Can open educational resources, or OER, truly create more equity and access?

How do we keep building an education where students feel like full agents, owners of their own learning, while also being given the necessary tools? Laptops, domain space, but much more importantly, food, shelter, accommodations and compassion?

Give every family access to a free accelerated AA degree

open access

access to one-on-one (and possible small circle) consultations for a fee

access to the top researchers in the field

if cross-format identifiers like DOIs are used, annotations made in one format (eg, EPUB) can be seen in the same document published in other formats (eg, HTML, PDF) and in other locations.

he challenge therefore is in ensuring that the Web remains open, in that it is accessible to as many users as it can be, with the aim of not disadvantaging anyone.

OER: Bigger Than Affordability

If OER is appealing because they can help make knowledge more accessible, then we must care about the myriad issues -- from child care to transportation -- that prevent our potential students from even coming to our classrooms in the first place.

How library collections budgets work By Library Loon 27 October 2017 Library as organization, Scholarly communication 3 Comments “Why can’t open-access initiatives get some of that sweet, sweet library budget money?” the Loon was asked (well, entitledly whinged at, but it comes to much the same thing). Short answer: The librarians in charge of allocating collections money have no incentive to support open access, and the librarians (supposedly) in charge of changing scholarly communication have either zero budget or strictly-earmarked budgets that do not permit this use. QED.

In Bangladesh, as an example, only 0.3% of the population have access to Internet(CIA 2008).

Call for Papers: Special Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) edition

face an urgent need to increase access and success when it comes to education

Sci-Hub has made nearly all articles freely available using a black open access model, leaving green and gold models in its dust

Filtering obligations -Undermining the foundations of Open Access7.The provisions of Article 13 threaten the accessibility of scientific articles, publications and research data made available through over 1250 repositoriesmanaged byEuropean non-profit institutions and academiccommunities. These repositories, which are essential for Open Access and Science in Europe, are likely to face significant additional operational costs associated with implementing new filtering technologyandthe legal costs of managing the risks of intermediary liability. The additional administrative burdens of policing this contentwould add to these costs. Such repositories, run on a not-for-profit basis, are not equipped to take onsuch responsibilities, and may face closure. This would be a significant blow, creating new risks forimplementing funder, research council and other EU Open Access policies.

Springer Nature is pleased to present the subscription price list.

a particularly influential one published in Nature in 1970 by Ulrich Laemelli, on a new method of electrophoresis revealing as yet unknown proteins in a bacteriophage (unfortunately, if you don’t have a subscription, you’ll need to pay to read the whole paper…)

Guzzella: Der Closed Access kann ja wohl nicht die Alternative sein. Da gibt man gewissen Firmen oder Verlagen die Möglichkeit, massiv Profit damit zu machen. Die Forschung wurde ja von der Öffentlichkeit finanziert – also soll die Gesellschaft als Ganzes profitieren.

Leviathan

Doch zunehmend gewinnt man den Eindruck, dass auch Bibliotheken mehr und mehr tangiert werden von aktuellen politischen Umwälzungen und Ereignissen, denen sie sich nicht mehr verschliessen können und dürfen. Da ist zum Beispiel das Thema «Open Access», das deutlich mehr ist als eine weitere Spielart der Literaturversorgung. Es ist vielmehr eine politische und wirtschaftliche Problematik, die bis in die Führung von Staaten reicht und auf der gleichen Ebene wie Wirtschaftssubventionen oder Marktinterventio-nen abgehandelt wird. Denn die Konsequenzen sind so ge-waltig und grundlegend, dass viele Akteure sie nicht mehr zu überschauen scheinen und das Thema mit einem blossen Aktionismus mit ungewissem Ausgang vorantreiben.Gerade hier ist es wichtig, dass sich Bibliotheken ihrer Jahrhunderte alten Tradition als Kultur- und Gedächtnis-institution erinnern und neuen Trends – zumal wenn sie irreversible Konsequenzen haben – mit dem notwendigen Sachverstand und der gebotenen Tiefe nähern und die be-teiligten Akteure mit validen Informationen und Statements unterstützen. Die ETH-Bibliothek ist gerade bei diesem Thema im besten Sinne des Wortes professionell mit dabei: Qualifiziert, durchdacht, konstruktiv, aber ohne Schnell-schüsse.

“bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.

In the early '90s, so-called open access journals started to make scientific research free to anyone with working WiFi by shifting costs to scientists, who pay an upfront fee to cover editing.

