With over 36 million visitors each month, the San Francisco-based platform-capitalist company Academia.edu is hugely popular with researchers. Its founder and CEO Richard Price maintains it is the ‘largest social-publishing network for scientists’, and ‘larger than all its competitors put together’. Yet posting on Academia.edu is far from being ethically and politically equivalent to using an institutional open access repository, which is how it is often understood by academics. Academia.edu’s financial rationale rests on the ability of the venture-capital-funded professional entrepreneurs who run it to monetize the data flows generated by researchers. Academia.edu can thus be seen to have a parasitical relationship to a public education system from which state funding is steadily being withdrawn.

Defining the "Open" in Open Content

The four freedoms don’t limit us as creators — they open possibilities for us as creators and consumers. When you apply them to software, you get Linux, Webkit/Chrome, and WordPress. When you apply them to medicine, you get the Open Genomics Engine, which is accelerating cancer research and bringing us closer to personalized treatment. When you apply them to companies, you get radically geographically distributed, results-based organizations like Automattic. When you apply them to events you get TEDx, Barcamp, and WordCamp. When you apply them to knowledge, you get Wikipedia.

as of December 2013, 21% of websites are powered by WordPress. One-fifth of the web is built with a tool that anyone can use, change, or improve, whenever and however they want (even more when you count other open source projects

B2 was ultimately abandoned by its creator. If I’d been using it under a proprietary license, that would have been the end — for me, and all its other users. But because we had freedoms 2 and 3, Mike Little and I were able to use the software as a foundation

I’ve spent a third of my life building software based on Stallman’s four freedoms, and I’ve been astonished by the results. WordPress wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for those freedoms, and it couldn’t have evolved the way it has. WordPress was based on a program called B2/cafelog that predated it by two years. I was using B2 because it had freedoms 0 and 1

UNDERSTANDINGOPEN ACCESS

The real problem with textbooks, though, is that focusing on them is focusing on content. When learning, and open education, should focus more on process (a conversation on this from a year ago across my blog, Jim Groom’s, Mike Caulfield’s and David Wiley’s).

“why textbooks?”

Is That What We Meant?

Northern Virginia Community College’s Extended Learning Institute (ELI) and open courseware provider Lumen Learning announced a collaboration to publish 24 online college courses for two complete degree programs. All courses were developed for zero student cost using open educational resources (OER)

Companies that open source a project and then abandon it need to publicly acclaim the people taking over the project and make a clear change in ownership.

Companies need to have realistic expectations of the work-life balance of open source maintainers.

effectively contribute and participate in upstream projects

They should be treated like adults though and allowed to spend what they see as an appropriate amount of time working on the project versus other projects for the company. Trying to quanitfy/limit the amount of time leads to conflict and strife and unhappy management and employees. It doesn't work and it's not a long term, maintainable solution.

Some projects work to actively alienate corporations trying to contribute because of ideology. This is not the path that will lead us to sustainable open source software development and companies that can contribute responsibly.

The company refuses to expand the core development team with non-employees

TwitterOSS team (hint: their funding as a department was cut)

sometimes you find a bounty like this one where a company has added a significant amount to a bug

U Wisconsin Stout Gets Grant for Open Textbook Pilot

All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier’s policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online. As soon as January, when the departing editors’ noncompete contracts expire, they plan to start a new open-access journal to be called Glossa.”

open access

Better Lesson: A Common Core Aligned OER

USD 501 teachers looking to replace science textbooks with Web-based instruction

What Open-Access Publishing Actually Costs

This article included an estimate from the system that further backs up the $530 – $640 figures. [Hanley’s] rough estimate: As of a few years ago, learners at the 23-campus, 460,200-student university system were spending $300 million a year on course materials — about $651 per student per school year.

Open Education Handbook 2014

Open Education We believe that educational opportunities should be available to all learners. Creating an open education ecosystem involves making learning materials, data, and educational opportunities available without restrictions imposed by copyright laws, access barriers, or exclusive proprietary systems that lack interoperability and limit the free exchange of information.

