Open Education as Disruption: Lessons for Open and Distance Learning from Open Educational Practice

This paper reflects on what Open and Distance Learning providers might learn from the Open Educational Resources/Practices (OER/OEP) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). It is based on experiences working on OER and OEP first at the OU in Scotland (OUiS) and more recently under the auspices of the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) funded Open Educational Practices Scotland (OEPS) programme hosted by OUiS. The paper by exploring the disruptive potential of MOOCs and OER within Higher Education. While it acknowledges lessons for HE it argues the focus on access and scale has obscured other lessons ODL might learn from opening up educational practices. Much of our work has centred on OEP and partnership with organisations outside the formal education sector. As such it has taken the possibilities offered by openness as an invitation to look at the relationship between the formal and the informal. The paper traces OEPS journey as it explores less apparent but no less important lessons around designing and creating open content through partnership in a way that is cost effective and context relevant

Investigating overlay journals: introducing the RIOJA Project

Introduces the RIOJA (Repository Interface to Overlaid Journal Archives) project, a 1-year partnership between UCL (University College London), Imperial College London, and the Universities of Glasgow, Cambridge and Cornell. The project will work with the Astrophysics community to investigate aspects of overlay journals. For the purposes of the project, an overlay journal is defined as an open access, quality-assured journal whose content is held on one or more repositories

Finding Open Access Publications by UWM Authors

This study looks at the open access publications affiliated with the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in Web of Science Core Collection. Such analysis became possible based on a partnership of Clarivate Analytics and Impactstory for integrating new technology which enabled finding an individual open access article from a publisher’s website or an author self-archived manuscript from a repository into Web of Science. The study concludes with three observations: There is 17.4% open access compared to all records affiliated with UWM. There is open access citation advantage for UWM authors. There is prevalence of Gold or Bronze over Green versions at UWM

T-Cell Subsets Predict Mortality in Malnourished Zambian Adults Initiating Antiretroviral Therapy.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedTo estimate the prognostic value of T-cell subsets in Zambian patients initiating antiretroviral therapy (ART), and to assess the impact of a nutritional intervention on T-cell subsets.This work was supported by European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership grant # IP.2009.33011.004; trial foods were prepared and supplied by Nutriset, Malauney, Franc

SCOAP³ – Towards a second phase

The global partnership SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) has reached the conversion of high-quality subscription journals in the field of High-Energy Physics to Open Access through redirection of existing subscription funds by installing the SCOAP3 Gold Open Access Repository providing free access to scientific articles in the field of High Energy Physics. This article describes the steps taken to enable a second phase (2017–2019) of this international project based on an output-based (fair share) financing model

Community owned fibre optic networks - a sustainable broadband future for rural areas in Croatia?

For a small rural community such as the city of Krk (6.000 inhabitants), the business model for a fibre roll-out is not very promising if it is based on the classical cost-benefit analysis where investments are covered by service revenue generated. The conducted analysis is leading to two main findings - there will be no network operator investing in the roll-out of a fibre access network in the city of Krk and the fibre net-work has to be rolled out by becoming an integral part of the utility of the city. By util-izing the existing network of empty ducts and the facilities of the city owned cable network, the city of Krk has a better starting position than other comparable cities in Croatia. Public private partnership and open access are highly relevant in future elaborations. --optical access networks,community owned,business models,open ac-cess,cost analysis

Understanding the Rights Provisions of a Book Contract

A book contract establishes a partnership between a publisher and an author. The author offers their scholarly expertise and selected rights to the work while the publisher offers capital and expertise in copyediting, design, marketing, and rights management. In essence, the partnership is grounded in the exercise of specified rights. This presentation covers the provisions of book publishing contracts related to US copyright law: Copyright ownership Copyright as a package of rights Open access and open licenses Contract terminatio

Understanding the Rights Provisions of a Book Contract

A book contract establishes a partnership between a publisher and an author. The author offers their scholarly expertise and selected rights to the work while the publisher offers capital and expertise in copyediting, design, marketing, and rights management. In essence, the partnership is grounded in the exercise of specified rights. This presentation covers the provisions of book publishing contracts related to US copyright law: Copyright ownership Copyright as a package of rights Open access and open licenses Contract terminatio

Towards Open Educational Practice

Significant claims are made for the potential of Open Educational Resources (OER) to widen access to higher education. Most recently, the very large numbers of individuals enrolling on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has dominated discussion in universities and beyond. Advocates such as D’Antoni (2013) have written persuasively of how OER can potentially open up access to education and redefine the boundaries between institutions and society. However, the evidence from the first wave of MOOCs suggests that the participants are primarily individuals with prior experience of higher education. While this indeed widens access, there is no evidence that it is widening participation from those distanced from education (Lane et al, 2014). Indeed there is limited evidence of significant impact on widening participation by OERs (Falconer et.al, 2013). The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, however, has longer and deeper roots (Lane, 2012: 140), roots that are about more than licensing and has engaged in educational practices that break down barriers to education. This paper explores recent examples from Scotland of partnership-based approaches to the development, design and delivery of OERs. Drawing on this experience and ideas from the academic literature on educational technology, pedagogy and widening participation, we draw some provisional conclusions on an approach that combines key elements from all these fields. In particular we note that openness is not simply a matter of barriers to access related to licenses or technological aspects, but are inherently cultural, social and situational. We conclude that while the OER movements early focus on licenses and technology was useful, widening participation requires a shift in emphasis, a shift that accounts for peoples, places and the practices of open educatio

The DART-Europe project: towards developing a European theses portal

This paper will report on the new European theses project DART-Europe. The purpose of this project is to align institutional and national e-theses developments across Europe with the wider open archives movement by the construction of a European portal for research theses, thus enabling a global view of European institutional research assets. This project is driven through an innovative partnership between an information provider and an international body of university libraries and open access consortia. The project’s goal is to explore the creation of a European model for the deposit, discovery, use and long-term care of research theses in an open access environment. The paper will outline the projected outcomes of DART-Europe, which is an active group of institutions in addition to a technical service. To this end, DART-Europe is engaged with disciplines and institutions that are widening the definition of research by redefining the formats of theses. For institutions and countries without a repository infrastructure, DART-Europe will enable the creation of a depository. Institutions and countries with a repository infrastructure can engage with DART-Europe to deliver their e-theses. DART-Europe acts as a technology bridge for researchers between those who have existing infrastructures and those who do not. The DART-Europe architecture assumes free at point of use access to full text theses, whether held on the DART-Europe server or by institutional repositories. This paper will provide session attendees with the current progress of this initiative, including a report on the 5 strands of the project, including: architecture; creation of a management tool kit; content acquisition; digital preservation and an investigation of business models