiana’s postsecondary public colleges and universities are required to “use a conspicuous symbol, logo, or other distinguishing feature to highlight each course included in its course schedule that exclusively utilizes Affordable Educational Resources (AER) or Open Educational Resources (OER) course materials.”

OER and AER are unique designations defined as:

OER: A resource that is in the public domain or has been released under an intellectual property license that permits the free use, adaptation, and redistribution of the resource by any person.

• All required curricular resources, including textbooks and other instructional materials such as workbooks, lab manuals, and online homework platforms must be openly licensed.
• Students will have zero costs for course materials.

AER: A single or collection of required resource(s) offered at no or low cost to students at a pre-sales tax cost not to exceed an amount equal to four times the federal minimum wage (i.e., no more than $29 with a $7.25 federal minimum wage).

• The total cost of all required textbooks and other required instructional materials will remain affordable as defined in Act 125.
• Library ebooks that are free to students but not open access are included in this designation.

LSU Libraries offers numerous resources and services to help modify courses to make them AER/OER compliant. We offer:

• More than 400,000 AER book options for faculty to adopt for courses: www.lib.lsu.edu/ebooks/faculty;
• An online guide with information about the mandate and the support: guides.lib.lsu.edu/c.php?g=1081524;
• Individualized consultation services provided by subject librarians for every discipline to help faculty navigate:
• The resources available to identify and adopt high-quality OER/AER course material for each discipline;
• Assistance obtaining this material and making it available;
• Consultation about copyright considerations;
• An institutional repository for hosting books and articles by LSU faculty;

Contact your subject specialist for more information.

Some of this information was adapted from https://regents.la.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/202007_Course_Reporting_FAQs.pdf.