“Instead of having one prescribed way to do things that comes from a textbook, kids can do things where they’re truly interested,” says Lori Secrist. “When they’re truly interested, they’re engaged. And when they’re engaged, they learn.”

Discover, Search and Find

creation of an OER culture among faculty

Letter: Legislators should stand up for students

A&M University Libraries Working To Solve Problem Of Expensive Textbooks

U of M's Open Textbook Network reports student savings of $1.5 million from open textbooks

Open/Alternative Textbook Initiative

Of the two textbooks Mr. Bourget chose as replacements, one cost $76 and the other was free.

new textbook initiative

long time curating these tomes

If you deal with PDFs online, you’ve probably noticed that some are different from others. Some are really just images.

Technology is the only way to dramatically expand access to knowledge. Why should students be limited to a textbook that was printed two years ago, and maybe designed 10 years ago, when they could have access to the world's best and most up-to-date textbook?

He gave the example of digital textbooks which can be updated as an example of how online technology could be better than traditional methods.

College Textbooks: Do You Get What You Pay For?

The second level of Open Access is Gold Open Access, which requires the author to pay the publishing platform a fee to have their work placed somewhere it can be accessed for free. These fees can range in the hundreds to thousands of dollars.

OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation.

access

studies show that people with a large amount of bridging capital have a greater sense of connection to the broader community, a more open-minded attitude, and a greater ability to mobilize support for a cause.

taking advantage of free, "open source" textbooks.

The W3C Annotation Working Group has a joint deliverable with the W3C Web Application Working Group called “Robust Anchoring”. This deliverable will provide a general framework for anchoring; and, although defined within the framework of annotations, the specification can also be used for other fragment identification use cases. Similarly, the W3C Media Fragments specification [media-frags] may prove useful to address some of the use cases. Finally, the Streamable Package Format draft, mentioned above, also includes a fragment identification mechanism. Would that package format be adopted for EPUB+WEB, that fragment identification may also come to the fore as an important mechanism to consider.

it was only a problem for researchers in the developing world

Keyan Tomaselli does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

While these features have connected untold millions and created new forms of social organization, they also come at a cost. Material seems to vanish almost as quickly as it is created, disappearing amid broken links or into the constant flow of the social media “stream.” It can be hard to distinguish fact from falsehood. Corporations have stepped into this confusion, organizing our browsing and data in decidedly closed, non-transparent ways. Did it really have to turn out this way?

In an academic world ever more infiltrated by fraudsters, con artists and pirates, one can still trust the content and academic integrity of scientific society journals and long-standing corporate publishers. They protect against article and journal cloning, identity theft, bogus journals, forgery, author substitution, fake metrics, and prevent outright intellectual property theft.

Shared information

The promise of OA lies more in prospects for social success than in the model's descriptive power.

However, if an open access version of a text is available, this must always be treated as the primary text. Here the commercial version of the text becomes the secondary version and it should always be cited second and in a manner that makes this completely clear. For instance, after the primary reference to the full text, you could write: ‘Also available as: ….’

open access

77 cents of every dollar spent on textbooks go to publishers. Of those 77 cents, the publishing company makes about 18 cents in pure profit, while spending 15 cents on marketing, and roughly 32 percent to cover costs (paper, printing, employee salaries, etc). At the same time, the author - the person who dedicated hundreds of hours of research to write the book – only gets about 12 cents on the dollar on average.

Promoting digital ownership is different than assigning work in publicly accessible spaces.

The Training and Learning Architecture (TLA) encompasses a set of standardized Web service specifications and Open Source Software (OSS) designed to create a rich environment for connected training and learning.

Journals in which all peer reviewed scholarly articles are online available without any restrictions and for which an Article Processing Charge (APC) has been paid.

Digital writing is the first kind of writing that does not reduce recorded knowledge to a rivalrous object. If we all have the right equipment, then we can all have copies of the same digital text without excluding one another, without multiplying our costs, and without depleting our resources.

