Article on Open Educational Resources in Times Higher Education

Get it out in the open by Rebecca Attwood (24th September 2009)

UKCoRR meeting

I wasn’t able to attend the UKCoRR meeting held in Kingston on Friday, as much as I would have liked to.  It sounds like I missed out on a really good day with an excellent programme.

A thorough summary and all the presentations from the day are available from the UKCoRR website:

http://www.ukcorr.org/events/aug2009-event.php

In addition, there is a summary on the UKCoRR blog:

http://ukcorr.blogspot.com/2009/08/after-our-meeting.html

I was particularly interested in Theo Andrews’ presentation on Central Funds for Open Access and ensuing discussion around institutionally designated funds for OA – both Gold and Green routes.  I hope UKCoRR don’t mind me reproducing some of the issues discussed here:

1) Concern about the costs: these might escalate, and sometimes amount to “double dipping” (some publishers are paid by authors and subscribers because they charge authors for OA article publication but don’t reduce their subscription fees).
2) Publishers who are aware of funder mandates for OA within 6 months, might introduce 12 month embargoes on post-print availability in OA repositories, in order to force authors to pay for OA publishing of the final version or miss their funder’s mandate. (NB the point here is that funders are paying, as authors can claim such costs from funders. But we’re all struggling to set up mechanisms by which this can be done – see Theo’s presentation for a summary of the issues.)
3) An institutional response might be to set up an OA fund, or it might be to encourage authors to deposit post-prints into the OA repository, rather than paying such publishers’ fees. Some researchers object to the fees being charged.
4) The Wellcome Trust does seem to prefer that the authors pay for OA publication, and indeed it suits authors better than depositing themselves because a part of the Wellcome mandate is for PubMed deposit. By paying, authors can leave the PubMed deposit up to the publishers to do. Is the Wellcome Trust’s mandate skewing the OA landscape in the way publishers have responded to them, whilst other academic disciplines are no way near as well funded?

The inimitable @llordllama has also posted summaries of the day on the UoL Library blog:

http://uollibraryblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/ukcorr-summer-2009-meeting-pt-1/

http://uollibraryblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/ukcorr-summer-2009-meeting-pt-2/

On the strength of this I’m certainly looking forward to attending future UKCoRR events – maybe even oop North next time?!

UNESCO releases new publication on Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace

Download available free at:

http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=Open_Educational_Resources:_Conversations_in_Cyberspace

Edinburgh repository fringe – links

I wasn’t able to attend the Edinburgh repository fringe but have been scouring the blogosphere for info – unlike the real Edinburgh fringe there doesn’t seem to be much mainstream media coverage, not even a late night slot on Channel 4.

I haven’t found masses beyond the main website and the event wiki – http://wiki.repositoryfringe.org/index.php/Main_Page – though may be I’m jumping the gun a little.

The best live blogging seems to be on the jisc-datashare blog

Posts are tagged #repofringe09:  http://jisc-datashare.blogspot.com/search/label/%23repofringe09

The only other posts I’ve found so far are:

Lorna’s JISC CETIS blog – http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/07/31/repository-fringe-2009/

And

The Open Knowledge Foundation Blog – http://blog.okfn.org/2009/07/31/open-data-session-at-repository-fringe-2009/

For pics there is also a flickr group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/repofringe09/

Mashed Library UK 2009

Today is Mash Oop North! at the University of Huddersfield.

Mashed Library is a semi-unconference style event centred around the theme of data mash-ups in a library context (“bringing together interested people and doing interesting stuff with libraries and technology“). The first event took place at Birkbeck College in November 2008.

There is a blog at http://mashlib09.wordpress.com/

And a ning site http://mashedlibrary.ning.com/

Or follow the twitter tag #mashlib09

Bibliosight project website and blog

The Bibliosight project website is now online at http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/inn/repository/bibliosight/

There is also a blog at http://bibliosightnews.wordpress.com/

JISC have indicated that the blog should be the primary mechanism for reporting on our project – in lieu of a formal final project report – there’s not much there yet but I’ll rectify that as soon as I come back from holiday!

Research in the Open: How Mandates Work in Practice

Bill Hubbard’s slides from last weeks event (which I didn’t go to) may come in useful.

(Thanks to UK Council of Research Repositories blog)

Open Repositories 2009

I wasn’t fortunate enough to attend the recent OR2009 conference held in Atlanta

For what it’s worth here’s a bunch of links – though you’ll get pretty much the same set of results by putting “Open Repositories 2009″ into Google…

https://or09.library.gatech.edu/

http://www.openrepositories.org/

http://www.arts-humanities.net/event/open_repositories_2009_conference

http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2009/05/dont-ever-stop-adding-to-your-body-of.html

http://ptsefton.com/2009/05/25/open-repositories-2009-trip-report.htm

http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/johnr/2009/05/15/recent-jisc-project-outputs-at-open-repositories-2009/

http://loomware.typepad.com/loomware/2009/05/open-repositories-2009-day-1—group-1.html

http://loomware.typepad.com/loomware/2009/05/open-repositories-2009-day-1—group-2.html

http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2009/05/20/mention-it-takes-open-repositories-2009-developer-challenge-award/

http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2009/05/25/blog-reports-from-open-repositories-2009/

http://hurstassociates.blogspot.com/2009/02/event-open-repositories-2009-annual.html

http://www.ensemble.ac.uk/archives/398

New UKCoRR blog

The UK Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR) committee are keeping a blog at http://ukcorr.blogspot.com/

UniCycle website

There is now a project website for UniCycle.  Not much there yet as it’s Ning and we’re relying on this newfangled Web 2.0 to generate content – so if you’re interested in Open Educational Resources come and join us.