Group items tagged

"Such margins (37%, up from 36% in 2010) are possible because the journals' content is largely provided free by researchers, and the academics who peer-review their papers are usually unpaid volunteers. The journals are then sold to the very universities that provide the free content and labour. For publicly funded research, the result is that the academics and taxpayers who were responsible for its creation have to pay to read it. This is not merely absurd and unjust; it also hampers education and research."

"Some publishers don't want to hear this, but the truth is that DRM can be hacked and does not eliminate piracy. It not only fails as a piracy deterrent, but it also introduces restrictions that make e-books less attractive than print books. We've all read a print book and passed it along to a friend. Good luck doing that with a DRM'd e-book! What publishers don't understand is that DRM implies a lack of trust. All customers are considered thieves and must be treated accordingly."

"The Open Data Handbook is a valuable resource for everyone interested in open data. It covers many types of data, but its particular focus is open government data. The Open Data Handbook is targeted towards a broad audience. It contains useful information for civil servants, journalists, activists, developers, researchers - basically, for anyone with an interest in open data!"

"That's what you have to reckon with. Helped along by technology, that open culture has grown much stronger in the 10 years since another scholarly boycott aimed at publishers helped create the open-access Public Library of Science. Its flagship journal, PLoS One, published almost 14,000 articles last year, according to its publisher, Peter Binfield. "

"The OBI is the 'plumbing' of the badge ecosystem. It is a specification for badges, set of repositories ("Backpacks") for storing badges and APIs for pushing badges in and pulling badges out. It's an important piece of this badge experiment because it moves us beyond more silo'd systems, allows the learner to collect badges from lots of different learning experiences and provides the structural components to enable badges to be transferred and leveraged across the ecosystem for real results like jobs or credits."

"As an up and coming academic, I'm willing to put my career on the line and promise to only publish in open access journals. Putting my career on the line is a very real threat, since many departments look for publications in key (generally not open access) journals such as American Anthropologist when hiring. However, I'm confident that the people who will be evaluating me will overlook those issues if they understand why I made this choice, and will evaluate my work on its own merits and not on the journal that publishes it"

"Today I resigned from the editorial board of a well respected journal in my field - Genomics. No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings. It has not been an easy decision. Some may feel that I'm grandstanding or making a futile gesture. And it may be a toxic career move. Scientists are expected to contribute to the community by reviewing papers and serving on editorial boards. But I cannot stand by any longer while access to scientific resources is restricted."

The European Union is set to throw the weight of its €80 billion (£64 billion) research funding programme behind open-access publishing, Times Higher Education has learned. An official at the European Commission, which is drafting proposals for the Horizon 2020 programme, said that for researchers receiving funding from its programme between 2014 and 2020, open-access publishing "will be the norm".

"The Open Knowledge Foundation has published a nifty guide on the basics of Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online. You can skim the guide in well under ten minutes, and it includes useful links and accompanying descriptions to online collections where PD works can be found, including Europeana, the Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg. It also contains quite a few references to Creative Commons and succinct explanations of the relevant CC tools, such as the Public Domain Mark and the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. The guide, like all articles at The Public Domain Review, is available for reuse under CC BY."

"We've been following the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) movement for a couple years now because we and our clients are all engaged in online learning at some level, be it totally online, flipped or hybrid, or just lecture capture for on-demand replay." In this post on Mediasite, Erica St. Angel has collected an impressive list of MOOC resources.

"Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls."

"now is the time for the rebirth of the university press as a place that runs a set of open access, online journals. In times of financial stress in the sector, it may seem perverse to be proposing that universities take on a function that is not aimed at earning revenue, but here is my economic, and public good, argument."

Scientific information is both a researcher's greatest output and technological innovation's most important resource. Open Access (OA) is the provision of free access to peer-reviewed, scholarly and research information to all. It requires that the rights holder grants worldwide irrevocable right of access to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and make derivative works in any format for any lawful activities with proper attribution to the original author. Open Access uses Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to increase and enhance the dissemination of scholarship. OA is about Freedom, Flexibility and Fairness.

"From our perspective, we view textbook publishers as highly exploitative," Justin Goss, a student senator at UC Davis, told members of the Senate Education Committee. "While I am sure that they are perfectly nice people, it continues to baffle me why a reordered table of contents and a shiny new binding warrants and additional $50, $60, or sometimes $100 on the price tag."

Looking toward a year-end negotiation in Dubai, where 193 nations will gather to revise a U.N. treaty concerning the Internet, Michael Joseph Gross lays out the stakes in a conflict that could split the virtual world as we know it.

The Association of American University Presses does not support the proposed Research Works Act, the group said in a statement released Tuesday. But it also does not support an opposing bill, the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would require public access to the results of federally financed research no later than six months after publication. The other bill would prevent federal agencies from imposing such mandates.

"All public administrations in Iceland are increasing their use of free and open source software. The country's government recently launched a one year migration project for all of its public institutions. "The goal of the project is not to migrate public institutions to free and open source software in one single year but to lay a solid foundation for such a migration which institutions can base their migration plans on", reports Tryggvi Björgvinsson, the project leader."

SCORE sent out a survey between 18 October and 6 December 2011 aimed to get a national perspective on institutional engagement in Open Educational Resources through their librarians.  It also sought to identify library staff engagement with OER, their understanding of licensing and OEP, and their experience in using and finding OER. 

"This is evident in an invitation to discussion in the Guardian, Talk point: Why don't more academics use open educational resources? It is a reflection after a seminar on OER which demonstrated the richness of resources available today and then raised the issue why they are not being sufficiently exploited."

The Utah State of Office of Education (USOE) today announced it will develop and support open textbooks in the key curriculum areas of secondary language arts, science, and mathematics. USOE will encourage districts and schools throughout the state to consider adopting these textbooks for use beginning this fall.