The Chronicle of Higher Education: Wired Campus has published an interview with Adam Smith, the Director of Google’s book search project. Smith discusses the settlement and what he believes it means for academics.
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Monthly Archives: June 2009
Interview With Google’s Book Search Director
Posted in Open Education
Tagged google, Google's Settlement, openness, policy, public domain
Plagiarism Detection to Track OER Reuse
Brandon Muramatsu at MIT has a new blog post suggesting the use of plagiarism software to detect OER reuse. Muramatsu mentions the idea originating at discussions at COSL, and was mentioned in Sean Duncan’s recent dissertation on OER reuse. From the blog post:
I propose that a new metric to evaluate the use of open educational resources (OER) is to look for use by running a plagarism-style detector against the web. In this case, Plagiarism is Good™, very good. The idea is to build on the idea of plagiarism detecting software, like TurnItIn, to find occurrences of text that matches the text of documents in open educational resources. Since most OERs are licensed to permit copying and modification (with attribution), it should be relatively easy to find additional occurrences on the web at large.
Thanks to Smart Marbles for the repost.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged Internet, oer, open content, Open Education, open learning, reuse
Editors of Fake Open Access Article Resign
Bob Grant at The Scientist reports that the editor behind the fake article in an open access journal have resigned (reported by OEN). The editor acknowledges some responsibility, but asserts that others at the publisher (Bentham) are responsible as well. From the article:
Parmanto said that he had never seen the phony manuscript that was accepted by TOISCIJ. “I want to lessen my exposure to the risk of being taken advantage of.”
Thanks to Stephen Downes and Peter Suber for the trail of links.
Happy Ending for Google Books Settlement?
Eriq Gardner at Law.com has posted an article giving a summary of the settlement between Google and the Association of American Publishers. Gardner interviews Allan Adler, Vice President of Legal Affairs at the association, providing insight into his perspective on the case. From the article:
Since then, Adler has had his hands full explaining to people that in order to object to the deal, they must first opt in to the settlement class. Asked the ubiquitous “Why settle?” question, Adler says: “We figured the best we were likely to do was, after many years and several million dollars fighting, the Supreme Court would probably hand down a split decision that was fairly narrow in application.”
As for having to wait until October to see whether the settlement is approved, there’s only one thing that bothers Adler: “The downside is that it gives people who are opposed to this more time to rabble-rouse.”
Creative Commons Search Added to Picasa
Fred Benenson at Creative Commons is reporting that Creative Commons search has been added to Google’s image-editing software, Picasa. Google already has advanced search options to search by license, so this move comes as no surprise. From the blog post:
Its one thing to enable your community to select a CC license for their work, but its another thing entirely to help the rest of the web discover that content. Picasa’s commons community will surely benefit from this kind of exposure, so thanks to Picasa for enabling such a valuable feature.
Also reported by Lifehacker.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged cc, CC licenses, commons, creative commons, open content
OER Workshop at EDEN 09
The blog Ignatia Webs has a description of an OER workshop that took place at the EDEN 2009 conference. The conference was held in Poland. From the blog post:
So OU UK has been looking at ways to describe design (visual representation is given).
What they do is that the design is explicitely clear for the learners as well.
Because the OER’s design is explicit, you can test it and ask students to enter the design. So students are asked to give their description of a resource, this is coupled back to the other students and this results in a the overall description.
With this explicit design, the teachers are asked to get to work with an explicit design in mind.
The Merits of Gold Open Access
Stuart Shieber at The Occasional Pamphlet argues the merits of “gold OA” in a recent blog post. Gold open access can be defined as the author or representing institution making a payment at the time of publication, and the publication being completely free to anyone thereafter. From the blog post:
…access is the least important of the services that journals currently provide—least important because technological advances have led to the ability to provide access at essentially zero marginal cost by the authors themselves. The important and valuable services that publishers provide in greater or lesser quantity are management of peer review, a variety of production services, and imprimatur.
Thanks to Peter Suber at Open Access News for the link.
Pubget: Article Search Engine
Kevin Davies at Bio-IT World points to a new website called Pubget, which is a search engine for scientific articles. Some are openly available, while other entries only link to abstracts and citations. From the article:
Pubget offers various links for functionality, including a Firefox plug-in to download PDFs; access to the publishers’ web page and the equivalent page in PubMed; email forwarding; and tagging (using a virtual cloud-based storage system) to metatag articles and keep them in a ‘locker.’ A widget, which works via RSS, allows continuous updates on topics or authors inside a lab web page.
Thanks to Gavin Baker at Open Access News for the link. Also, commentary from Stephen’s Web.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged e-learning, higher education, open access, openness
Short Video Explaining Creative Commons Licensing
Cameron Parkins notes a short video about Creative Commons. The video is mainly about CC-BY-NC-SA, but it is helpful in explaining that authors retain copyright. Video available at Denver Open Media.
California Textbook Vetting Process Explained
Yesterday OEN reported that the state of California will be migrating to online textbooks for K-12. John Timmer at Arstechnica has more details on the approval process for prospective textbooks. The process itself will be handled by the California Learning Resource Network (CLRN), and is anticipated to complete an expedited review before the upcoming school year begins. From the article:
“We’re pretty excited about what we’re seeing,” he [CLRN's Director] said. “We actually have one commercial publisher who is submitting several of their textbooks [as open sourced material] for review, so this will be pretty groundbreaking, and I think it will be a paradigm shift for the publishers as well. They’re taking a paid resource they used to charge the districts for, and basically allowing the districts to download it for free.”
