431,289 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Openness and education: a beginnerâs guide
While recent high-profile developments such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have placed renewed emphasis on the idea of openness in education, different notions of open in relation to education can be found dating back to the 1960s. This document builds on recent research undertaken to trace this history, acknowledging that there is no single root of âopenâ in this context, but to map the different ways of thinking about open education that have come to bear on the field we see today. Mapping of themes across time aims to provides those new to the field with a useful overview of the history and introduction to the concept of openness, and ways to explore the literature further. Each section of this document will summarise the nature of one of the themes, and its relationship to the broader network. Additionally, the document provides an annotated bibliography, through summaries of five of the most influential publications across a range of perspectives in each theme
Librarians as midwives of change in scholarly communication
History testifies to two ICT revolutions. In my reckoning scholarly communication is now in the grip of a third. The point of this chapter, to paraphrase Marx, is to show that librarians are in a position not simply to interpret the world of scholarly communication, but to change it, or at least to act as the midwives of that change.
The chapter discusses the information value chain, the economic background to scholarly communication, and trends in pricing and negotiation with publishers.
It closes by suggesting that the electronic age offers the potential to turn academic library practice on its head. University libraries until now have promised to collect or gain access to the research outputs of all other universities and research institutions, a task that is both impossible to accomplish and costly to attempt. With the widespread introduction of institutional repositories, however, it is now feasible for each university or research institution to collect all the research outputs of its own scholars, and make them available to all other universities. This task, by contrast, is finite and achievable; the costs are commensurate with the research standing and income of the academic institution
The Yin and Yang of Kinship and Business: Complementary or Contradictory Forces?
Are the social domains of kinship and business on balance complementary or contradictory? Do ventures that invest heavily in both â conventionally referred to as âfamily firmsâ â bear a net gain or net loss? We are scarcely the first to raise these questions. How then will we try to contribute to an answer? We try this in five ways, all of them based on previous literature. First, we develop the dichotomy of kinship and business by taking seriously the metaphor of yin and yang, merging it with the anthropological constructs of structural domains such as âdomesticâ and âpublic.â This metaphor proves to shed light on the relevant literature. Second, we provide a qualitative survey of the costs and benefits of kinship in business. Third, we summarize the empirical work that addresses the performance outcomes from family involvement. Fourth, we consider the practitioner implications of these studies. Finally, we ask if scholars are as yet in a position to answer these questions
Goodbye to all that: Disintermediation, disruption and the diminishing library
The librarianâs role in collection development is being eroded through disintermediation. A number of factors are contributing to this:
⢠With the Big Deals for e-journals power has shifted considerably in the publishersâ favour, and librariesâ freedom to make collection development decisions has been curtailed. If the trend towards national deals and block payments, seen for instance in the Scottish Higher Education Digital Library (SHEDL), continues, this freedom will be eroded even more; acquisitions decisions are increasingly made at the level of publisher rather than title.
⢠A notable response to the power of the publishersâ monopoly is the open access movement, which aims to make scholarly literature freely available to all. One route is through open access publishing, where typically the author, or their institution or research funder, pays the cost of peer review and publishing. The other route is the deposit of pre- or post-prints of traditionally published materials in the authorâs institutional repository or in a subject repository such as Arxiv. The librarian again is making no decisions on availability in collections.
⢠E-book technology has enabled the introduction of so-called âpatron selectionâ or âpatron driven acquisitionâ (PDA). Suppliers of e-books are now offering libraries the opportunity to make available a fund to be spent on new e-book titles as they become popular with library users. PDA is becoming increasingly popular: a recent survey of 250 libraries in the USA showed that â32 have PDA programs deployed; 42 planned to have a program deployed within the next year; and an additional 90 plan to deploy a program within the next three yearsâ (http://www.libraries.wright.edu/noshelfrequired/?p=932). Librarians are able to impose some restrictions â for instance specifying subjects or ranges of titles; otherwise selection is taken out of the hands of librarians and entrusted to users . Initial statistics show the usage of many titles selected by users to be as high as the usage of titles selected by librarians or academics.
