Iryna Kuchma at EIFL.net has a summary of three open access mandates in Russia. The mandates include the Vologda scientific-coordination center of the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences and the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics. Peter Suber notes that no english translations from these institutions are available yet. Thanks to Open Access News for the link.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged education, higher education, open access, open content, research
Peter Suber at Open Access News is reporting that Harvard University has sent a letter to congress regarding H.R. 801, a bill that would reverse the NIH Open Access mandate (as covered by OEN last month). From the letter:
The NIH public access policy has meant that all Americans have access to the important biomedical research results that they have funded through NIH grants. Some 3,000 articles in the life sciences are added to this invaluable public resource each month because of the NIH policy, and one million visitors a month use the site to take advantage of these research papers. The policy respects copyright law and the valuable work of scholarly publishers.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged higher education, journal, open access, openness, policy
The University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute has seen a 7% increase in print sales since offering open access versions of their publications, according to Charles Ellwood Jones, a librarian at NYU. From the post:
This strikes me as very significant indeed! If open access can now demonstrated to increase the sales of back list titles, one of the primary arguments against providing open access for back-list titles evaporates. In fact it seem to indicated that open access, if thought of as promotional, might actually increase a publisher’s revenue stream.
Thanks to Peter Suber at Open Access News.
Peter Suber at Open Access News is reporting that it has been one year since NIH mandated open access. Since the mandate was first put into place, there have been over 6,000 articles approved. Suber re-posts an article in Nature from Meredith Wadman on the subject. From her article:
However, opposition to the law persists among some publishers. “What is being done by this policy is imposing a specific model of publication that we think the government has no business imposing,” says Allan Adler, legal counsel for the Association of American Publishers (AAP) in Washington DC. (Nature is a member of the AAP but cooperates with and supports the NIH on open access.)
The SPARC Videoblog has posted a video of David Wiley presenting a brief introduction to Open Educational Resources to the SPARC-ACRL Forum in January. The presentation is only fifteen minutes long and is also available on Vimeo.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged higher education, oer, Open Education, openness, presentation, SPARC
Jane Park at Creative Commons is announcing ccLearn Recommendations, ccLearn Explanations and ccLearn Step-by-Step Guides. ccLearn Recommendations are resources for sites crafting licenses and terms of use when hosting OER. ccLearn Explanations introduces open education concepts to educators. ccLearn Step-by-Step Guides is a basic guide to people who would like to apply a Creative Commons license to their work. All three are licensed CC-BY. From the post:
The aim of the three series is to spark initial interest in OER, while still relaying accurate and meaningful information that can be put to good and immediate use. However, like most, if not all, educational resources, these documents are by no means final or summative. They are meant to serve as starting points, licensed openly for future iteration and improvement.
Karen Fasimpaur has a new blog post about Mozilla collaborating with Seneca college. The project involves two classes that make modifications to Firefox. Along with her commentary, Fasimpaur also links to an audio interview with David Humphrey from Mozilla about the project. From the blog post:
My thoughts….This sounds pretty much like a technical product development course. I’m thinking of how you could adopt this model for education. Take the “open pedagogy” approach and have a grad level ed course on developing open educational resources collaboratively. This could use parts of both what Wiley did with his open ed course and parts of WikiEducator’s Learning4Content idea…but with a more practical project-building focus.
The Tufts Daily is reporting that Tufts Community Union Senate has passed its budget for 2010. The article mentions, towards the end, that the senate unanimously passed a resolution aimed at reducing the cost of textbooks. The resolution suggested posting a list of required textbooks well in advance of class starting and to avoid new, often more expensive, editions of textbooks when possible. From the article:
[B]ooks are the single greatest out-of-pocket expenditure to students,” read the resolution, submitted by the Senate’s Services Committee…
“The Senate is really committed to reducing the cost of attending Tufts and incidental costs and barriers to social and academic life,” he [senate Treasurer Matt Shapanka] said.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged education, higher education, open textbooks, openness
Ahrash Bissell at ccLearn has a new post about increasing funding impact through open licensing. His comments center around a new document produced by ccLearn directed at funders of OER. From the post:
In these tough economic times, getting a great return on an investment can be difficult to achieve. However, increasing the impact of investments in open educational resources (OER) is pretty easy – simply adopt a policy that strongly encourages or requires education grantees to disseminate their resources under one of the Creative Commons licenses, ideally the most permissive CC license, CC BY.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged cc, CC licenses, commons, copyright, creative commons, oer, policy
Glyn Moody is reporting on his blog that OpenStreetMap integration is soon coming to Wikipedia. The delay apparently has largely been caused by concerns over OpenStreetMap handling Wikipedia’s large user base. From the post:
One of the powerful features of open source is re-use: you don’t have to re-invent the wheel, but can build on the work of others. That’s straightforward enough for software, but it can also be applied to other fields of openness. Here’s a fantastic example: embedding OpenStreetMap in Wikipedia entries…
