News blog

Open Education Week

Starts today!
Open Education Week is taking place from 11-15 March 2013 online and in locally hosted events around the world. The purpose of Open Education Week is to raise awareness of the open education movement and opportunities it creates in teaching and learning worldwide. Participation in all events and use of all resources are free an open to everyone.

Implementing the UK Open Access policy: The embargoes for Green

Anyone who has been tracking the rapid transition from the recommendations of the Finch Group to the emergence of RCUK’s policy must admit that the horse-trading around OA embargoes caused considerable confusion. The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee report into the policy published on 22 February 2013 produced this graphic to highlight how it should work.

MOOC: The Real Digital Change Agent

Bryan Alexander, a senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, explores some potential explanations, including MOOCs’ relative novelty and their top-tier-university cachet. But the obvious answer is, as it nearly always is, money. For many institutions, MOOCs are viewed as a potential revenue stream, higher education’s business model of the future.
The Chronicle.

Tech Therapy: Episode 104: Professor Sees ‘Moral Imperative’ for Open Access

David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the University of Texas at Dallas, argues that scholars have an obligation to publish their research in journals that make free copies available online. The Tech Therapy team talks with him about how the debate over open access to research has heated up in recent months, and invites journal publishers to give their views on next month’s podcast.
The Chronicle.

On the EU Copyright Dialogue

In other words, the selfish obstinacy of the copyright industries, in their refusal to consider any approach other than yet more licensing, is likely to cause serious economic losses to Europe, alongside the cultural ones. Once again, we have a clear demonstration of how copyright maximalists are happy to harm an entire continent rather than concede that their scarcity-based approach is outdated and needs to be re-thought in a world of digital abundance. That the copyright industries should cling to this retrogressive approach is no surprise - it’s what they’ve done at every turn for the last fifteen years or more. That the European Commission still hasn’t learned its lesson from the street demonstrations against ACTA last year, and tries to shore up decrepit intellectual monopolies to the disadvantage of the 500 million citizens of Europe it supposedly serves, is not just extraordinary, but truly shameful.
Blog entry. Computerworld UK.

Changing Nature

IN THE world of academic publishing, it is hard to get more traditional than Nature. The British scholarly weekly has been reporting scientific breakthroughs since 1869. It hews to the time-honoured, and time-consuming, process of peer review, in which papers’ worth is judged by anonymous experts prior to publication. Fewer than one in ten submissions make the cut. Successful ones are printed on dead trees and dispatched by mail to subscribers, who pay for the privilege of reading about the latest important findings. Their authors win kudos just for getting their paper in.
The Economist (Babbage).

Drug firm Roche pledges greater access to trials data

The pharmaceutical company Roche has announced that it will make more of the data from its clinical trials available to researchers. It’s estimated that half of all clinical trials have never been published and positive trial results are twice as likely to be published as negative findings. The AllTrials campaign wants the pharmaceutical industry to publish all data, and is supported by the Wellcome Trust, the BMJ and NICE.
BBC News.