Two students and a volunteer team of programmers and designers recently unveiled the Open Access Button. The OA Button is a browser-based tool that allows people to report when they’ve run into a paywall while trying to access material online. The OA Button is very easy to use. You simply… read more
Open access monographs
The momentum towards open access journal articles picked up substantially this year. Even though we’re still a long way from the ideal world we wish we had, where all academic scholarship can be freely read and used by anyone, anywhere, at least we are well on the way. More and… read more
OER bill introduced
A bill was introduced into the U.S. Senate that would create a competitive grant program to create open educational textbooks – meaning textbooks that are freely available online. The bill, called the Affordable College Textbook Act, was introduced by Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Al Franken (D-MN). Senate bill 1704: A… read more
New preprint repository: bioRxiv
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has launched a preprint repository for the biological sciences called bioRxiv. bioRxiv is a place for scientists to deposit their unpublished manuscripts. This is similar to the preprint repository, arXiv, which has been in existence since 1991 and serves mainly researchers in physics, mathematics, and computer… read more
Letter in Support of FASTR
The leaders of dozens of universities have added their names to a letter written in support of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR). If passed, FASTR would provide for public access to the results of much of the government-funded research in the United States. SPARC letter: http://www.sparc.arl.org/letter-congress-higher-education-community-supports-FASTR
Digital Public Library of America
The Chronicle featured a post about the DPLA Tuesday morning, so I thought I’d go over and check it out. DPLA, the Digital Public Library of America, has as its goal to aggregate the records of mostly open content from libraries, archives and museums all around the country. So, for… read more
OA Week 2013 wrap-up
Thanks to everyone who showed up for OA Week 2013 events! We had great discussions about OA issues and hope we sparked some long term interest in OA. A big thanks to everyone who helped make our first OA Week a success. In addition to everyone on the planning group,… read more
OA Week 2013 in review
Dates and times for OA Week 2013 events: #utopenaccess Monday, October 21st, 4-6 pm: Wikipedia Editathon in the Perry Castañeda Library (PCL 1.124) Celebrate Open Access Week by joining other students, faculty, staff, librarians, and community members interested in becoming Wikipedians and improving the open educational content of this online… read more
RiP: A Remix Manifesto additional resources
The documentary being screened at today’s OA Week 2013 event is RiP: A Remix Manifesto. The idea of remix culture is quite fascinating and always brings up many questions. The resources provided below are meant to provide people with additional avenues of exploration into this topic. Video: Everything is a… read more
OA Panel recap
There is a nice article in The Daily Texan today about the OA panel discussion yesterday. Check out reporter, Lizzie Jespersen’s article: http://www.dailytexanonline.com/news/2013/10/22/open-access-should-be-an-issue-on-the-forefront-for-university-faculty-and-students. Join us today at 12:30 for a talk about Open Educational Resources with Garin Fons, from COERLL.
