the world’s knowledge is a public good

equalize access to knowledge and educational opportunities across the world

gives them access to the research for which they have already paid through their taxes

Priced access to journal articles would not scale with the continuing, explosive growth of knowledge even if prices were low today and guaranteed to remain low forever.

Even though journal prices have risen four times faster than inflation

This means that authors may publish in nearly any journal that will accept their work (OA or non-OA) and still provide OA to the peer-reviewed text through an OA repository

Directory of Open Access Journals

A growing number of universities maintain funds to pay publication fees on behalf of faculty who choose to publish in fee-based OA journals.

Peer review does not depend on the price or medium of a journal. Nor does the value, rigor, or integrity of peer review.

not carry over to research articles.

career-advancement

Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

Open educational resources

Government funding may not be used to duplicate or challenge the activities of the private sector (e.g. PubChem). Governments have to be accountable for the efficient use of taxpayer's money: If public funds are used to aggregate the data and if the data will bring commercial (private) benefits to only a small number of users, the users should reimburse governments for the cost of providing the data. The revenue earned by publishing data permits non-profit organisations to fund other activities (e.g. learned society publishing supports the society). The government gives specific legitimacy for certain organisations to recover costs (NIST in US, Ordnance Survey in UK). Privacy concerns may require that access to data is limited to specific users or to sub-sets of the data. Collecting, 'cleaning', managing and disseminating data are typically labour- and/or cost-intensive processes – whoever provides these services should receive fair remuneration for providing those services. Sponsors do not get full value unless their data is used appropriately – sometimes this requires quality management, dissemination and branding efforts that can best be achieved by charging fees to users. Often, targeted end-users cannot use the data without additional processing (analysis, apps etc.) – if anyone has access to the data, none may have an incentive to invest in the processing required to make data useful (typical examples include biological, medical, and environmental data).

Tunisian Open Data Portal for Energy & Mines / data.industrie.gov.tn, launched in June 2015;[16] Ghana Open Data Initiative, launched in January 2012;[17] Japan Open Data Initiative, launched in December 2013;[18] Kenya Open Data Portal, launched in July 2011;[19] United Kingdom Data.gov.uk platform, launched in January 2010;[20] United States Open Government Initiative, which operates at the federal level.[21] University of Babylon Open Access Repository (Arabic), and Academic/Personnel Data Collections[22][23] Singapore government's one-stop portal to publicly-available datasets from public agencies, launched in 2011.

open access to scientific data

Numerous scientists have pointed out the irony that right at the historical moment when we have the technologies to permit worldwide availability and distributed process of scientific data, broadening collaboration and accelerating the pace and depth of discovery...we are busy locking up that data and preventing the use of correspondingly advanced technologies on knowledge.

A piece of data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike.

extend its evil empire

debian-legal tests for DFSG compliance

It can be sometimes hard to define what constitutes the "source" for multimedia files, such as whether an uncompressed image file is the source of a compressed image and whether the 3D model before ray tracing is the source for its resulting image.

Integrity of the author's source code (as a compromise).

Enjoyment predicts efficiency.

To define goals and keep everybody pointed in the same direction To monitor and make sure crucial details don't get skippedTo motivate people to do boring but necessary drudgeworkTo organize the deployment of people for best productivityTo marshal resources needed to sustain the project

start by finding a problem that is interesting to you

To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you

The ``severe effort of many converging wills'' is precisely what a project like Linux requires—and the ``principle of command'' is effectively impossible to apply among volunteers in the anarchist's paradise we call the Internet. To operate and compete effectively, hackers who want to lead collaborative projects have to learn how to recruit and energize effective communities of interest in the mode vaguely suggested by Kropotkin's ``principle of understanding''. They must learn to use Linus's Law

leadership by coercion would not produce the results we see

entire world

egoless programming

Open source,'' he correctly observed, ``is not magic pixie dust

It is not a coincidence that Linus is a nice guy who makes people like him and want to help him. It's not a coincidence that I'm an energetic extrovert who enjoys working a crowd and has some of the delivery and instincts of a stand-up comic. To make the bazaar model work, it helps enormously if you have at least a little skill at charming people

Early reviewers and test audiences for this essay consistently raised questions about the preconditions for successful bazaar-style development, including both the qualifications of the project leader and the state of code at the time one goes public and starts to try to build a co-developer community.

this doesn't change just because they're not paying you in money

fetchmail

Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong

If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

contributors for any given project are self-selected

In Linus's Law, I think, lies the core difference underlying the cathedral-builder and bazaar styles. In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop confidence that you've winkled them all out. Thus the long release intervals, and the inevitable disappointment when long-awaited releases are not perfect.In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena—or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quickly when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release. Accordingly you release often in order to get more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out the door.

ego-satisfying piece of the action, rewarded by the sight of constant (even daily) improvement in their work

you often don't really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)

release early and often

Who would have thought even five years ago (1991) that a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet, connected only by the tenuous strands of the Internet

See

Sun stated at the time that they were concerned about preventing forking of the Java platform.

in the case of Java, the main open source implementation is by now very close to the commercial version

Google cannot yet convert Office documents into its own proprietary Google Docs format correctly

Stallman still maintained, however, that users of each term were allies in the fight against proprietary software.

