what we sell in the Open Textbook movement is not just reduced cost.

Those students that bought the cheap version of the text back in 1991? They were pill-splitters. And they failed at pill-splitting (and maybe at the course). Do we own that failure? What we’ve learned over the past five years or so in OER is that what we sell in the Open Textbook movement is not just reduced cost. It’s the simplicity that you can get when you’re not working with an industry trying to milk every last dollar out of students. It’s every student having their materials on day one, for as long as they like, without having to navigate “simple” questions of what to buy, what to rent, and when-is-the-book-on-the-syllabus-that’s-required-not-really-required.

Asking What Students Spend on Textbooks Is the Wrong Question

Pedagogy in Public: Open Education Unbound

“free vs. open”

Is it possible to add information to a resource without touching it?

The University of New Hampshire Open Educational Resources Ambassador Pilot

To maximize its utility

“In the last 15 years, we’ve seen a massive transition in the way academic publishing is being done,” said Jules Blais, an environmental scientist at the University of Ottawa and editor of FACETS.

Students Should Demand Their Colleges Produce Free Open Textbooks to End the Textbook Racket

To date 5'-cytosine methylation (5mC) has not been reported in Caenorhabditis elegans, and using ultra-performance liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS) the existence of DNA methylation in T. spiralis was detected, making it the first 5mC reported in any species of nematode.

Giga Science Database

Scholarly communication is the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use.” –Association of College and Research Libraries

networked discovery of connections would be at the center of both the learning environment as designed by faculty and the learning environment as experienced by students

When you see young people as agents of change, rather than objects to be changed,

Students as Authors: Why Students Should Publish Their Class Essays Online

It also arguably just shifts the costs of a broken system from students to the library.

involving students throughout the entire process

it sometimes isn’t enough just to say “this will save students money so we should do it.

“While we have the ‘must do’ layer, there’s also that little bit of subversion here, giving kids that little bit of creativity and maybe a ray of hope,” Reisinger said. “I want them to learn that learning is not all about what someone else preordains for you. It’s OK to tinker and play with things.”

Researchers have ‘ethical obligation’ to share data

The Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn't feel like victory

Academic Publishing is a Goddamned Exploitative Farce

A Framework for Identifying and Evaluating Openly Networked Connected Learning Course Designs

In the MIT Libraries we’ve just launched a new and innovative approach for our scholarly communications program — and for our collections budget: the collections budget is now part of the scholarly communications program.

What occurs when we decide that agency and not expertise is the core principle of learning is that we must, as teachers, learn to see the very best in students.

Imagine having at least part of your virtual learning environment (VLE) open, not just for current students (and even current students usually can't see all the teaching that might be useful to them) but for non-students, prospective students, or staff members who want to know what's happening down the road, across the country, in that academic department that interests them. NetworkED 2020 Watch Donna at NetworkED 2020: The London University, as she asks 'what if all of London were a networked University?'There would be so much potential for seeing the different ways in which departments are teaching, for instance. Which departments of biology are doing what in their labs? What theoretical approaches are they taking?

Open data

Open Learning

Think about that, a student speaks up to represent her class.

The Open Stuff that I am interested in, is not just that anyone can walk through the door, as there are often ONLY IFs. They can walk through the door ONLY IF they create an account and login. They can walk through the door ONLY IF they are in certain parts of the world (geographic limits on media). Openness is not just a door.

you do not always know who is there with what class, or on their own.

inner cynic

open – that is, to make public, transparent, and participatory

As of fall 2015, the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) no longer expects any undergraduate to spend money on textbooks.

What is a business model?

open annotation.

Faculty want to share their life’s work with others that care about their niche too.

Textbook Cost Research Results

Many times, the work we do as educators is actually taking away some of the most powerful learning from our students.

Rebus Open Webbooks Building knowledge to build on

3 Keys to Designing Learner-Centered Spaces

Thoughts on using open eBooks as textbooks

Who Pays for Supplemental Materials?

