Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness

In recent months, more than 11,000 researchers worldwide have expressed their dissatisfaction through a petition calling for a boycott of Elsevier. This academic publishing giant earned profits of more than US $1.1 billion in 2011.

He says a good model is the public subsidy of scholarly publishing. “Academic publishing costs about one percent of what is allocated to research,” Guédon noted. “All you need is to add this amount to research budgets to cover publication costs while ensuring independence from governments so they don't interfere with content. This already exists in Latin America with the Scientific Electronic Library Online, which includes 800 open access journals.”

Some figures to remember315%: the average price increase of subscriptions for universities between 1986 and 2003, while inflation was only 68% for the same period. US $1.1 billion: profits earned by the publisher Elsevier in 2011, a profit margin of around 35%. Between $7 and $8 million: the cost of electronic subscriptions for Université de Montréal libraries, representing around 80% of the acquisitions budget. US $24,047: the price of a yearly subscription to the journal Brain Research. 7,000: the number of open access scholarly journals. 80%: the proportion of journals worldwide allowing authors to deposit their articles in an open access repository or on their personal websites. 19 million: the number of pages visited since the creation of the Érudit platform in 1998, whose content is 90% open access. 375,000: the number of theses and dissertations downloaded from Papyrus, the institutional repository of Université de Montréal, in 2011.

Dr. Parry declared that “it was the single thing that changed the classroom dynamics more than anything I’ve ever done teaching.”

“Once students started Twittering I think they developed a sense of each other as people beyond the classroom space, rather than just students they saw twice a week for an hour and a half.”

During lecture, students tweet comments or questions via laptop or cell phone, while the TA and Dr. Rankin respond to a real-time feed displayed prominently in front of the room. Students who manage to live off the grid for 50 minutes can still pass in hand-written notes for the TA to tweet after class.