Recent news on students and open access

After a bit of hiatus, here’s some recent news on students and open access:

• The winners of the Sparky Awards contest for videos on information sharing have been announced. The contest, sponsored by SPARC (which also sponsors Open Students), invited students to create a short video on the value of sharing information. The grand prize winner was created by a group of students from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Check out the winners here!
• Benjamin J. Keele, a law student at Indiana University - Bloomington and editor in chief of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, published an op-ed in Student Lawyer magazine calling for open access to student-edited law journals. The student newspaper at Virginia Tech editorialized in favor of open access, medical students at the University of Michigan published an op-ed supporting open access, and a Ph.D student at Queensland University of Technology published a letter to the editor extolling the school’s open access repository.
• Instructors at several colleges, including Michigan State University, University of Toronto, San Jose State University, had their students produce an open access journal as a class assignment. We previously posted a similar assignment for students at the University of British Columbia.
• Several new open access journals published by students launched: Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (by students at Erasmus University Rotterdam), New Social Inquiry ( Carleton University), PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication (University of Melbourne), Amsterdam Law Forum (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), aspeers (University of Leipzig), and Public Knowledge (Virginia Tech).
• Temple University adopted a requirement that its doctoral students’ dissertations be made open access. Meanwhile, at Lund University students may choose to make dissertation open access, and 43% of them do. A survey of open access repository managers found that they expect theses and dissertations to be a top trend for repositories in 2009.
• Mary Anne Kennan, a student at the University of New South Wales, wrote her dissertation on Reassembling scholarly publishing: open access, institutional repositories and the process of change. The dissertation is available open access.
• A collection of papers by students at the University of British Columbia on libraries and publishing, including on open access, was published (and is itself open access).
• Concern about unauthorized downloading of textbooks by students continued to grow: see e.g. articles in the Toronto Star and Times Higher Education. But Flat World Knowledge, a company dedicated to publishing open textbooks, released its first books. Nature also launched an open access educational site, Scitable, focused on genetics. Finals Club is a new open access, Creative Commons-licensed site for students to share lecture notes and discuss class topics.
• The UK Serials Group announced the winners of its essay contest for library and publishing students, on the topic of accessing academic information in the Google Era.