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.
What if employers didn't care whether applicants held a college diploma but instead asked what educational "badges" they had collected? Like Boy Scout merit badges for professionals, these marks of achievement would show competence in specific skills, and they could be granted by any number of institutions.
The smart funders will work with the pre-existing prejudice of researchers, probably granting copyright and IP rights to the researchers, but placing tighter constraints on the terms of forward licensing. That funders don't really need the publishers has been made clear by HHMI, Wellcome Trust, and the MPI. Publishing costs are a small proportion of their total expenditure. If necessary they have the resources and will to take that in house. The NIH has taken a similar route though technically implemented in a different way. Other funders will allow these experiments to run, but ultimately they will adopt the approaches that appear to work.
"By requiring students to grapple with primary sources and find their own journal articles, she said, she could teach in a way that emphasized process rather than memorization of facts in a book."