Gold open access provides everyone with access to articles during all stages of publication, with processing charges paid by the author(s).

a chaotic way of managing a project as that project gets big

the nature of low-bandwidth communication on the internet probably just exposes you to misunderstandings and you end up stressing out over things vs being the friends you normally would.

The odds that an open access journal is referenced on the English Wikipedia are 47% higher compared to closed access journals,” say Teplitskiy and co.

equal access

Answer: a minimum of $80,000, more likely around $130,000.

While the process of developing critical editions will still take some time, Phase 1 of Open Modernisms places reliable texts in student hands through the MVP and Open Modernisms, more or less immediately and without the cost of the book to house it.

Engineers who worked on a lot of open source projects had high levels of creativity

Developers felt more ownership over their work, and pride in it

Open source developers work well together because of their similar ways of thinking

Peer pressure from GitHub—having their name on a project—was a big motivator for engineers to work harder and not let the community of users down.

If they leave, they're likely to keep working on the project, so you're still getting value for free!

Author and peer reviewer anonymity haven’t been shown to have an overall benefit, and they may cause harm. Part of the potential for harm is if journals act as though it’s a sufficiently effective mechanism to prevent bias.

Peer reviewers were more likely to substantiate the points they made (9, 14, 16, 17) when they knew they would be named. They were especially likely to provide extra substantiation if they were recommending an article be rejected, and they knew their report would be published if the article was accepted anyway (9, 15).

5.4 STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF MOOCS

The best currently available evidence shows that the methods and results of clinical trials are routinely withheld from doctors, researchers, and patients [2–5], undermining our best efforts at informed decision making.

A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.

To suggest that faculty are innocently waiting to be pounced on by predators is to deny their agency and their ability to make choices about their own work. There may be days where that metaphor seems apt, but I think overall this is a damaging mentality to librarians interested in promoting new models of scholarly communication.

“fluency”

’d love to hear thoughts on this approach to placing a lens on the Web Literacy Map. Please ask questions, push back, give feedback to this thinking-in-progress.

Any contributor to our open source projects is already familiar with a bit of software that we use internally and would require less training if they joined the company.

At Twitter, our open source program has a team of developer advocates focused on growing open source ecosystems which are important for us to ensure they thrive and evolve to our benefit.

hosting events, speaking at conferences, reaching out to contributors, writing documentation to lower the barrier of entry to new contributors

suffers from an over protective legal organization

respecting open source licenses to making it easier for engineers to open source code and ensuring we’re giving back to the open source projects we depend on

Yet, these are not certain, and the future of the ecosystem as I hope to shape it depends upon a growing core of influencers who are genuinely committed to and uncompromising about the value of the commons.

democratizing technology and authoritarian technology.

There are inherent affordances and limitations to the technology that make some things possible and other things more likely. At the same time, there are complex individual and societal forces that impact how it develops, especially the power structures that develop alongside a given technology.

but they are instead examining how it developed in a give context.

We saw this happen with Microsoft. It started out with a big vision: How do we get a PC on every desk and in every home? It was profoundly democratizing.

Here’s a presentation at the 2013 Personal Democracy Forum that provides a little more context for our project.

lowRISC is producing fully open hardware systems. From the processor core to the development board, our goal is to create a completely open computing eco-system. Our open-source SoC (System-on-a-Chip) designs will be based on the 64-bit RISC-V instruction set architecture. Volume silicon manufacture is planned as is a low-cost development board. There are more details on our plans in these slides from a recent talk lowRISC is a not-for-profit organisation working closely with the University of Cambridge and the open-source community.

Ronja is a free technology project for reliable optical data links with a current range of 1.4km and a communication speed of 10Mbps full duplex. Applications of this wireless networking device include backbone of free, public, and community networks, individual and corporate Internet connectivity, and also home and building security. High reliability and availability linking is possible in combination with WiFi devices. The Twibright Ronja datalink can network neighbouring houses with cross-street ethernet access, solve the last mile problem for ISP’s, or provide a link layer for fast neighbourhood mesh networks.