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.
The College of Wooster Library, Information Resources, and Technology Committee (LIRTC) that introduced the policy believes that the resolution supports the institutional mission. LIRTC’s informational page highlighted the benefits of the policy.
Longer embargo periods of up to 24 months for green open access will only apply when universities’ annual block grants for “gold” article fees have run out, Research Councils UK has confirmed.Times Higher Education.
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.
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copyright maximalists are happy to harm an entire continent rather than concede that their scarcity-based approach is outdated and needs to be re-thought in a world of digital abundance.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.
Emerging publisher Frontiers is joining Nature Publishing Group (NPG) in a strategic alliance to advance the global open science movement.Nature News.
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).
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.
In German.
For all the differences, the fates of Nature and Frontiers have become intertwined. On February 27th Nature Publishing Group (NPG), which owns Nature and 81 other scholarly journals, announced that it has bought a controlling stake in Frontiers for an undisclosed sum. Besides 30 titles in 14 scientific fields the Swiss upstart brings a social-networking platform—a LinkedIn for boffins, if you like—to share not just research, but news, job offers, information about conferences and events. It currently boasts around 80,000 members.The Economist. See also the article on Frontiers’ website.
To build a network of species, the Open Tree of Life team has adopted Neo4j, an open-source database that stores information structured in graphs rather than in tables. It is developed by Neo Technology, which has offices in the Silicon Valley, England, Germany, and Sweden.Neo4j website, download free tool for online property graph database.
The UK’s higher education funding councils will not express a preference for either green or gold open access in their submission rules for future research excellence frameworks.Paul Jump for Times Higher Education.