Open educational resources and college textbook choices: a review of research on efficacy and perceptions

If the average college student spends approximately $1000 per year on textbooks and yet performs scholastically no better than the student who utilizes free OER, what exactly is being purchased with that $1000?

A multi-institutional study of the impact of opentextbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students

Rhizomatic learning as an open pedagogy

Alongside the Dutch government, which is using its presidency of the EU to push the case for open access, only Hungary, Romania, Sweden and the UK, share the view that academic publishers should stop charging readers a subscription and instead charge authors for publishing their papers.

The peer-reviewed journal marks a new era in academic journal publishing. Discrete Analysis will follow the "diamond open access" model - free to read and free to publish in - and will be entirely editor-owned with no publisher middleman.

right to privacy, while allowing them to make an informed choice about taking reasonable risks to their privacy in order to help advance research

OCW Educator: Sharing teaching approaches and materials from MIT with educators everywhere, for free

Open Pedagogy: Moving Forward

A Pre-flight Check: Response to Wiley’s Open Pedagogy Challenge

Notes on Open Pedagogy

A framework for assessing fitness for purpose in open educational resources

The OER is used to devise interactive ways of using OER to promote students’ engagement in the problem-solving process.

Pedagogy

Learners are engaged in solving real-world problems. Existing knowledge is activated as a foundation for new knowledge. New knowledge is demonstrated to the learner. New knowledge is applied by the learner. New knowledge is integrated into the learner’s world.

1) Providing open, accessible and quality content for a wider community of teachers and learners.  2) Sharing best practice and helping to avoid re-inventing the wheel.  3) Helping developing countries improve and expand learning for development opportunities.  4) Offering flexible non-formal and informal knowledge and skills accumulation pathways to formal study.  5) Providing learning opportunities for geographically, socially or economically excluded students and non-traditional and work-based learners.  6) Improving the quality of conventional and online education by achieving greater awareness of open and inclusive educational practices and varied perspectives on fields of study.  7) Enabling collaboration between institutions, sectors, disciplines and countries.

Inquiry Learning Vs. Standardized Content: Can They Coexist?

The feed is how stuff enters their content system. But the feed itself is outside, leaving it available for other services to use. It's great when this happens, rather than doing it via a WG that tend to go on for years, and create stuff that's super-complicated, why not design something that works for you, put it out there with no restrictions and let whatever's going to happen happen.

Re-Envisioning Paulo Freire's "Banking Concept of Education"

Sci-Hub: the debate continues

Academic freedom is for students, too

The power of open

High academic journal prices justify sharing of illegal articles

Framing our Open EdTech project

The university must promote teaching excellence and the use of open learning methods

We don’t know if content will be interoperable – that is, usable beyond the Amazon (Kindle) ecosystem – or if there’ll be integration with other software systems.

federally funded research publicly accessible are becoming the norm

BC Open Textbook Authoring Guide

the MLA Commons is built on top of Commons in a Box

An Open Education Reader

As I have mentioned in previous posts, several platforms have appeared recently that could take on this role of third-party reviewer. I could imagine at least: libreapp.org, peerevaluation.org, pubpeer.com, and publons.com. Pandelis Perakakis mentioned several others as well: http://thomas.arildsen.org/2013/08/01/open-review-of-scientific-literature/comment-page-1/#comment-9.

A coalition of some of the world’s key scholarly publishers, platforms, libraries, and technology organizations

What makes this more difficult to resolve is that GitHub is — surprise! — not open source. GitHub is closed source, meaning that only GitHub staff is able to make improvements to its platform.The irony of using a proprietary tool to manage open source projects, much like BitKeeper and Linux, has not been lost on everyone. Some developers refuse to put their code on GitHub to retain their independence. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Git himself, refuses to accept pull requests (code changes) from GitHub.

Technically, if you use someone else’s code revision from Stack Overflow, you would have to add a comment in your code that attributes the code to them. And then that person’s code would potentially have a different license from the rest of your code.Your average hobbyist developer might not care about the rules, but many companies forbid employees from using Stack Overflow, partly for this reason.As we enter a post open source world, Stack Overflow has explored transitioning to a more permissive MIT license, but the conversation hasn’t been easy. Questions like what happens to legacy code, and dual licensing for code and non-code contributions, have generated confusion and strong reactions.

