Category — Guest Post

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Athanasia (Nancy) Pontika. Ms. Pontika is a doctoral student at the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science, specializing in open access. She is an Assistant Editor of the Open Access Directory, which is hosted by Simmons, and an active member of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T).

The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a wiki that hosts factual lists about open access. Its purpose is to serve as a useful and fast tool for reference and searching. The project was conceived by Peter Suber, Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Robin Peek, Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Simmons College. These two academics and experts in the open access movement recognized the importance of involving the international community in the promotion of scholarly communication and envisioned a joint publication where users will have the power to build and edit content.

The first lists that were hosted to the OAD were moved from Prof. Suber’s personal Web page, which he had maintained for years by himself. As his workload was growing, it was harder for him to keep them current and decided to open them for the community, to ensure that the lists would be more comprehensive with the help of the users. The spirit of OA had to be promoted broadly with the creation of an open publication. Due to this reason, the OAD is published in a wiki environment, is open under free registration to everybody and it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license.

The OAD was launched officially on May 1, 2008 with approximately half a dozen lists. As of today, the OAD counts a little bit less than 320 registered users, and almost 40 published lists. This rapid growth of lists would not have happened if it weren’t for the help and engagement of the worldwide community. The cultural diversity of the international users, and their access to remote information enriched the wiki with information that covers a broad spectrum of the OA and it is freely accessed.

The characteristics of the OAD

The OAD does not include narratives in its pages; only factual lists that link to groups, documents, events and other primary or secondary resources. The wiki content is viewable by anyone, but only registered users can add or edit content. In order for us to protect the wiki content against spammers and violators, it is required from the users to register with their real names and not to use pseudonyms. Since this is a community publication, users are welcome to propose new lists, which are launched after the approval of the Editorial Board. Constructing a new list is sometimes a long procedure that requires consultation and considerable rethinking before finalizing their format and launching them.

My personal experience

Almost four years ago, I experienced a pleasant shock, when for the first time I read about the costless distribution of scholarly communication and the benefits for students and scholars. Currently, I am a second year doctoral student in the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, focusing on open access. My involvement with the OAD started almost a year and a half ago, where I was serving as a project manager and after its launch I have been the Assistant Editor. All this time, I have built from scratch some of the lists and I have assisted other users to compose other lists. Since the nature of my studies demand that I become informed about both the past and current issues on the movement, I don’t know how I could have made it so far if the OAD did not exist. When I want to study a subject area I always consult the lists, where I can find organized and trustworthy information. When I want to investigate an issue that is not developed yet in the OAD, I propose the new list and I volunteer to build it, either by myself or by cooperating with other users. Personally speaking, the most unique and challenging experience is to build a list from scratch. This procedure demands investigation in several online resources and allows me to apply critical thinking and personal judgment to decide whether the information is relevant and important to be included in the list. Sometimes building a concise list can take a couple of months, but at the end I have learned all I wanted about the subject and it is an ethical reward when other users consult it and find it as useful as I do.

Students, contribute to the OAD!

For students who want to help promote scholarly communication and gain invaluable knowledge at the same time, the OAD is waiting for you. You can use the OAD two ways. You can use the lists to learn more on a subject area of the open access movement or to collect information for your courses and assignments. On the other hand, you can help to develop the OAD by constructing new lists or improving the existing ones: for example, correcting dead links or updating information. Plenty of volunteer opportunities are offered to everyone who wants to get involved, either with the OAD or with the OA movement in general! Please feel free to contact the editors for more information.

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Chris Boulton. Mr. Boulton is a PhD student in communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst specializing in advertising, visual culture, and media literacy.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

Last year, my masters thesis served as a “guinea pig” for the new electronic submission process at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The monograph was a critical analysis of children’s fashion and included several examples of clothing advertisements. Despite lengthy efforts to secure permission to reproduce these copyrighted images, I was denied at every turn by corporations eager to protect the image of their brand. Therefore, according to rule number 88 of the UMass Graduate School’s Guidelines for Master’s Theses and Doctoral Dissertations, I was required to excise the ads from the text and “include a note in the List of Figures that directs readers to the set of illustrations on file in your department.”

