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A great news, especially for the "immediately" aspect! "A consortium of six leading UK medical research charities will support the costs of making research articles from their funded research immediately and freely openly available to scientists, patients, and donors alike, through the recently announced joint Charity Open Access Fund."

The "manifesto" for the open access movement, written by Aaron Swartz from 2008. Only 6 years old, but already, it carries a historical value. "Will you join us?" Creative Commons license: Attribution 3.0 United States

Great resource and very relevant to this weeks' module! Thank you for sharing. The idea of "Guerilla Open Access" is something I had really hoped to cover more in depth in the lecture materials. Yes, there's a tension -- or a "balance", as many of the lecturers said -- between protecting creators vs. protecting consumers, but there has not been nearly enough discussion on the power dynamics and implicit within our current system. I am taking this class partly in person through UBC, and I will be sharing this resource with my seminar group this week.

An interesting article arguing for the creation of open licenses for data. They make the point that the use of creative commons licenses is mistaken as these are designed for creative work not data or data bases. Unfortunately the argument - which is repeated several times - is not very thoroughly presented. The Talis Community License is mentioned as a possible alternative. The paper dates from 2008 and is thus - apart from the forceful argument for open licenses as the more viable alternative to the public domain - primarily of historical interest. Much progress has been made in the field with Open Data Commons Licenses now being an accepted standard as well as well as country specific licenses such as Open Government License UK, Open Government License Canada or Data License Germany (cf. http://opendefinition.org/licenses/).

I presented this paper to a conference in South Africa in 2005, and it was described as "too radical" by the top leaders in libraries in South Africa who attended. :) So am rather happy that my vague perceptions and musings about the emerging trends have been vindicated today. "This paper will focus on another aspect that is integrally linked to the ability to access literature and information - that of cost and economics. Both the broader macroeconomic context and the more focused microeconomic (South African) environment will be referred to. We will examine the assumption that the economic development of a nation is linked to the ability to access information and test whether this is a valid assumption. From there, we will take a brief look at the issue of the cost of books, specifically in South Africa. The advent of the electronic revolution and the many paradigm shifts that the Internet and electronic media have initiated and the effects on the publishing industry, will be outlined. We will explore the "information as commodity" paradigm and briefly look at the related Copyright and Intellectual Property developments before weaving these seemingly disparate threads together to form a picture of innovative solutions that have arisen in response to the information access crisis in South Africa. These solutions have arisen from the popular notion that information should be freely available for societal good, rather than commodified. Finally, we will ponder the effect that these solutions may have on the traditional book publishing industry in South Africa."

Thank you all, very much, it is quite a new experience for me to have the paper well received. :)

Thank you for sharing this. I really appreciated the non-North American context. I grew up in the States, and am working on my Master's degree in Canada, so it's really easy to get caught up in always looking at these issues from the North American point of view. Seeing papers like this really help to confirm how global these issues are, and cement their importance in my mind.

The story of Aaron Swartz, incredible programmer and activist for internet rights, open access and open knowledge. Good documentary to learn a little more about the open access movement, see some important figures (Tim Berners-Lee, Lawrence Lessig, etc.) and the fight against the SOPA bill. A big part of the movie is about his personal life and legal battle over copyright infringement. Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

This was a great video! I enjoyed it very much and it was very touching. thank you for posting. @smoens - awesome blog too. thank you for the link.

For the Copyright section I recommend to watch this documentary: The Internet's Own Boy depicts the life of American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. It features interviews with his family and friends as well as the internet luminaries who worked with him.

"Progress has been made toward making academic research, knowledge, and resources accessible to the broader public. This is a great cause. It is certainly a matter of justice and equality. Ironically, a number of scholars - particularly those from marginalized communities themselves (women, people of color, LGBT people) - cannot or are hesitant to participate in the move toward open access. However, many scholars, particularly marginalized scholars, participate in a different form of open scholarship: intellectual activism. "

Open e-learning course about open access, new science comunication models  for everybody

This article discusses the start of open access publications and the arguments against open access journals.

Excellent and concise article, thank you for posting. I think this type of anonymous testing of open journals must continue to be applied to ensure standards are raised, and then consistently maintained. It also serves to call out frequent offending publications that may repeatedly demonstrate a lack of stringent review.

An investigation of the role of libraries in open access funding and support within institutions

"Although the official press release highlights that "Open Access publishing has no negative effect on book sales, and increases online usage and discovery considerably" (which is, in my opinion, only a snapshot which will sooner or later lose validity in the course of the ongoing digitalization of the academic book market), the most interesting and valuable outcomes of the pilot arise from the attempt to quantify and itemize the costs of an OA monograph."