When the USL v. BSDi lawsuit was settled out of court in 1993, FreeBSD and NetBSD (both derived from 386BSD) were released as free software. In 1995, OpenBSD forked from NetBSD. In 2004, Dragonfly BSD forked from FreeBSD.

non-profit funding and support organization

In 1989, the first version of the GNU General Public License was published.[18] A slightly updated version 2 was published in 1991. In 1989, some GNU developers formed the company Cygnus Solutions.[19] The GNU project's kernel, later called "GNU Hurd", was continually delayed, but most other components were completed by 1991. Some of these, especially the GNU Compiler Collection, had become market leaders[clarification needed] in their own right. The GNU Debugger and GNU Emacs were also notable successes.

software-only companies began routinely charging for software licences

without any exchange of money (or lawsuits).

openly shared

o single definition is universally accepted,

Many more scaling up and verifying iterations of this work need to be conducted before the field can claim to have robust knowledge in the area of sustaining OER initiatives

how does one continue to fund, on an ongoing basis, a program whose goal is to give things away for free

nspired to purchase an academic course.

Flat World Knowledge (http://flatworldknowledge.com/) and CK12 (http://ck12.org) publish Creative Commons licensed textbooks that can be broken down into individual OER for revising and remixing. Connexions (http://cnx.org/) is a Wikipedia-like site that allows users to create individual modules and compile these with modules created by otherusers to make textbooks (using a “one module equalsone chapter” model). PediaPress (http://pediapress.com/) allows users to aggregate Wikipedia articles into printable booksas well, where each Wikipedia article appears as an individual chapter in the printed book

Open Publication License and GNU Free Documentation License combine for fewer than 5

Creative Commons license

four permissions

a universal educational resource available for the whole of humanity

final layer of the license design recognizes that software

human readable

We call this the Legal Code layer of each license

You let others copy, distribute, display, perform, and (unless you have chosen NoDerivatives) modify and use your work for any purpose other than commercially unless they get your permission first

You let others copy, distribute, display, perform, and modify your work, as long as they distribute any modified work on the same terms. If they want to distribute modified works under other terms, they must get your permission first

we’re seeing the emergence of more sophisticated anti-open strategies like the “good will” and “inoculation” strategies of openwashing

less likely to become fully invested in the real power of open when they encounter it in the future

the only way it can benefit from the public’s good will toward open is to redefine the word as describing something their business model actually permits

I’ve liked what I’ve read by Laster in the past and am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt with regard to his intentions in this opinion piece.

are free

How Much Do College Students Actually Pay For Textbooks?, Phil Hill

groceries, pay for rent, pay for their transportation to internships, make payments on their loans, save for future education, take more classes, replace shoes with holes in them, buy diapers for their children

just one of their traditional textbooks replaced with OER or an open textbook, it would save students in this country more than $1 billion dollars annually

the program has expanded to provide training and workshops to a number of other campuses across the country

full-time staff member that would promote OER

At an overall investment to-date of $96,250 in grants to faculty, the program has generated over $1.1 million dollars in savings.

grantees meet at the end of each academic cycle to compare experiences and share best practices

students

Open Education Initiative, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

the professor

Institutions and all stakeholders in higher education should take greater ownership over solving the problem of high textbook prices, and can do so effectively by providing the training and resources faculty need to convert their classroom to an open textbook

$128 per course

Associate of Science in Business Administration

earn better grades than students in traditional classes

a textbook for an introductory course in psychology at College of the Redwoods cost $174.19, while the average cost of a textbook for the same course at Tompkins Cortland Community College was $67.36

KOCI included eight colleges or community colleges (the initiative has since grown to over 20 schools

(1) eliminate textbook costs as a barrier to student success, (2) improve the quality of course designs in order to increase student success, and (3) create a collaborative community to share learning and investment in the project

governments

$900 (U.S.D) annually

instructors might desire

Libraries can play an important role in the successful implementation of digital

finding innovative ways of teaching and learning without an assigned textbook

but the reasons are unclear from this research

concerns

(73%) of the faculty and staff hadheard of open textbooks

Seventy percent of the respondents indicated that having lifetime access to digital textbooks in their major area of study was important or very important. Lifetime access to other textbooks, however, is considerably less important to them

9% said textbooks were not available for checkout

1.Support greater development of openly licensed course materials, and use that content to deliver low-cost or free textbooks to students2.Address student and consumer frustrations around bundling, access code, and other unmerited use restrictions3.Partner with open textbook providers to provide low-cost supplementary materials and services like homework help and study materials around open textbooks

Open textbooks, and openly licensed resources in general, are growing in both volume and use, but, despite their merits, they have yet to fully disrupt and upend the traditional market

If applied to the enrolled undergraduate population in the United States, this finding means that over 5.2 million students use financial aid to purchase their textbooks

year-round full-time job would leave that student in a financial deficit.

