Poland has recently adopted two open textbook initiatives. One focuses primarily on textbooks for the first three years of school and the other initiative is for primary and secondary education across the board. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/poland-pioneering-worlds-first-national-open-textbook-program
Flipping subscription journals to OA
Scholarly communication learning opportunities
Winter/spring semester 2016 is full of learning opportunities on a variety of scholarly communication topics. Friday, February 12th, 12:30-1:30: Deceptive -vs- ethical publishing practices. PCL 1.124 Wednesday, February 17th, 1:00-2:00: Copyright and academic work. Learning Lab 2 (PCL 2.340). Wednesday, March 2nd, 12:00-1:00: Statistics in Texas ScholarWorks. PCL 1.124 UT… read more
Scholarly communication brown bag discussions
The Scholarly Communication Group at UT Libraries organizes periodic brown bag discussions on a variety of schol comm topics. These brown bag sessions are open to anyone, although the primary audience is UT Libraries staff. They provide an opportunity to talk through either current or emerging issues for the Libraries and… read more
Dept. of Labor adopts open licensing policy
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has adopted an open licensing policy that requires all intellectual property created under the competitive award process to be licensed with a Creative Commons attribution license. This will allow the public to use, share and build upon the work funder by DOL. More information:… read more
Publishers requiring ORCIDs
Several publishers have announced that they will require author to use an ORCID identifier during the publication process. Those publishers are: The American Geophysical Union, eLife, EMBO, Hindawi, IEEE, Science journals, ScienceOpen, and PLOS. These publishers join the UK’s Royal Society and several funding agencies in requiring ORCIDs. This is fantastic news… read more
Institutional repositories and academic social networking sites
The University of California Office of Scholarly Communication has a really great blog post about the difference between open access institutional and subject repositories and academic social networking sites like Academia.edu and ResearchGate. Here’s the post: http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/12/a-social-networking-site-is-not-an-open-access-repository/ I particularly like the table they created to demonstrate the differences:
Open Access explained via cartoon
Editors of Lingua step down
Inside Higher Ed reports that “All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier’s policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online.” This is… read more
David Ernst coming to UT Austin
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
