Tim Growers (Cambridge University mathematician) talks with Bryan Crump on Radio NZ, Monday 30 July, about how his refusal to submit or review papers for publishing house Elsevier led to demands for open access to scientific knowledge.

http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/nights/audio/2526643/unlocking-science.asx

Tim’s blog also features details of a new open access venture for Cambridge University Press.

http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/a-new-open-access-venture-from-cambridge-university-press/

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

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.

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/

In an open letter the Harvard Faculty Advisory Council to the Library request that staff and students consider the following options in response to large journal publishers [that] have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive:

1. Make sure that all of your own papers are accessible by submitting them to DASH in accordance with the faculty-initiated open-access policies.

2. Consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access.

3. If on the editorial board of a journal involved, determine if it can be published as open access material, or independently from publishers that practice pricing described above. If not, consider resigning.

4. Contact professional organizations to raise these issues.

5. Encourage professional associations to take control of scholarly literature in their field or shift the management of their e-journals to library-friendly organizations.

6. Encourage colleagues to consider and to discuss these or other options.

7. Sign contracts that unbundle subscriptions and concentrate on higher-use journals.

8. Move journals to a sustainable pay per use system.

9. Insist on subscription contracts in which the terms can be made public.

(see: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448)