60% thought they should be allowed to upload their articles regardless of publisher or journal policies

Faudra-t-il attendre des décrets d’application pour que la loi devienne applicable ? Non. L’adoption de décrets va en effet être nécessaire pour d’autres parties de la loi République numérique (notamment celle relatives à l’Open Data et à l’exception en faveur du Text et Data Mining). Néanmoins, l’article 30 ne mentionne nullement la nécessité d’adopter des décrets et il sera donc directement applicable à la date d’entrée en vigueur de la loi (c’est-à-dire le 9 octobre 2016).

Samson-Steinbach Delphine, Legeai Fabrice, Karsenty Emmanuelle et al. (2003) GénoPlante-Info (GPI): a collection of databases and bioinformatics resources for plant genomics. Nucleic Acids Res., 31, 179–182.

By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

focus on what is likely to be true rather than what is likely to sell

largest cause of misunderstanding is lack of familiarity

Open Educational Resources and Institutional Repositories

Open Access policy adopted by IU Bloomington faculty

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AbstractThe main objective of this prospective longitudinal study was to investigate bidirectional associations between adolescent cannabis use (CU) and neurocognitive performance in a community sample of 294 young men from ages 13 to 20 years.

Examples of bad peer review and why it is damaging to researchers

Federally Funded Research Results Are Becoming More Open and Accessible

The resource-based economy goes like this: In the future robots will do all the jobs (including creating new robots and fixing broken one). Now, imagine the world is like a public library, where you can borrow any book you want but never own it. Fresco wants all enterprise like this, whether it’s groceries, new tech, gasoline, or alcohol. He wants everything free and eventually provided to us by robots, software, and automation.

THE NEW FACE OF THE TEXTBOOK MONOPOLY

Smarter State Spending

The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review

There is a fruitful argument for the cost of these more “traditional” publishing houses, as they spend a good amount of time with editing, formatting, and distribution (often in paper form)

Unpaid Labor

Computers are not everything, theyare just an aspectof everything, and not to know this iscomputer illiteracy, a silly and dangerous ignorance.

able summarizing the federal public access policies

Figure 3 illustrates at what age ceased ‘indie’ journals stopped publishing. Most journals survived the first 2–5 years period, whereas the mortality rate rose in the critical 6–9 years period. After that, the number of journals ceasing dropped sharply, indicating that the surviving journals had found stability.

The development over time of active ‘indie’ OA journals before and after 2002 is shown in Figs. 1A and 1B. A journal was counted as ‘active’ in a particular year if it was still publishing articles in that year. Before 2002 the number of active journals grew very rapidly from a total of 76 journals in 1995 to 207 journals in 2002. The year 2002 was the cut-off year to be included in the studied cohort, meaning that no new journals were added to the data set after this point in time. After 2002, the number of journals in the cohort decreased steadily to the 127 that stayed active in 2014.

The average number of articles published was 31 per year with 74% publishing 0–30 articles, and 9% 60 or more. The study also contains interesting data about the workload done, revenues etc.

“The key question for OA publishing is whether it can be scaled up from a single journal publishing model with relatively few articles published per year to a comprehensive major journal with of the order of 50–100 articles annually.” They further note: “The continuation of the journal relies very heavily on the personal involvement of the editor and is as such a risk to the model. Employing staff to handle, for example, management, layout and copyediting tasks, is a cost-increasing factor that also is a threat to the model.” Both questions are still highly relevant today.

Earlier studies A number of previous studies, both snapshots and some with longitudinal elements, have shed light on different aspects of such type of journals, which for short we will call “indie” journals.

Often the enthusiasm of the founders and their personal network can carry a volunteer-based journal for a few years. But at that same time this type of journal, which lack the support of employed staff and a professional publishing organization, are threatened by many dangers. The editor may change affiliation or retire, or the support of the university hosting the journal might be withdrawn. Authors may stop sending in good manuscripts and it may become more and more difficult to find motivated reviewers. Not being included in the Web of Science, and the impact factor that follows, may in the long run limit the number of submissions severely. On the positive side of the balance the emergence of open source software for publishing (i.e., Open Journals System) and cheap or free hosting services like Latin American Scielo have facilitated the technical parts of publishing.

Most of the OA journals founded in the 1990s were of this variety, later many established subscription journals (particularly society ones) have made their digital versions freely available immediately or with a delay. This has been particularly noticeable in countries where cheap or free national or regional electronic portals have become available, like Scielo, Redalyc, and J-stage. Since around 2003 the OA market has become increasingly dominated by professionally published journals, which finance themselves by charging authors so-called article processing charges, APCs. At first such journals were being launched by open access publishers like BioMedCentral and PLOS, but in the last couple of years the major commercial and society publishers have increasingly started new OA journals and have also converted some subscription journals to APC-financed models.