The free software generation had to think about licenses because they were taking a stance on what they were not (that is, proprietary software). The GitHub generation takes this right for granted. They don’t care about permissions. They default to open.Open source is so popular today that we don’t think of it as exceptional anymore. We’re so open source, that maybe we’re post open source:But not is all groovy in the land of post open source.

"It comes down to what is the reason for our existence? It's to accelerate science, not to make money."

Adapt an Existing Open Textbook

Below I list a few advantages and drawbacks of anonymity where I assume that a drawback of anonymous review is an advantage of identified review and vice versa. Drawbacks Reviewers do not get credit for their work. They cannot, for example, reference particular reviews in their CVs as they can with publications. It is relatively “easy” for a reviewer to provide unnecessarily blunt or harsh critique. It is difficult to guess if the reviewer has any conflict of interest with the authors by being, for example, a competing researcher interested in stalling the paper’s publication. Advantages Reviewers do not have to fear “payback” for an unfavourable review that is perceived as unfair by the authors of the work. Some (perhaps especially “high-profile” senior faculty members) reviewers might find it difficult to find the time to provide as thorough a review as they would ideally like to, yet would still like to contribute and can perhaps provide valuable experienced insight. They can do so without putting their reputation on the line.

With most journals, if I submit a paper that is rejected, that information is private and I can re-submit elsewhere. In open review, with a negative review one can publicly lose face as well as lose the possibility of re-submitting the paper. Won’t this be a significant disincentive to submit? This is precisely what we are trying to change. Currently, scientists can submit a paper numerous times, receive numerous negative reviews and ultimately publish their paper somewhere else after having “passed” peer review. If scientists prefer this system then science is in a dangerous place. By choosing this model, we as scientists are basically saying we prefer nice neat stories that no one will criticize. This is silly though because science, more often than not, is not neat and perfect. The Winnower believes that transparency in publishing is of the utmost importance. Going from a closed anonymous system to an open system will be hard for many scientists but I believe that it is the right thing to do if we care about the truth.

PLOS Labs is working on establishing structured reviews and we have talked with them about this.

It should be noted that papers will always be open for review so that a paper can accumulate reviews throughout its lifetime.

I am hoping to change scholarly communication at all levels and I think transparency must be at the heart of this.

While there are some features shared between a university repository and us we are distinctly different for the following reasons: We offer DOIs to all content published on The Winnower All content is automatically typeset on The Winnower Content published on the winnower is not restricted to one university but is published amongst work from peers at different institutions around the world Work is published from around the world it is more discoverable We offer Altmetrics to content  Our site is much more visually appealing than a typical repository  Work can be openly reviewed on The Winnower but often times not even commented on in repositories. This is not to say that repositories have no place, but that we should focus on offering authors choices not restricting them to products developed in house.

These 39 Sites Have Amazing Stock Photos You Can Use For Free

We need to talk about sharing

open Science

Technologies that live within closed systems create roadblocks in students’ learning pathways.

What is Open Access?

What the Open-Access Movement Doesn’t Want You to Know

Open Access Overview

Open Pedagogy: Connection, Community, and Transparency

Nothing really interesting grows there. For that you need the wilds of -- the open web -- of course. 

authors have pulled around 100 papers from Lingua and transferred them to Glossa

“If I wanted to do it for the compensation, I would be better off using that time to flip burgers or go wash windows.”

He refers to hybrid journals as “double-dipping journals” because they profit from both APCs and subscriptions.

