The blurb on the Commonwealth of learning site (http://www.col.org/resources/publications/Pages/detail.aspx?PID=412) says that 28 contributors to a new book on “OERs and change in higher education” answer such questions as:

How do institutions, in both developed and developing countries, reposition themselves meaningfully within the new information-rich world in which information is accessible as never before? …. and …

How might proponents of OER garner greater governmental, institutional and educator “buy-in” to the principles of open educational practices, and to the policies and programs necessary to realise and sustain OER?

Download the book today from that link (above) and find out what the answers are might be …

UNESCO is hosting the 2012 World Open Education Resources (OER) Congress at its Headquarters in Paris, from 20 to 22 June 2012 to lead the debate on the development of OERs worldwide, with the participation and support of global governments, educators, NGOs and prominent universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The goal of the Congress is to invite Governments to view and discuss the merits of open educational resources and to adopt a Declaration that calls on Governments to support the sustainable development and dynamic use of OERs.

The full program can be downloaded here

Live streams of selected presentations are available here

On June 12 PeerJ was announced, a new model for peer-reviewed Open Access publishing based on membership and community rather than a charge to cover publishing costs. Make what you will of the neologistic name, PeerJ promises authors the lifetime right to publish for a one-off membership fee from as little as $99. Its founders, including Peter Binfeld, who recently stepped down from heading PLoSOne, also claim to be be re-inventing the peer review process, allowing greater transparency and promising a turn-around of one month. The challenge for PeerJ will be its eschewing of impact factor, with accepted articles being judged on scientific validity alone. (Ed’s note: they’ve responded to this here, among other questions put to them following the launch). Nevertheless, the move promises to shake the world of academic publishing by harnessing the potential of the modern web to bring greater interactivity, transparency and simple speed of process to peer review and publishing.

Read more on Ars Technica or Nature or from among a whole host of media coverage, including a post by the University of Auckland’s champion for OA, Fabiana Kubke, professor of neuroscience, on her Building Blogs of Science site.

The June 2012 issue of ACRL news features a selective guide to Open Education Resources. refer http://crln.acrl.org/content/73/6/334.full

Resources are reviewed under a series of categories, including full course packages, video, repositories and textbooks.

Institution-specific resources are only listed when they offer broader contributions.

An interesting post to the LIBLICENSE email list:

From: David Prosser <david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk

Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 21:01:53 +0100

Interestingly, we heard today at a conference in Brussels on the PEER project that the project found:

1. No evidence of any harm to publishers as a result of embargoed green OA

2. Evidence of increased total usage through green OA

3. Evidence that green OA through the PEER project actually drives usage at the publisher site.

The PEER project did not investigate issues around gold OA and so I am a little surprised that this is the focus of the press release from STM.

David 

On 29 May 2012, at 19:52, LIBLICENSE wrote:

From: Kim Beadle <beadle@stm-assoc.org

Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 16:59:25 +0200

PEER End of Project Conference

29 May 2012. Brussels

STM welcomes support for gold open access from PEER conference

‘Gold’ open access publication is the practical route to achieving sustainable open access, the project partners agreed today at the PEER End of Project results conference in Brussels. The Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) project, which will report to the European Commission in July 2012, provides large-scale, robust research to inform the debate about access to publicly funded research.

The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) welcomes the consensus of the partners, and hails PEER as a successful collaboration.

Behavioural, economics and usage research were presented at the conference today. “The PEER project shows that self-archiving is complex, inefficient and cannot be successfully achieved without the co-operation of publishers,” said Michael Mabe, CEO of STM.  Only 170 of the c 11,800 authors invited to self-archive, chose to do so. Usage research supports the hypothesis that readers prefer the publishers’ final version over self-archived manuscripts.

“Through working together on PEER, publishers, funders and the repository community have established greater trust and understanding,” said Mabe. “Today has demonstrated that there are a number of fundamentals on which all PEER partners are agreed, based on the results and experience of the project. Most strikingly, all partners are in agreement that ‘gold’ open access publication provides a practical, viable way to provide public access to research findings.”

PEER, supported by the EC eContentplus programme, is a collaboration between publishers, repositories, and the research community. The project was a partnership between STM, Fondation Européenne de la Science Association (ESF), Göttingen State and University Library (UGOE), Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V. (MPG), Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA).

The project, which has run since September 2008, has been investigating the effects of the large scale, systematic depositing of authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts on reader access, author visibility, and journal viability, as well as on the broader ecology of European research, with the aim of informing the evolution of policies in this area.

  -ENDS –

STM is an international association of over 100 scientific, technical, medical and scholarly publishers, collectively responsible for more than 60% of the global annual output of research articles, 55% of the active research journals and the publication of tens of thousands of print and electronic books, reference works and databases. We are the only international trade association equally representing all types of STM publishers – large and small companies, not for profit organizations, learned societies, traditional, primary, secondary publishers and new entrants to global publishing. www.stm-assoc.org

Contact Kim Beadle for more information – beadle@stm-assoc.org

The development of a metric, the Accessibility Quotient (AQ), is outlined in a research article in the new Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.  The authors from MIT assert:

“The AQ offers a concise assessment of accessibility for authors, departments, disciplines, or universities who wish to characterize or understand the degree of access to their research output. In combining three measures of interest to authors – price, quality, and shareability – the AQ offers a means of summarizing information about a given publishing environment in a way that is relevant to our authors and campus leaders.”

Other articles of interest include:

Reinsfelder  T. L.  Open Access Publishing Practices in a Complex Environment: Conditions, Barriers, and Bases of Power

Graf, K & Thatcher, S.  Point & Counterpoint: Is CC BY the Best Open Access License?

“Openly” available here…http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/