Open Access (OA) is nowadays increasingly being used as a business model for the publishing of scholarly peer reviewed journals, both by specialized OA publishing companies and major, predominantly subscription-based publishers. However, in the early days of the web OA journals were mainly founded by independent academics, who were dissatisfied with the predominant print and subscription paradigm and wanted to test the opportunities offered by the new medium. There is still an on-going debate about how OA journals should be operated, and the volunteer model used by many such ‘indie’ journals has been proposed as a viable alternative to the model adopted by big professional publishers where publishing activities are funded by authors paying expensive article processing charges (APCs). Our longitudinal quantitative study of 250 ‘indie’ OA journals founded prior to 2002, showed that 51% of these journals were still in operation in 2014 and that the median number of articles published per year had risen from 11 to 18 among the survivors. Of these surviving journals, only 8% had started collecting APCs. A more detailed qualitative case study of five such journals provided insights into how such journals have tried to ensure the continuity and longevity of operations.

A longitudinal study of independent scholar-published open access journals

expand access to some knowledge

The copyright for the materials in this collection is held by Universal Music Canada and their affiliates. These materials have been made available with their consent. Patrons may not download, reproduce, alter or transmit files/images without permission from the copyright holder(s). These files/images may not be used for commercial purposes but may be used under the fair dealing or educational exemptions outlined in the Canadian Copyright Act.

New Hampshire System Plans Open Education Push

Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it?

List of publications on open access research data

SSRN had one of the early freemium business models for an open access service.

Input feed: lkfitz's bookmarks

5 billion reasons for open access

Open access is not fully realized without open peer review, which would provide opportunities for scholarly dialogue and critique throughout the writing process and beyond, argues Alex Mueller.

Work on exploitation arising from asymmetries of information is an important example.

Around 40% of Swiss research is open access

I utilize some of the useful critiques OA has generated to inform the discussion of OER creation and practice.

Active OER: Beyond open licensing policies

Do we mean free open access?

“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.

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

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

Researchers have ‘ethical obligation’ to share data

Academic Publishing is a Goddamned Exploitative Farce

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.

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

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.

Sci-Hub: the debate continues

High academic journal prices justify sharing of illegal articles

federally funded research publicly accessible are becoming the norm

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

What is Open Access?

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

Open Access Overview

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).

As there is a 'digital divide' so there is a 'linguistic divide'.

“What we’re seeing is that the general public wants to read scholarly papers.”

Dutch universities and Elsevier reach deal over open access

We find ourselves at a decisive moment. This is the time to recognize that the very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective civil disobedience. It is the time to emerge from hiding and put our names behind this act of resistance. You may feel isolated, but there are many of us. The anger, desperation and fear of losing our library infrastructures, voiced across the internet, tell us that. This is the time for us custodians, being dogs, humans or cyborgs, with our names, nicknames and pseudonyms, to raise our voices. Share this letter - read it in public - leave it in the printer. Share your writing - digitize a book - upload your files. Don't let our knowledge be crushed. Care for the libraries - care for the metadata - care for the backup. Water the flowers - clean the volcanoes.

In Elsevier's case against Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, the judge said: "simply making copyrighted content available for free via a foreign website, disserves the public interest"

legal changes often lead to negative outcomes. New laws can limit use, introduce new payments or make open licensing incompatible with the given legal system. In such cases, OER advocates need to take a stance in defense of the existing rules.

not all of the resources needed for education will be openly licensed — for example, modern education requires use of cultural resources that are in copyright and will never be openly licensed. We therefore need good and balanced rules allowing educators acting in the public interest to use these resources.

the development of OER provides proof for the need of strong user rights in education. By looking at effects of successful OER projects we can describe a future educational reality, in which institutions, educators, and students benefit from a more liberal copyright law. Part of the success of Wikipedia as an education tool is the fact that no one accessing the site, or copying it for students, needs to worry: “Is this legal?”

Anyone can say Anything

if free textbooks or OER offer learners free access to good quality knowledge

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.

UNDERSTANDINGOPEN ACCESS

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.”

What Open-Access Publishing Actually Costs

Open Education Handbook 2014

advocate for the preservation, archiving, and free c

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.

The facilitation ap-proachcreated opportunities for youth to participate in a variety of leadershiptasks. Youth participants routinely initiated the meetings, explained the agenda,and helped keep the group on task.

access

it was only a problem for researchers in the developing world