The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a major player in health-related research. We’re very pleased to learn that the Gates Foundation is now requiring its grantees to publish their work in immediately available (aka Gold) open access journals. This policy doesn’t go into force until January 2017 but between then and now, Gates Foundation grantees are expected to publish in hybrid (partial) open access journals that make their content freely available 12 months after publication. Way to go, Gates Foundation!
October 20-24 is International Open Access Week
October 20-24 is International Open Access Week http://www.openaccessweek.org/!
Learn more about Open Access and why it matters to academics and researchers as well as students and libraries. Here is a great handout created by Professor Jill Cirasella, Associate Librarian for Public Services & Scholarly Communication, CUNY Graduate Center http://openaccess.commons.gc.cuny.edu/files/2011/05/OA-The-Very-Basics-Oct-2013.pdf (see attached as well).
Join the discussion and keep up with what’s happening related to Open Access on the CUNY Academic Commons. The OA @ CUNY blog http://openaccess.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ is a great place to start and the Resources link will lead you to other related sites on the Academic Commons. Interested in attending an event this week? See http://openaccess.commons.gc.cuny.edu/category/open-access-week/oa-week-2014/ for listings.
The library will be doing a faculty program and workshop on predatory publishing on November 11, 5-6:30 pm, Faculty Commons. Anyone with an .edu email address gets spammy emails about journals and conferences–these are usually from predatory publishers. Attendees will learn the hows and whys of predatory publishing, a small but alarming subset of all Open Access publishers. The workshop component will address how to identify hallmarks of predatory publishers. Please rsvp to Professor Keith Muchowski, kmuchowski@citytech.cuny.edu.
Support open access to taxpayer-funded research!
There’s a petition that began recently to ask the White House to require academic and scientific research funded by federal dollars to be made available for all to read free of charge. This is called open access publishing, and support for open access has been growing in the scholarly and library community over the past several decades.
Here at the City Tech Library we’re big fans of open access publishing, and have held many events over the years. We’ve even pledged to publish our own research open access whenever possible. When research is published open access everyone — students, patients, researchers who don’t work at a wealthy university, you, and me — can read it free of charge, and use it to teach, learn, and innovate.
Help support open access to federally-funded research! Head over to the White House website and sign the petition. The petition has until June 19th to reach 25,000 signatures, which guarantees an official response from the Administration (which is currently considering a bill called the Federal Research Public Access Act).
For more details about the issues surrounding open access publishing, check out this short video, and great website. There’s also the open access publishing network on the CUNY Academic Commons — if you’re interested in more discussion and action about open access publishing, please join us!
Open Science and You!
What is the Open Science Revolt, and what does it mean for you, the researcher? Find out more about Open Science and the Federal Research Public Access Act over at Wired.
Egyptian Archeology at Michigan State
Have you ever wanted to learn about Egyptian archeology, but wished you had someone to walk you through it? You’re in luck. This week Boingboing has a post about an Open Access course being offered by a professor at Michigan State University. Only students enrolled in the class can take it for course credit, but those who are interested have access to much of the course content and are invited to participate in blog discussions with the rest of the class. If you’ve thought about taking (or teaching) an Open Access course, the professor includes a useful summary of what it is and how it works on his class website.
Liberation bibliography!
Post-Open Access Week musing from Barbara Fister: Open to All: Preserving Library Values in a Digital World – Inside Higher Ed.
Why Share Open Educational Resources?
reposted in the original source’s entirety: http://collegeopentextbooks.org/blog/?p=566
Why would anyone want to share their course, their best ideas, their intellectual property?
Why would someone openly license their digital work with a creative commons license? According to Hilton and Wiley (2010), there are four common reasons people might be motivated to share their educational resources:
Receive Increased Exposure: sharing your work openly online allows access to many more people
― Lawrence Lessig published his book Free Culture in 2004. Although the book has sold tens of thousands copies, the free digital version has been downloaded several hundred thousand times. Perhaps more importantly, it has been translated into seven different languages, audio versions are freely available, and it has been put into sixteen different file formats. All of these translations and format changes are freely available for others to download.‖ (p. 6).
Give New Life to Out-of-Print Works: openly licensed works never go out of print
― A significant problem in the publishing world relates to orphan books (Boyle, 2008). These are books that are out-of-print, and the copyright owner of the books cannot easily be identified. As time passes the out-of-print book becomes increasingly unavailable, as publishers merge and authors change locations, it can become impossible to locate‖ (p. 7).
Improve the Quality of Educational Resources: when resources are “open” and can be reused, redistributed, revised and remixed … they can get better over time
― When an educational resource is published openly it may bring about the mechanisms of peer review (Wiley, 2009). If people know their educational resource will be viewed by others they might desire to make it better than they ordinarily would. In addition, as others use the resource they may improve it and return the revised version to the creator, who then benefits from the improvement‖ (p. 8).
― Openness has a tendency to lead to better material used in courses not only because faculty can build on other open resources, but simply because teachers can more easily see what other teachers are doing. Just as observing others teach has been shown to improve teaching (Elmore, 1997), observing the educational resources that others use in the classroom may also improves teaching. Thus OERs benefit both the teachers‖ (p. 8).
Do Some Good: sharing educational resources helps people around the world access a higher education
To get a sense of what’s possible when we share open educational resources, read the Cape Town Declaration.
― We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge.‖
Dr. Cable Green is Director of eLearning & Open Education, SBCTC.
He blogs about ―open issues at: http://blog.oer.sbctc.edu
Columbia goes OA
Columbia’s on the OA bandwagon–“Columbia University has joined … several leading institutions of higher learning in a commitment to a Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity. Other signatories to the compact are Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley.”
