As part of the Year of Open programming, David Ernst, the Executive Director of the University of Minnesota Open Textbook Library, will be on the UT Austin campus Thursday, November 5th. He’ll be giving a talk on Open Textbooks: Access, Affordability, and Academic Success at 2:00pm in the Texas Governors’… read more
Archives for October 2015
UC OA policy extends to all UC employees
The University of California has expanded the reach of their open access policy by including all UC employees. The Presidential Open Access Policy builds on the Academic Senate open access policy and will include scholarly research authored by clinical faculty, lecturers, staff researchers, postdoc scholars, grad students, and librarians. You can… read more
Open Textbooks save students $1.5 million
The University of Minnesota announced today that the Open Textbook Network has saved students $1.5 million dollars through the adoption of open textbooks. The Open Textbook Library has over 200 open textbooks that anyone can use. For more information about this exciting achievement, see the official announcement: http://discover.umn.edu/news/teaching-education/u-ms-open-textbook-network-reports-student-savings-15-million-open-textbooks
OA Spectrum Evaluation Tool
SPARC has announced the launch of the Open Access Spectrum Evaluation Tool. The tool provides a concrete way to analyze the openness of a particular journal. The tool measures journal policies regarding reading/reuse rights, author posting rights, machine readability, compliance with funder & institutional mandates, and other openness indicators. Five hundred… read more
Wikipedia edit-a-thon is part of OA Week
To celebrate Open Access Week 2015, SPARC is promoting a week-long Wikipedia edit-a-thon. The purpose of the edit-a-thon is to “improve existing open access related pages, create new content where it needs to be added, and translate open access related pages into new languages”. More information about the Wikipedia edit-a-thon can… read more
Academia.edu and open access
I just read an interesting blog post about Academia.edu by Gary Hall: http://www.garyhall.info/journal/2015/10/18/does-academiaedu-mean-open-access-is-becoming-irrelevant.html Academia.edu (and ResearchGate) come up quite frequently when I talk with faculty, postdocs, and grad students. I’ve always advised that it may be a good tool to use if you are trying to network with your colleagues, but… read more
What's the deal with Open Access?
Knowledge unfortunately isn’t free. Much of the research being conducted at universities, colleges, and institutes around the world is written up by professors, graduate students, and research associates and published in toll-access (subscription) journals. Anyone lacking a subscription to that journal will not be able to access the articles published there. This… read more
Repository competition for OA Week 2015
UT Libraries is having a competition to celebrate Open Access Week and to get library staff involved in using the repository. A permanent library staff member may participate by uploading content to Texas ScholarWorks (either on behalf of someone else or uploading their own content) or by talking to someone else… read more
