Open Access

Recently, on February 12, 2008, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard University took a landmark step.  The faculty voted to adopt a policy requiring that faculty authors send an electronic copy of their scholarly articles to the university’s digital repository and that faculty authors automatically grant copyright permission to the university to archive and to distribute these articles unless a faculty member has waived the policy for a particular article. Essentially, the faculty voted to make open access to the results of their published journal articles the default policy for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University.

 “The movement toward open content forces us to really think about what value it is we bring to students who enroll at the Open University. I think that we are getting to that tipping point—rethinking the underlying pedagogy with which we have conventionally delivered distance education and open learning.”

Peter Suber shares his annual review of the open access movement. The article highlights 15 categories of open access activity in 2007.

In <b>Open Access Publishing and the
Emerging Infrastructure for 21st-Century Scholarship</b>, Donald Waters asks,
ìopen access for what and for whom and how can we ensure that there is
sufficient capital for continued innovation in scholarly publishing?

"Since 2003, when PLoS Biology was launched, there has been a spectacular growth in “open-access” journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/), hosted by Lund University Libraries, lists 2,816 open-access journals as this article goes to press (and probably more by the time you read this). Authors also have various “open-access” options within existing subscription journals offered by traditional publishers (e.g., Blackwell, Springer, Oxford University Press, and many others). In return for a fee to the publisher, an author's individual article is made freely available and (sometimes) deposited in PubMed Central (PMC). But, as open access grows in prominence, so too has confusion about what open access means, particularly with regard to unrestricted use of content—which true open access allows. This confusion is being promulgated by journal publishers at the expense of authors and funding agencies wanting to support open access."

This report examines The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s past investments in Open Educational Resources, the emerging impact and explores future opportunities.  Central to the report is the idea of “The Brewing Perfect Storm” and the creation of an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure.

"The dream of ubiquitous information environments may be at hand, but how well do they support
scholarly and scientific research?"