Publishing an open-access paper in a journal can be prohibitively expensive. Some researchers are drumming up support for a movement to change that

Green OA and the role of repositories remain controversial. This is perhaps less the case for institutional repositories, than for subject repositories, especially PubMed Central. The lack of its own independent sustainable business model means Green OA depends on its not undermining that of (subscription) journals. The evidence remains mixed: the PEER project found that availability of articles on the PEER open repository did not negatively impact downloads from the publishers’s site, but this was contrary to the experience of publishers with more substantial fractions of their journals’ content available on the longer-established and better-known arXiv and PubMed Central repositories. The PEER usage data study also provided further confirmation of the long usage half-life of journal articles and its substantial variation between fields (suggesting the importance of longer embargo periods than 6–12 months, especially for those fields with longer usage half-lives). Green proponents for their part point to the continuing profitability of STM publishing, the lack of closures of existing journals and the absence of a decline in the rate of launch of new journals since repositories came online as evidence of a lack of impact to date, and hence as evidence of low risk of impact going forward. Many publishers’ business instincts tell them otherwise; they have little choice about needing to accept submissions from large funders such as NIH, but there has been some tightening of publishers’ Green policies (page 102).

Gold open access based on APCs has a number of potential advantages. It would scale with the growth in research outputs, there are potential system-wide savings, and reuse is simplified. Research funders generally reimburse publication charges, but even with broad funder support the details regarding the funding arrangements within universities it remain to be fully worked out. It is unclear where the market will set OA publication charges: they are currently lower than the historical average cost of article publication; about 25% of authors are from developing countries;

The APC model itself has become more complicated, with variable APCs (e.g. based on length), discounts, prepayments and institutional membership schemes, offsetting and bundling arrangements for hybrid publications, an individual membership scheme, and so on (page 91; 93).

On weak ties and faculty OER research

One thing that irritates me more than anything is the expectation people have to other people’s time, specifically open source project maintainers. They are not your tech support. They built a product you are using for free. You’re welcome.

The No. 1 Predictor Of Career Success According To Network Science

So, my fellow Americans, whatever you may believe, whether you prefer one party or no party, our collective future depends on your willingness to uphold your obligations as a citizen.  To vote.  To speak out.

It doesn’t work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice, or that our political opponents are unpatriotic.  Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise; or when even basic facts are contested, and we listen only to those who agree with us. 

It will only happen if we fix our politics. A better politics doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything.  This is a big country, with different regions and attitudes and interests.  That’s one of our strengths, too.  Our Founders distributed power between states and branches of government, and expected us to argue, just as they did, over the size and shape of government, over commerce and foreign relations, over the meaning of liberty and the imperatives of security.

That’s how we forged a Trans-Pacific Partnership to open markets, protect workers and the environment, and advance American leadership in Asia.  It cuts 18,000 taxes on products Made in America, and supports more good jobs.  With TPP, China doesn’t set the rules in that region, we do.  You want to show our strength in this century?  Approve this agreement.  Give us the tools to enforce it. 

how do we make technology work for us, and not against us

Supporting Open Textbook Adoption in British Columbia

For hundreds of years, the most important tools of humanistsand social scientists were pen or brush and paper. Today, scholars require a range of digital tools for research,teaching, and writing, including tools for finding, filtering and reviewing, processing and organizing, anno-tating, analyzing, and visualizing digital information. Even though we can point to current efforts in many ofthese areas, lack of coordination among them is a problem: a great deal of tool building is done on a localscale, and this results in unnecessary redundancy of effort.1

As NSFdirector Ardent L. Bement, Jr., observes, “with today's electrical grid. . . my neighbor and I can use differentappliances to meet our individual needs; as long as the appliances conform to certain electrical standards,they will work reliably,” and a sufficiently advanced cyberinfrastructure will work similarly: researchers willhave “easy access to the computing, communication, and information resources they need, while pursuingdifferent avenues of interest using different tools.”92

Access to data should be seamless across repositories. This will require standards-based tools and metadatathat ensure interoperability and enable use for a variety of purposes.

7. Develop and maintain open standards and robust tools.

Open Education Resources provide cheaper textbook alternative

massive advances in Open Educational Resources

one wonders about the relationships between scholarship, technology, and the academic institution that engendered that turn from printing materials to printing ideas.

export books as apps

Introduction to Sociology 2e

5 key lessons learned through the B.C. Open Textbook Project