Founding editor and previous co-editor of the open access journal Feminist Media Studies provides an in-depth account into her experiences engaging with feminist, open access processes. Lisa McLuaghlin spends a great deal of time discussing the implications of hierarchies in (academic) publishing and the political implications of editorial boards. Also engaged throughout the article is a conversation about diversity within academic publishing. She emphasizes how Feminist Media Studies does not have a very diverse authorship despite the journal's intention and specific policies and editorial policies that are intended to encourage non-English speakers to publish in the English journal. This reflection on feminism and open access demonstrates what these fields have accomplished, while also indicating how far we still have to go. Overall, the article provided many insights from someone on-the-ground in regards to feminist, open access initiatives.

Open access publishing in Feminist/Gender studies should reflect objectivism and diversity; therefore a diverse editorial board should be elected to recruit and select journal content that suits the target profile. It seems as if the editorial management of this journal is run more along business ethics than the principles of the journal.

I would say that ethics should nearly always come ahead of journal principles.

Lists cover a range of topics related to: institutions that support open access, university actions for open access or against high journal prices, what you can do to help the cause of open access, etc.

Breaking new ground for the open-access movement, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of global health research, plans to require that the researchers it funds publish only in immediate open-access journals. The policy doesn't kick in until January 2017; until then, grantees can publish in subscription-based journals as long as their paper is freely available within 12 months.

This serves as a significant catalyst to change the mentality of both the researcher and the funder. The Gates Foundation is a leading organization in resolving world health issues. This action demonstrates their drive and desire toward their cause; and will hopefully it will start a trend amongst authors and other research funding NGOS.

As mentioned in class discussions, this is the only reasonable response. Bill and Melinda have put their time forth into creating charities, and attempting to control content which was given from charitable grants is lunacy. It is comforting to see the Gates foundation scrapping the 6-12 month window of restriction. WIth this said that said, this draws interesting parallels with journals that receive government grants due to the fact that the privately sold resource is already being funded by the tax payers.

Codecademy is the easiest way to learn how to code. It's interactive, fun, and you can do it with your friends.

I would like to encourage everyone that takes the OpenKnowledge course to contribute their top five favourite websites that can give us more information on open learning and information sharing and/or people, collectives and websites that are already doing it! This is a Library open to all which we can use now and in the future to search for the resources we need.

Hello, Teresa, As the amount of information taken from this course, as well as from resources related to it and taken from the web is simply overwelming, I decided to create a blog with all these resources. Some are from the course, others from different internet resources, all related to open learning and knowledge. I give you the adress here: learninglovers.wordpress.com Sorry for not compleating your document, but I am still in module 3 and I have recorded more than 300 resources, so it would take me for a little while to do so... Hope it's useful for you!

"If, as rumoured, google builds a platform for depositing unrefereed research papers for "peer-reviewing" via crowd-sourcing, can this create a substitute for classical peer-review or will it merely supplement classical peer review with crowd-sourcing?"

Two facts that makes me think, peer-reviewing via crowd-sourcing, at best would supplement the traditional peer-review process. Fact one, there are already open access repositories that allow "deposit first; review later", but those repositories have not taken over other journals. Fact two, Wikipedia is an example in that, though theoretically anyone can contribute and edit the articles, there is definite number of people who would do it. Therefore, I don't see crowd sourcing peer review would really substitute the traditional route.

I appreciated that this source was framed outside of dichotomous thinking by not pitting more traditional and open access peer review models directly against one another, carrying the assumption that a particular publishing process must choose one or another. Although, I think I would challenge Harnad to take this thought process further. Rather than supplementing or complementing one another, traditional and open peer review models are distinct enough to also be applicable in different types of contexts, without necessarily needing to rely on one another. That is not to disagree with Harnad that the two do not "substitute" one another, but precisely because they cannot substitute one another indicates that they serve different purposes and could thus be useful in different contexts…. Or, as Harnad suggest, supplement each other in the same context. I think this very well parallels the context of taxonomies and folksonomies.

"[W]e use open source software in our solutions and will use open source software in the future. From time to time, we may face claims against companies that incorporate open source software into their products, claiming ownership of, or demanding release of, the source code, the open source software and/or derivative works that were developed using such software, or otherwise seeking to enforce the terms of the applicable open source license."

A source of some open text books with a interesting back story that should act as a warning about open--they are all now ex-open text books. After 2012 the publisher decided to abandon the CC/open textbook model and shifted the licensing on all their books. However, you can not revoke a CC license retroactively, so copies of the books downloaded prior to the change are still CC. But if the publisher no longer provides access to them, they disappear from CC circulation and access--luckily in this case, some one saved the CC versions and makes them available on this website. thanks!

Seriously useful! Indeed!

Wow, this collection is extensive, and the content seems good too! I'm so glad that someone was motivated enough to make these available according to their original licenses -- but it feels a bit bittersweet as well they had to resort to guerilla tactics to keep them available. It does make me wonder -- why did the publishing company decide to start charging for their textbooks? Was the previous model unprofitable?

En este post se habla de Randy Schekman y su postura sobre las revistas de lujo y el open access

Open access, be it via institutional repositories or publishing using OJS, is fast becoming the norm for sharing research output. Africa needs to get onto the open access bandwagon.

Hi TG, great to see you here! :)