eLife is a unique collaboration between funders and practitioners of research to communicate influential discoveries in the life and biomedical sciences in the most effective way. eLife began following a workshop at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2010, where attending scientists concluded that there was a need for a model of academic publishing that better suited the needs of their community. In eLife a team of highly regarded, experienced and actively practicing scientists ensures fair, swift and transparent editorial decisions followed by rapid online publication. The editorial team are editorially independent of the funders. They rely on their scientific expertise and active research experience to identify the best papers, make scientifically based judgements and exercise leadership in steering these papers through peer review. The entire content of the journal is freely available for all to read and reproduce for unrestricted use.

Alma Swan is one of the Open Access Movement's key voices. In this video presentation she presents the benefits of open access from the author's perspective, as well as for institutions and research funders

ScienceOpen, is a next generation Open Access platform that builds on the premise that scholarly publishing is not an end in itself, but the beginning of a dialogue to move research forward. It combines over 1 million articles from all areas of modern science, the humanities and social sciences with collaborative pre-publication workspaces, immediate publication and post-publication peer-review.

A map displaying the locations of institutional repositories, which can be filtered by country, platform and date of registration. Each entry links to the url of the repository.

OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources. Access to these digital resources is provided by "harvesting" their descriptive metadata (records) using OAI-PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting). It includes the Institutional Repositories of many universities.

OASIS aims to provide an authoritative 'sourcebook' on Open Access, covering the concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieving it. The site highlights developments and initiatives from around the world, with links to diverse additional resources and case studies. As such, it is a community-building as much as a resource-building exercise. Users are encouraged to share and download the resources provided, and to modify and customize them for local use. Open Access is evolving, and OASIS invites the growing world-wide community to take part in this exciting global movement.

The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) presents a current snapshot of the status of Open Access (OA) to scientific information around the world.For countries that have been more successful implementing Open Access, the portal highlights critical success factors and aspects of the enabling environment. For countries and regions that are still in the early stages of Open Access development, the portal identifies key players, potential barriers and opportunities.

The African Journal Archive is a retrospective digitisation project of full-text journal articles published in Africa. Journal articles hosted on the Archive extend back to the first issue (if available) and end with the last pre-current issue (determined by the publisher). The website comprises over 700 issues and 150,000 pages of journal archives of academic, scholarly, institutional, museums, and professional research organizations in Africa. Online access to the archive is free of charge to Africa and the world.

In this TED talk, John Wilbanks advances the idea that opening up medical data could leave to a new wave of innovation. With a corpus of open data, semantic search technologies can be employed to determine patterns in data that would take years for scientists to make. Another argument in support of open dada and its potential to accelerate and advance science and innovation

Khan Academy has done some good work, but I certainly do not believe it is the solution to the nation's problems in education. A critique, by Karim Kai Ani, considers the videos to be poor, as well as the math: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/khan-academy-the-hype-and-the-reality/2012/07/22/gJQAuw4J3W_blog.html#pagebreak

Consider the excerpt below:

The real problem with Khan Academy is not the low-quality videos or the absence of any pedagogical intentionality. It's just one resource among many, after all. Rather, the danger is that we believe the promise of silver bullets - of simple solutions to complex problems - and in so doing become deaf to what really needs to be done.

As Arne Duncan said, we need to invest in professional development, and provide teachers with the support and resources they need to be successful. We need to give them time to collaborate, and create relevant content that engages students and develops not just rote skills but also conceptual understanding. We have to help new teachers figure out classroom management - to reach the student who shows up late to class every day and never brings a pencil - and free up veteran teachers to mentor younger colleagues.

I recently attended the inaugural #TwitterMathCamp, a collection of teachers who traveled from around the country (plus two Canucks!)…during their vacation…and paid out of pocket…to discuss how best to introduce proportions and whether slope always requires units.

We need to stop focusing on the teachers who are doing it wrong and instead recognize the ones who are doing it right: the Frank Noscheses and the Kate Nowaks; the Sadie Estrellas and the Sam Shaws; the ones who spend their time trying to become better to make someone else's kids smarter.