"The fate of scholarly societies is one of the most contentious and even emotional in the open access landscape. Many researchers have strong emotional ties to their disciplinary societies and these societies often play a crucial role in supporting meetings, providing travel stipends to young researchers, awarding prizes, and representing the community. At the same time they face a peculiar bind. The money that supports these efforts often comes from journal subscriptions. "

The entire field of particle physics is set to switch to open-access publishing, a milestone in the push to make research results freely available to readers. Particle physics is already a paragon of openness, with most papers posted on the preprint server arXiv. But peer-reviewed versions are still published in subscription journals, and publishers and research consortia at facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have previously had to strike piecemeal deals to free up a few hundred articles.

"Science is very inefficient," says Ijad Madisch, founder of a Web site called ResearchGate. "You try an experiment, fail, try again, fail, try again, it works. And what works is what you publish. All the data about failure is wasted."

"Now that Stanford, MIT and other brands that "no one's going to question" have ventured into the online territories, one could propose that "the traditional brand pecking order" will "reassert itself online," says Garrett. Especially since the most desirable brands are offering their product for free."

"Almost every so-called MOOC violates at least one letter in the acronym. Why are we using this word that doesn't describe the things we attach it to?"

"On Tuesday, Virginia is joining a group of 12 institutions that plan to open their courses to the world, free of charge, through an online platform created by the start-up company Coursera."

"Open access is framed as a moral issue, but it's actually a business one. Arguments that tax-payer funded research should be publicly accessible can seem obvious; but what if tax-payer funding is not available or is not adequate to cover the costs-as is usually the case in the arts and humanities?"

"NTER - the National Training & Education Resource - is an easy-to-access, open source, web-based learning platform that enables learners, instructors, and organizations to be part of an entirely new education community - the next generation of learning. Update your existing knowledge or discover a new field of learning - Get started today!"

"An organization established by MIT and Harvard University that will develop an open-source technology platform to deliver online courses. EdX will support Harvard and MIT faculty in conducting research on teaching and learning on campus through tools that enrich classroom and laboratory experiences."

"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".

"Private companies, like Phoenix, have been offering online degrees for a fee for years. And schools like M.I.T. and Stanford have been offering lectures for free online. Coursera is the next step: building an interactive platform that will allow the best schools in the world to not only offer a wide range of free course lectures online, but also a system of testing, grading, student-to-student help and awarding certificates of completion of a course for under $100. (Sounds like a good deal. Tuition at the real-life Stanford is over $40,000 a year.) Coursera is starting with 40 courses online - from computing to the humanities - offered by professors from Stanford, Princeton, Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. "

"Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies is a collection of chapters and case studies contributed by college and university presidents, provosts, faculty, and other stakeholders. Institutions are finding new ways of achieving higher education's mission without being crippled by constraints or overpowered by greater expectations. "

In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans - one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world - Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.

"In an effort to reduce costs for students, the College of Education and Human Development has created this catalog of open textbooks to be reviewed by faculty members. Open textbooks are complete textbooks released under a Creative Commons, or similar, license. Instructors can customize open textbooks to fit their course needs by remixing, editing, and adding their own content. Students can access free digital versions or purchase low-cost print copies of open textbooks."

The OpenScout project invites you to a series of four webinars showing you how you can take full advantage of Business and Management Open Educational Resources (OER). Do you also recognize a growing need to improve your Business and Management skills but are confronted with a lack of time or financial resources to keep up with the latest developments? Are you a student in Business and would like to learn with high-quality, up-to-date, yet free learning materials? Are you a teacher of Business and Management and would like to re-use or adapt existing learning materials of competent peers to enhance your learning offerings? Are you a Business and Management institution looking for new distribution channels for your open learning materials?

"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."

"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."

"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."