But if the sciences can do it, why not also the humanities and social sciences? Long, enthusiastic but basically exhortatory piece by Gary F Daught promoting "bright and energetic young scholar" Martin Eve's idea.
A consideration by Eric van de Velde of why MOOCs have caught the eye and the imagination of HE leaders in a way that OA never did. Poses three questions: 1. Why do academic leaders not make the same calculation with respect to OA? 2. Why do they fear the potential of OA-caused disruption? 3. Why do they embrace the potential of MOOCs-caused disruption? Puts forward four not entirely convincing explanatory conjectures: 1. MOOCs are in their infancy, providing cover for their pedagogic inadequacy, and allowing for experimentation. 2. MOOCs provide big first mover advantages. (Hasn't PLOS had FMA?). 3. In contrast with OA MOOCs put control in the hands of teachers (!). 4. OA is not sufficiently disruptive (PeerJ, however, is).
Jonathan Eisen is the academic editor-in-chief of PLoS Biology. This post, which is a reaction to the #PDFtribute surge after Aaron Swartz's suicide, presents options for making articles Open as a 10-point hierarchy.
"Pre-print" of forthcoming PLoS article by Mike Thelwall, Stefanie Haustein, Vincent Larivière, and Cassidy R. Sugimoto concludes that there is strong evidence that six of the eleven altmetrics (tweets, Facebook wall posts, research highlights, blog mentions, mainstream media mentions and forum posts) associate with citation counts.
Broad mix of people on the Open Library of Humanities Academic Steering and Advocacy Committee, including Michael Eisen, who co-founded PLOS; and Peter Suber.