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Open Access Newsletter Archive Open Access

Open Access Tracking Project Open Access

Bermuda Principles DNA sequencing - Human Genome Open Science Open Data

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. 

UK Open University OpenMark Open Source Assessment

UK Open University OpenMark Assessment Source Code Possibly falls in Open Assessment and Open Source course topics

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.

"The success of these largely independent initiatives does, however, raise a question: should they continue to be pursued separately, allowing the individuals involved to get on with it, or is there a case for greater coordination as part of wider institutional strategy? The answer to this question lies partly in what the different initiatives have in common."

The Case for Open Data in The Lancet

"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."

"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."

"Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any ereader within minutes. Create books on your own or with others via an easy-to-use web interface. Build a community around your content with social tools and use the reach of mobile, tablet and ebook technology to engage new audiences. "

Ebook standards may lack the glamour that the technology attracts, but the arrival of ePub3 has the potential to transform how the academy creates and delivers its content to students and researchers. Just weeks into the New Year and already there is a new ebooks revelation that colleges and universities need to digest. January saw the launch of Apple's new iBooks2 software which grabbed headlines (see the BBC article here) and sparked heated debate across the academic community. Quietly underpinning the technology of the iBooks software is ePub.  ePub is the 'defacto' ebook standard, with the latest version of ePub3 supporting complex layouts and rich media and interactivity for eTextbooks and professional and scientific publications.

"In Year 1 we: Created an API (OERPub) for publishing OER to remixable repositories. The API is an adaptation of the popular SWORD API. Implemented the API in Connexions, a repository anyone can use to create open textbooks and share learning materials. Developed an importer for creating and publishing remixable OER to Connexions. Formed a team of designers and developers using OERPub."

When everything is in a state of flux, we need opportunities for ideas to collide, innovations to be shared, concepts to be rehashed and mashedup, and iterative improvements to occur. Education today - at all levels - faces the challenge of tremendous change and unstettledness. Rigid systems break in periods of flux.

"Digital Scholarship provides information and commentary about digital copyright, digital curation, digital repository, open access, scholarly communication, and other digital information issues."

"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."

"Ms. Morgan borrows the phrase "free-range learning" to describe students' behavior, and she finds that they generally shop around for content in places educators would endorse. Students seem most favorably inclined to materials from other universities. They mention lecture videos from Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology far more than the widely publicized Khan Academy, she says."

MOOC Open Teaching