For students using financial aid, 70% of their total textbook expenses were covered by financial aid on average

faculty reported being more aware of affordability issues and cost considerations than they were previously

Skewed perceptions about learning materials that value frills over efficacy

For those that used financial aid, the amount of financial aid dollars they put toward purchasing textbooks was more than $300 on average per semester.

The result of a nationwide survey of nearly 5,000 students,

he cost of a college textbook increased by 73%i- over four times the rate of inflation.Today, individual textbooks often cost over $200, sometimes as high as $400

more than 9 in 10 faculty believe that they should be assigning more OER.

contribution to student loan debt

The most recent, including over 18,000 students, asks students directly about the impact of textbook costs on their academic career:

And textbook publishers are suffering

It is important to look at both types of data – textbook list prices and student expenditures

per capita college student expenditures on textbooks has stayed relatively flat at approximately $600 per year.

choosing not to acquire the course materials – is rapidly growing. According to Student Monitor, 30% of students choose to not acquire every college textbook.

this means that textbook prices are rising roughly 3 times the rate of inflation.

unfulfilled potential of open educational resources (OER)

Others envision a less disruptive future for OER, suggest-ing that the model for higher education will persist in a form not wholly different from what it is today, but enhanced with high-quality, open, digital content.

The abundance of OER can leave users spending a long time searching for a resource that fits their needs, and the volume of OER will only increase. OER repositories and the tools to search for and filter resources will need to build out their capacities and ca-pabilities to help instructors and individual learners navigate the growing sea of open content. part of this process is evaluating the credibility of individual resources or collections, and new mecha-nisms are likely to emerge to facilitate this. To some extent, partner-ships (with certain publishers, for example) have begun to fill this role, allowing faculty members to choose from lists of reviewed (or “approved”) open resources; other means of assessing the quality of OER will surely be developed. Even when a resource is deemed accurate and effective, resources might need to meet even higher standards to be included in for-credit courses. What organization will have the authority to sanction a resource or a collection of re-sources for degree- or certification-granting programs?

like all educational resources, the quality of OER can be uneven and depends largely on their sources. Some OER are sim-ply ineffective at presenting content in a valuable manner, and not all OER collections have a feedback mechanism by which users can share their evaluations about the quality of a resource. The value of educational resources tends to decrease without periodic updating, and many open resources are not kept current. Even within an OER repository that is operated and sanctioned by a respected institution, individual resources might not be held to the same standard of quality as the institution’s other offerings. The flipside of the flexibility of open resources is that many need to be adapted for use in a departmental or institutional context to meet local requirements or needs. Some open resources do not comply with accessibility requirements for users with disabilities. Whenever content is shared, and especially when it can be modi-fied, questions arise over intellectual property and copyright con-cerns. In some cases, faculty resistance to opening their resources can be an obstacle.

high-quality learning materials and activities for a full complement of courses can be prohibitive for many institutions and instructors.

promote collaboration and participation

vetted and improved by a broad community of educators, resulting in materials that represent what the educational com-munity sees as most valuable

Why is it significant?

Free information is a fundamental human right

best courses and even degree programs

They are important for developing countries, where many students may not be able to afford textbooks, where access to classrooms may be limited, and where teacher-training programs may be lacking. They are also important in wealthy industrialized countries, where they can offer significant cost savings

The fact that participation levels have not kept pace with education gainscalls into question the true causal effect of education.

10% of employed high school graduates

16% of employed college graduates work two or more jobs

Fifty-eight percent of employed college graduates always or usually work in an office, nearly double the percentage of employed adults with just a high school education (30%). In fact, a plurality of employed adults without any college education (43%) say they never work in an office setting.

Telling dichotomies between high school and college graduates are found in their job types. Forty percent of employed college graduates work in a "professional specialty," as do only 3% of employed high school graduates with no college education. Conversely, 15% of employed high school graduates are in "service" jobs, compared to only 5% of employed college graduates, and 24% of high school graduates with no college education are "operators, fabricators, and laborers," compared with less than 1% of college graduates. Twenty-six percent of employed college graduates are in managerial or executive positions, compared with 14% of employed adults with only a high school education.

A million dollars is a great deal of money. And that's about how much more a college graduate will earn than a high school graduate over the course of a career, according to the latest Census Bureau statistics.

the one that correlates most highly with overall job satisfaction is having the opportunity to do what you do best -- whatever that may be

Time and money have been long held to be important components of job satisfaction -- the more you get of both, the happier you're supposed to be. And supposedly, the more education you have, the more of both you get.

regardless of education, American workers across the board are generally quite satisfied with their jobs. But the survey results also indicate that satisfaction with the traditional fruits of education -- such as more vacation time and a job's income -- don't vary much with educational achievement.