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An interdisciplinary journal about regions, places, and cultures of the American South and their global connections Southern Spaces combines innovative scholarship about real and imagined spaces and places of the American South with the tools of digital media. Realizing that few scholars are experts in website design, we are eager to work with authors, photographers and videographers in the process of producing image, sound, and video files for submissions. We are committed to assisting scholars at varying levels of technological proficiency. If you are interested in submitting materials to Southern Spaces, please create a new account on the site and then follow the instructions for submitting. A submission will not be considered if it has have been previously published or is concurrently under consideration by another journal or press. Copyright for essays published in Southern Spaces is retained by the authors. All images, video, and sound files associated with published submissions are securely archived by Emory University's Woodruff Library. If you choose to submit by post, we accept flash drives, DV tapes, CDs, or DVDs containing your manuscript, images, sound files, etc.

Contradicts the Fitch Report (http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/) and AHA response (http://blog.historians.org/publications/1734/aha-statement-on-scholarly-journal-publishing) re inequities for the pay-for-publishing strategies now trending: "According to the 2011 Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP), the APC is usually paid by the author's funding agency (59%) or employer (24%), not by authors out of pocket (12%)"

a table of contents: 1. Three major OA announcements from the UK on the same day 2. Some recent history as context for these announcements 3. Basics of the new RCUK policy 4. Basics of the Finch recommendations 5. General agreement between the RCUK policy and Finch recommendations 6. Appreciation of the large-scale shift to OA in the UK 7. Some consequences for journals and authors 8. Responding to publisher fears of green OA 9. Objections and recommendations 10. Announcements from Europe the day after the UK announcements

Comment by Tim Vollmer, Manager of Policy and Data for Creative Commons: "...a handy, human-readable reference guide for academic authors, publishers looking into supporting Open Access, and policy makers and funders adopting open policies that require Open Access to research that is funded through the public purse... focuses primarily on describing the spectrum of Open Access policies for journals. An increasingly important and related area is the sharing of data associated with the research process. Open data have the potential to facilitate enhanced scientific collaboration and reproducibility, but it is not yet settled, from both a legal and technical perspective, how this wealth of data that leads to the creation of scholarly work will be shared. And current research suggests an approach whereby articles are licensed under an open license (preferably CC-BY), while data associated with the article are dedicated to the public domain using a tool such as the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. In this way, researchers clearly communicate-in a comprehensive manner-the rights and permissions available to users for both the text and the data." Read more at http://blogs.plos.org/blog/2012/10/01/tim-vollmer-of-creative-commons-on-howopenisit/

"an increasing interest in online OER discussion across languages, particularly outside academic journal databases. Additionally, a widening "language gap" between OER discussions in English and other languages was identified in several platforms. This research reports some of the cultural and language challenges caused by the expansion of the OER discussion and highlights relevant findings in this field."

New research report from Isto Huvila of Sweden from user survey seeing to explain the different kinds of Wikipedia users and the quality of their contributions. References to other Wikipedia research are included and summarized to show the scholarly community's growing consensus about its reliability and validity. Refers also to new uses of Wikipedia, e.g., scholary journal requiring authors to post their summaries in Wikipedia.

The CSU's Affordable Learning Solutions Campaign is designed to enable faculty to choose and provide quality educational content that is more affordable for their students. CSU students typically pay over $800 per year for their books. By reducing their expenses, we believe we can provide better access to a quality CSU learning experience. We are launching this campaign in 2010 and will be continuously improving the services to CSU faculty and students each semester. The Affordable Learning Solutions website is designed to: - Make it easy for faculty, staff, and students to find no/low cost course content that can substitute for more costly textbooks Enable faculty to be recognized for their efforts in reducing costs for students - Share practices for using no/low cost digital content in CSU courses - Support campuses in customizing their strategies to enable affordable learning solutions For example: As part of a three-year partnership with Nature Publishing Group (NPG), publisher of the world's leading scientific journal Nature, CSU faculty guided and advised the development of NPG's Principles of Biology - the first in a series of interactive "born digital" textbooks. The text will be incorporated into courses for students at the Los Angeles, Northridge and Chico campuses starting in the 2011/2012 academic year.

Published by MERLOT, CSU Chancellor's Office

Sean Michael Morris sez "Coursera is silly" - same-old, same-old beast not far away from the correspondence course of the early 20th century or the educational TV of the 1960s