Promoting open scholarship at Otago in learning, teaching & research
Wednesday, October 31st, 2012 | Bill Anderson | 1 Comment
Published today, an interesting article in IRRODL looking at the impact of OpenCourseWare (or more broadly Open Educational Resources) involvement on some of the OCW institutions and on learners.
Broadly speaking, OCW publication has helped learners decide on and prepare for courses prior to enrolment, and has had some positive impacts on recruitment and outcomes for institutions.
http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1238/2336
Monday, October 22nd, 2012 | Richard White | No Comments
It’s Open Access Week across the world – and here at Otago, with our third and final seminar in our Open Minds series on Thursday 25 October, this time focusing on Open Data. Otago staff who have not registered but would like to attend please do so ASAP. See the relevant blog post for the programme and the contact details for registration.
And with a broader national focus, Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand is hosting a series of posts on the theme of Open Access. Featuring contributions from academics, publishers and librarians (and humble Copyright Officers), Open Access in Aotearoa discusses the future of free and open access to New Zealand’s publicly funded scholarly research. My own post discusses the reality of open access here at Otago but within the broader context of international trends, looking at the attitudes and understanding I see from our staff and students as Copyright Officer on a day-to-day basis.
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012 | SIMON HART | 1 Comment
Australia’s biggest research funding body the ARC is preparing to change its funding rules to mandate open access publishing for the research it funds. The intention is to align with the new National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) policy which now requires that all researchers that it funds must add their outputs to an open-access repository within 12 months of publication.
This move is consistent with the broader Australian Government agendas of promoting digital economy and of supporting open government; as well as the direction happening in New Zealand, refer: http://ict.govt.nz/programme/opening-government-data-and-information. The benefits of this open access approach include an increased visibility of research, together with increased usage and impact, alongside an improved community awareness of research and its relevance.
Commenting on this Cathrine Harboe-Ree, (President, Council of Australian University Librarians, (CAUL) has said “it is critical that the ARC does align with the NHMRC policy in one very important way. Unlike the approach taken recently by the Research Councils in the UK, the NHMRC has been careful not to insist that research publish in open access journals using the so called “gold” pay-to-publish approach or to pay extra to publishers to reduce embargo periods. The repository infrastructure in Australian Universities allows us to support all forms of open access, including the deposit of peer reviewed final manuscripts (“green” open access). There is no need for Australian funding agencies to mandate or fund the “gold” approach and indeed it may be detrimental to scholarly publication patterns and the cost of research to do so.”
It is worth noting that the repository infrastructure Cathrine mentions has also been established in New Zealand – all NZ Universities run a DSpace repository for research outputs.