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

I think it’s very much analogous to whether a family would want to take them in.

Support for Creative Commons

content (or “learning resources”)

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

Steelcase & GVSU

Stanford d.school

the major governing body of the Internet

Dutch universities and Elsevier reach deal over open access

In addition to the improved performance, Big Sur is far more versatile and efficient than the off-the-shelf solutions in our previous generation. While many high-performance computing systems require special cooling and other unique infrastructure to operate, we have optimized these new servers for thermal and power efficiency, allowing us to operate them even in our own free-air cooled, Open Compute standard data centers.

Faculty Stipends for Open Educational Resources and Open Pedagogy

BCcampus estimates that students have saved nearly $1 million dollars already on textbook costs thanks to open textbooks.

The EDUPUB Initiative VitalSource regularly collaborates with independent consultants and industry experts including the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), Tech For All, JISC, Alternative Media Access Center (AMAC), and others. With the help of these experts, VitalSource strives to ensure its platform conforms to applicable accessibility standards including Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Accessibility Guidelines established by the Worldwide Web Consortium known as WCAG 2.0. The state of the platform's conformance with Section 508 at any point in time is made available through publication of Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs).  VitalSource continues to support industry standards for accessibility by conducting conformance testing on all Bookshelf platforms – offline on Windows and Macs; online on Windows and Macs using standard browsers (e.g., Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari); and on mobile devices for iOS and Android. All Bookshelf platforms are evaluated using industry-leading screen reading programs available for the platform including JAWS and NVDA for Windows, VoiceOver for Mac and iOS, and TalkBack for Android. To ensure a comprehensive reading experience, all Bookshelf platforms have been evaluated using EPUB® and enhanced PDF books.

W3C welcomes technical feedback on its Web Annotation specifications

public review of all of our specifications

user-generated content

a home for the project that provides them with some open source credibility as well as a community of potential adoptees and participants.

if the group should decide to fork Moodle together

the plugin work they wanted to do anyway

Moodlerooms, now owned by Blackboard Remote-Learner UK, now owned by Blackboard Netspot, now owned by Blackboard Nivel Siete, now owned by Blackboard

alliance of Moodle service providers that currently collaborate on Moodle-related projects of mutual interest

tout enregistrement MLR conforme au profil Normetic 2.0 est automatiquement conforme au profil d’application MLR de base.

In open education we have generally focused on the rights that individuals have to remix content, while not providing or using publishing tools that make it easy to fork content in ways that make sense to non-programming communities. Wikity attempts to apply the tools and logic of forking to WordPress, the world's most popular web content platform. Content published in Wikity is easily forked to new sites while maintaining an attribution trail and keeping track of past versions.

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"

Open education is a means, a way of doing something; it isn’t something. That something is for individuals to arrive at however they want to get there–that’s the point of making it all “open.” I hope they share that awesomeness when they arrive at it, but they don’t have to.

The goal of education is for the educator to become less and less needed for learners to learn.

Textbooks Out of Step With Scientists on Climate Change, Study Says

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

“open” as in students can modify it

it apparently meant allowing students to see the syllabus before they register

Encouraging students to curate their own content

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

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?”

That's why I say that data is the new oil for the digital age

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

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