The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board has announced a Request for Applications for OER grants. They will be awarding up to 20 grants to encourage faculty to adopt, modify, redesign, or develop courses that use only open educational resources. The deadline for application is August 20th, 2018 at 5:00pm Central… read more
Editors4BetterResearch initiative
Researchers Chris Chambers, Corin Logan, and Brad Wyble have started an initiative called Editors4BetterResearch. They hope to create a database of journal editors who support reproducibility and open science. Right now they are soliciting feedback on their proposal and collecting names of editors who would like to be listed in… read more
UC takes a stand on journal negotiations
The University of California System has made an announcement that they will be prioritizing an open access future in their journal negotiations with publishers. Their goal is to responsibly transition funding for journal subscriptions towards funding for open access. You can find the full announcement which includes their guiding priorities here.
Travel scholarship from UT Libraries
The University of Texas Libraries wants to send you to OpenCon 2018 in Toronto, Canada! If you are a UT Austin graduate student or postdoctoral researcher with an interest in open access (OA), open educational resources (OER) or open data who wants to help shape the future of research and… read more
MIT and Royal Society of Chemistry
MIT Libraries and the Royal Society of Chemistry have signed a license agreement that is the first of its kind in North America. The agreement will provide access to Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) articles for the MIT community, and will also make all RSC articles authored by MIT researchers open… read more
OA Week 2018 theme announced
The theme for Open Access Week 2018 was announced earlier this week – Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge. OA Week this year will be October 22nd-28th. You can find more information about OA Week on their website. In the past UT Libraries has participated with both online and in-person… read more
Swedish libraries walk away from Elsevier deal
Y’all may have already seen the announcement last week that the Bibsam Consortium in Sweden has decided not to renew their agreement with Elsevier. The Bibsam Consortium negotiates license agreements on behalf of Swedish universities, government agencies, and research institutes. The Swedish government has set a goal of immediate open… read more
June brown bag discussion
For our June discussion we’ll be talking about information security, privacy, social media, and algorithmic culture and how all those things are impacting our society. If you’d like to read up on any of this before the June event, here are some helpful resources. Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us… read more
Petition against new machine learning journal
A large group of scholars has signed a petition protesting the creation of a new subscription journal from Nature, Nature Machine Intelligence. https://openaccess.engineering.oregonstate.edu/home They argue that most journals in the field are open access with no charges for readers or authors. The people signing the petition have said they will… read more
Florida State cancels big deal
Florida State University has announced it’s canceling it’s “big deal” journals package with Elsevier. The dean of university libraries, Julia Zimmerman, released a statement about the cancellation. Instead of the big deal, FSU will subscribe to a sub-set of journals that are most-needed. The Faculty Senate voted unanimously to approve… read more
