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16. ken udas - september 13th, 2007 at 4:06 am

Hello. There have been some great comments and insights provided, and lots of linked resources (enough to take up a few evenings). It is apparent that OA Journals and Open Archives are building momentum and entering into the mainstream of academic culture.

What are the types of things that could happen or ought to happen to further fuel the momentum? And, as a follow-up, what do you think that the impact will be on education and/or education providers?

I am thinking about this a bit from the perspective of there being differential impact on independent life long learners, continuing education, formal and traditional, etc.

17. gavin baker - september 13th, 2007 at 6:22 pm

(I posted this a few days ago but it never showed up. Ken, easy on the trigger finger with that spam filter!)

ossguy, Thanks for the comments.

steelgraham, Stevan Harnad is of course the authority on author archiving. OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) and the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) also have lists of repositories.

Steve, thanks again for the introduction. I hope this post will be circulated among participants in the upcoming Joburg meeting for their consideration. Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend, but consider this an open offer to draft any language that would be useful.

On the topic of conferences: Conference papers and presentations are definitely a valuable type of non-journal content (along with e.g. working papers, theses, dissertations).

For conference organizers: The Public Knowledge Project develops companion software to its Open Journal Systems , named appropriately Open Conference Systems , which conferences can use to manage submissions, make papers publicly available, apply Creative Commons licenses, provide metadata compliant with the Open Archives Initiative , etc.

If you’re not using OCS, you should still ask (maybe even require) permission from presenters to post their paper for gratis access and under the terms of a libre license. You don’t need the presenter’s copyright: If they agree to a CC license, you’ve got all you need.

For conference presenters: Seek to retain at least enough rights to post the paper online and apply a CC license. Science Common’s Scholars Copyright (including the SPARC Author Addendum , here called “Access - Reuse”) will be useful here, but obviously you’ll want to change the terms from “journal” to “conference”, etc. I don’t know of boilerplate addenda for conferences specifically. OwnTerms, via Siva Vaidhyanathan, has a Speaker Agreement which may be of use.

As long as you have the rights, you can archive your own paper, even if the conference doesn’t. Preferably, archive your paper in your institutional repository and/or a relevant subject repository; at worst, you can archive on your own Web site or the Internet Archive .

18. gavin baker - september 13th, 2007 at 6:46 pm

Ken: The momentum for open access seems to be in research funder mandates. For instance, the U.S. government spends billions of dollars each year funding academic research, resulting in thousands of journal articles published. There is a movement for such research funders to attach, as a condition of funding, the requirement that published articles must also be made available gratis online. A number of public and private funders have adopted such policies (details vary slightly), and more have been proposed; see t his list and look for funder mandates. Note that usually, these mandates do not require open access per the Bethesda or Budapest definitions, but only toll-free online access. Still, there’s a lot of momentum there.

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Source:  OpenStax, The impact of open source software on education. OpenStax CNX. Mar 30, 2009 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10431/1.7
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