⢠Googleâs massive digitisation programme, although currently under legal threat, is another example.
In the disintermediated world the librarianâs role is changing. It will in my view become increasingly focused not on externally produced resources, but on creating, developing and maintaining repositories of materials, whether learning objects, research data-sets or research outputs, produced in house in their own institution.
Traditionally librarians have sought through the art of collection development to obtain the outputs of the worldâs scholars and make them available to the scholars of their own institution â an impossible task. However our role is now being reversed: it will be to collect the outputs of our own institutionâs scholars and make them freely available to the world. This task is capable of achievement and attains the aim of universal availability of scholarship to scholars. However it is not collection development as it has been practised down the years in the print world; that art, it can be argued, will no longer be needed in the era of disintermediation
Open access in Australia: an odyssey of sorts?
Scholarly communication change and open access (OA) initiatives in Australia have followed an Odyssean path in the last decade. The stop-start nature of early initiatives demonstrates that institutional leadership is essential for the successful deposit of academic content in an institutional repository. Similarly, OA policies from the two Australian Research Councils were delayed for nearly a decade, partly due to publisher pressure and bureaucratic conservatism. More successful has been the development of full, or hybrid, open access university e-presses. These presses, usually embedded in the scholarly infrastructure of the university, provide monographic models for wider global consideration. Australian universities are now reflecting, partly through recent Research Council edicts and monitoring global OA developments, greater awareness of the need for action in scholarly communication change
Journal: Insights 26.3 (2013): 282-28
Publishing cooperative and work-integrated education literature: The Asia-Pacific Journal of Cooperative Education
The Asia-Pacific Journal of Cooperative Education (APJCE) was founded in 1999, with the first volume published in 2000. The journal strongly adhered to the philosophy of having freely and readily accessible information, and opted to be a free, fully online, open access journal. Over the last 12 years, the journal has grown and has become well-established in the cooperative (co-op) and work-integrated learning (WIL) community. The number of publications per year has steadily increased and the number of submissions has shown strong growth, especially in the last three years. APJCE articles are increasingly cited in other journals and significant book publications, and both its author and user bases have become more international. This article will discuss the advantages from the APJCE perspective of being an open access journal and provide an analysis of the growth of APJCE. The article will also discuss the performance of the journal in the context of co-op/WIL literature internationally and discuss some recent developments for the journal
Mapping the open education landscape: citation network analysis of historical open and distance education research
The term open education has recently been used to refer to topics such as Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Historically its roots lie in civil approaches to education and open universities, but this research is rarely referenced or acknowledged in current interpretations. In this article the antecedents of the modern open educational movement are examined, as the basis for connecting the various strands of research. Using a citation analysis method the key references are extracted and their relationships mapped. This work reveals eight distinct sub-topics within the broad open education area, with relatively little overlap. The implications for this are discussed and methods of improving inter-topic research are proposed
Request for Proposals to publish Research in Learning Technology, the journal of the Association for Learning Technology.
In addition to the PDF version we have included a .DOC version, which is made available for other organisations wishing to use the Research in Learning Technology RFP as a starting point for their own RFP. This document has an additional appendix containing some suggestions for additional or different questions for inclusion in an RFP. (Please ensure you honour the attribution requirements that we have placed on our document, and if you would like us to host a copy of your RFP for other to use we can do so alongside our own RFP). We also include a .XLS template for scoring publishing proposals which may be of value to others. Important notes 1. Responsibility for these documents rests with ALT. 2. They are provided with no warranties of any kind. 3. Individuals or organisations who use them do so at their own risk, and ALT shall not be liable for any losses or damages arising from their use or from reliance being placed upon them. [You may also be interested in http://repository.alt.ac.uk/887/ which is a guide to tendering for a publishing contract which we produced after going through the RFP process.
- âŚ