"WHAT IS THE UBC MOOC? This MOOC is a non-credit online course offered by the University of British Columbia through the open education platform EdX. This self-paced course is to be completed in the span of six weeks. No real-time events are scheduled. For the full experience, students are recommended to participate regularly in the online discussions." My comments: What a great way for you to continue your studies with MOOCs! This course will deal with various aspects of indigenous education, including the importance of traditional knowledge, and it uses the EdX platform as well so you should find the interface very familiar. If you're looking for ways to continue your education now that the main run of the MOOC has finished, this is a great way to get started. It's also run by the University of British Columbia, where I completed a blended course version of the Open Knowledge MOOC, so I can highly recommend it!

"The science journal Nature will make its archive of papers, dating back to 1869, free by way of read-only links available to subscribers and major news outlets. Under the new system, planned as a one-year trial, subscribers such as universities and researchers will be able to share a link to a read-only version of a Nature paper with anyone."

I really cannot recommend this resource highly enough. The brainchild and master's thesis of a lawyer-turned-information professional, SIPX is an incredible blend of copyright control centre, digital distribution hub, and online marketplace. With the impending downfall of Access Copyright and its rejection by most Canadian universities, schools have had to quickly learn about copyright and establish good practices and guidelines, but this product provides the safest legal protection while considerably upgrading the dissemination of course readings; it also makes strides that push against the dominance of the traditional textbook market. It has already been adopted by several major American universities, including Stanford (where it was developed; it seems all the greatest open knowledge stuff is coming out of there!) and Notre Dame. Did I mention that it even supports MOOCs? I just found out about this resource while doing a practicum placement for library school, and I can't believe that I'd never heard of it before. It's exactly the kind of integrated library and informational system that needs to happen in academic institutions, and while it's not explicitly modelled on open access, it relies on many of the same values that we've talked about throughout this course. Check it out!

This recently published book, by a University of British Columbia journalism professor named Alfred Hermida, questions how the new culture of sharing and collaboration-and the pace of change that sharing enables-changes our lives. It's particularly interesting for us because it doesn't back away from the challenges that open access poses for us: how does being both creator and consumer change us? How does blurring the lines between these two change the way we think about the balance between copyright and the public good? Hermida doesn't tackle these last questions directly, but he provides a useful lens for thinking about our changing roles and how open knowledge and sharing need to reflect that. Considering the book's focus on sharing, it's somewhat ironic that it's not open access, but I highly recommend checking it out. It's received significant attention in the Canadian press and is exactly the kind of mainstream attention that can get conversations about open access started.

Includes open versions of some of the most famous documents in the humanities: the complete works of Shakespeare, Milton's entire corpus, the Domesday Book, and more.

It's absolutely shameful that so few library and information science journals are open access: if any professional associations have a professional imperative towards improving the scholarly and cultural communication processes, it is librarians and other information professionals. This substantial (but still woefully short) list of open access journals that publish on library and information science will be a great resource for those of us in this course who are aspiring or practicing librarians. As we've heard over and over again throughout this course, advocacy is absolutely essential if open access principles are ever to receive wider acceptance and implementation; that's why it's important that, as practicing information professionals, we use open access publications for our research whenever we can. Lists like this one allow us to streamline our research in ways that align most closely with our professional values, though of course currently there just isn't enough published to allow us to rely exclusively on open access material for our own work. But having lists like this also allows us to determine where our research should be submitted; otherwise, by publishing in paid journals, we are only making things worse. This all being said, most lists like this that I could find online were either outdated and incomplete, part of a larger database that made hyperlinking difficult, or-like this one-they lacked any explanation of what sorts of articles could be found within; even this one hasn't been updated in eighteen months. But as is so often the case with open access, we must take what we can get.

Medievalists are often considered, like their subject matter, a stodgy old-fashioned bunch who are the vanguard of old academia. But there are a few exceptions, like the Digital Medievalist site. Open to scholars and enthusiasts of varying skills and experience, it runs a long-standing open-access journal, a small wiki dealing mostly with aspects of the digital humanities, and a list of important news and upcoming conferences for professional scholars. Overall it's a great place for those interested in what's going on in the medieval academy. It's not perfect, though: the journal only publishes a handful of papers each year, and most of the rest of the content isn't very expansive. It feels like, and probably is, a side-project that a few scholars work on in their free time rather than the comprehensive resource it could be; and that makes it a cautionary tale. If we freely offer only the barest bones of what constitutes a journal (or any other scholarly resource), we run the risk of presenting open access as an inferior model that can only take readers so far. It's important to remember that open access takes real sustained effort to make it a viable alternative to traditional models of scholarly publishing.

This project, while still in early development, will help those interested in historical (read: ancient) languages learn them outside of the traditional instructional method. Students will gain proficiency in languages through engaging with real materials rather than inaccessible textbooks and through relevant tasks that engage them more deeply in the learning process. It's also part of a larger ongoing project called the Open Philology Project which reflects the growing trend towards more experiential and open models of student learning in the study of ancient languages.