Monthly Archives: March 2009

Open Video Conference Now Accepting Proposals

Posted on March 14, 2009 by | 2 Comments

Creative Commons has announced that the Open Video Conference is now accepting proposals. The conference is taking place June 19-20 in New York City, and is sponsored by “the Yale Law School Information Society Project, the Participatory Culture Foundation, Kaltura, and iCommons.” From the conference’s “About” page:

Open Video is a broad based movement of video creators, technologists, academics, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, activists, remixers, and many others. When most folks think of “open,” they think of open source and open codecs. They’re right—but there’s more to Open Video than open codecs. Open Video is the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video. These qualities provide more fertile ground for independent producers, bottom-up innovation, and greater protection for free speech online.

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OCW at John Hopkins Bloomber School of Public Health

Posted on March 14, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Kanchanaraksa, Gooding, Klaas, & Yager explain the creation of OCW at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the most recent issue of Open Learning. The authors reflect on lessons learned, such as the importance of choosing the right platform and acknowledging that not all faculty will participate.

This is an ideal time for institutions to begin developing OER projects of their own. Pioneering OCW institutions are eager to share their collective experience and know-how with others, and the OCW Consortium provides a one-stop source for information on the OCW publishing process (OpenCourseWare Consortium, 2008a,b). Members and OCW Consortium officers are more than helpful and willing to share experiences, answer questions, and provide feedback.

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TeachingOpenSource.org to Connect Educators with FOSS

Posted on March 13, 2009 by | Leave a comment

David Humphrey on his blog Bread and Circuits reports on the launch of TeachingOpenSource.org. The site is meant to be a place where educators in FOSS can meet and collaborate. According to their “About” page, the site is not hosted or sponsored by any one organization, institution or company to create a neutral place. Accompanying the site is a wiki and mailing list. From Humphrey’s blog:

If you’ve spent any amount of time working in open source and education you’ll know what I mean when I say that there is currently too much duplication of effort: everyone has their own mailing list, wiki, planet, etc (I’m registered on about a dozen). This makes it hard for us all to “meet” and work on things together. Wouldn’t it be better if we had a light-weight hub so we could all see one another and share ideas? We think so.

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Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office

Posted on March 13, 2009 by | Leave a comment

The website Lifehacker has published a tutorial on how to add a Creative Commons add-in to Microsoft Office (Windows only). The add-in is available for free and supports Office 2003 and now 2007. From the article:

We’ve mentioned this utility before, but it’s since updated with support for Office 2007—making this worth a look for anybody publishing documents on a regular basis.

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The Growth of OCW Between 2001-2008

Posted on March 13, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Steve Carson, President of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, relates the history of OpenCourseWare since its inception at MIT in the most recent issue of Open Learning. Among the items discussed are MIT’s struggles with defining OCW within the context of its own mission, and how to handle the growing interest in OCW. From the article:

While the OCW concept was developed at MIT, the Consortium members will drive the future development of the OCW Consortium and the OCW concept. Given the rapid development of the movement to date, it is difficult to predict what lies ahead, but there are clusters of shared interest emerging within the Consortium membership. Many members are interested in further exploring interactive tools to support use of the published content, ‘educational networking’ that would allow users with shared interest to learn collaboratively. There is considerable interest within the Consortium in making materials more searchable and interoperable, supporting the needs of educators who are building new content out of the materials published. Interest is also growing around the issue of providing some level of certification or recognition of independent study undertaken using OCW materials.

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First U.S. Public Access Policy Made Permanent

Posted on March 13, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Jennifer McLennan, from the Association of Research Libraries, reports on the SPARC-OpenData mailing list that President Obama has signed the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act which, among other things, makes the NIH open access mandate permanent. The act does not guarantee open access if another bill overrides it, such as Representative Conyer’s H.R. 801. From the e-mail:

The NIH policy was previously implemented with a provision that was subject to annual renewal. Since the implementation of the revised policy the percentage of eligible manuscripts deposited into PMC has increased significantly, with over 3,000 new manuscripts being deposited each month. The PubMed Central database is a part of a valuable set of public database resources at the NIH, which are accessed by more than 2 million users each day.

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Lessig Replies to Conyers

Posted on March 12, 2009 by | 1 Comment

As OEN has recently reported, there has been an ongoing war of words between Larry Lessig and U.S. House Representative John Conyers regarding open access. Conyers recently said Lessig’s comments “cross the line.” Lessig has now posted a response on the Huffington Post:

This bill is nothing more than a “publishers’ protection act.” It is an awful step backwards for science — as 33 Nobel Prize winners, the current and former head of the NIH, the American Library Association, and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access have all said. And Mr. Conyers knows this.

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UK launches National Digital Resource Bank

Posted on March 12, 2009 by | Leave a comment

A press release on SourceWire announced the National Digital Resource Bank (NDRB) initiative. The aims of NDRB are to create a comprehensive resource to meet UK educational needs. The resources are developed with public funding. From the press release:

Despite strong government funding, to date, the enthusiasm for Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) in UK schools has been dampened by the absence of high quality learning content which has been criticised as too expensive and unsuitable for use within Learning Platforms. However tens of millions of pounds of digital resources have been created using public funding in Local Authorities, City Learning Centres and schools themselves. In addition many charities and industry partners have valuable digital resources that they would like to make available to schools Access to these rich and freely available resources will be now possible through the National Digital Resource Bank.

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Publishers reject JISC report

Posted on March 12, 2009 by | Leave a comment

InformationWorldReview is reporting on publishers’ reaction to a recent JISC report. The report suggested that UK higher education would save hundreds of millions of pounds per year if they moved towards an open access model of dissemination. The article quotes a joint statement from publishing associations:

OA publishing in all its variants is the subject of a series of experiments already running with our membership. Claims that if adopted universally an exclusively OA business model would generate large savings in the system costs for scholarly communication in the UK in our view remain unproven.

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Two Economists Call for Copyright Abolition

Posted on March 12, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Professors Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine have called for the elimination of copyright and patent laws, according to Newswise Business News. The two professors have published their views in a new book, Against Intellectual Monopoly, from Cambridge Press. From the article:

From a public policy view, we’d ideally like to eliminate patent and copyright laws altogether…There’s plenty of protection for inventors and plenty of protection and opportunities to make money for creators. It’s not that we see this as some sort of charitable act that people are going to invent and create things without earning money. Evidence shows very strongly there are lots of ways to make money without patents and copyright.

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