As you can imagine, this was a disheartening prospect. The ads were, in short, the very basis of my analysis. Rule 88 means that any reader who wanted to view the ads would be forced to travel all the way to the UMass campus, trudge up to the fourth floor of Machmer Hall, and then request that a secretary pull out a dusty manila folder “on file in my department.” I wouldn’t go to such trouble, particularly if I had accessed the thesis online, so how could I expect anyone else?

As you can see, rule 88 put me in a terrible position. To comply would mean stripping the data from my analysis. If I ignored the rule and printed the ads, I risked rejection of my thesis, or worse. Clearly, this rule presented a serious hindrance to my intellectual freedom. Furthermore, I did not believe that it correctly reflects current copyright law as specified in section 107 of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. For example, the guidelines from the Graduate School do not even mention the right to use copyrighted images for educational and non-commercial purposes. Commonly known as “fair use,” this mechanism allows scholars and journalists to quote from copyrighted material in order to comment on it.

But of course, copyright goes both ways. For instance, I have recently been inspired by SPARC to retain the copyright of my own scholarly journal articles. There are many reasons to do this, but the most compelling for me was preserving the option to make my academic work freely available to the general public immediately following its date of publication. The 9 minute video below takes a look at both sides of the copyright coin by telling my two stories of open access in the emerging digital commons.

Fair Game: Open Access in the Emerging Digital Commons from Chris Boulton on Vimeo.

For scholars who study media, the internet has broadened research horizons and expanded the reach of teaching and publications. But powerful gatekeepers remain. From academic journals seeking to control our intellectual property to lawyers crying foul when we quote from copyrighted material, we are bombarded with a myriad of confusing and dubious restrictions. In short, the implied threat of legal action creates a chilling effect that impacts us all. Some have pushed back, arguing that our educational activities are protected under the “fair use” statute. But this is a risky game to play. The rules aren’t always clear. And when it comes to fair use, we either use it, or lose it.

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Nelson Pavlosky. Mr. Pavlosky is a law student at George Mason University in Arlington, Va. As co-founder of both Students for Free Culture and its first campus chapter, Free Culture Swarthmore, Nelson has been a leader in the student free culture movement. He made headlines in 2003 as a plaintiff in OPG v. Diebold, a case which set an important precedent protecting freedom of speech from abuse of copyright law. This summer he is interning at SPARC and advocating for open access to research.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

At the end of 2007 open access advocates won an important victory when President Bush signed into law a public access mandate for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), directing the agency to provide open access to findings from its funded research. Unfortunately, a number of publishers who benefit from high journal prices — and from charging the public for access to publicly funded research — have banded together to try to undermine or repeal the NIH public access mandate. It is essential that students become informed about this issue and join open access advocates in defending the NIH public access policy, and so I would like to explain what is at stake and how students can help.

What is the NIH?

The National Institutes of Health is a United States government agency which funds biomedical and health-related research. It is the largest funder of medical research in the world, and the largest funder of non-classified research in the US federal government. It has a $29 million budget and its funding is responsible for roughly 80,000 articles in scholarly journals every year. The impact of the NIH and similar government agencies on scholarly research is dramatic, since about half of all university research funding comes from the federal government. [See the Provosts' 2006 letter supporting FRPAA]

It seems like a no-brainer that publicly funded research should be freely available to the taxpayers who fund it, and people are always surprised when I tell them that until recently it was not. Yes — until the NIH public access mandate was passed by Congress, about 96% of the NIH’s research was only available in expensive, restricted-access journals. In order to read the results of the research that your taxes paid for, you had to belong to an institution that could afford the increasingly absurd prices of academic journals. The comments of publishing industry analysts at Credit Suisse First Boston explain the dire situation well:

[W]e would expect governments (and taxpayers) to examine the fact that they are essentially funding the same purchase three times: governments and taxpayers fund most academic research, pay the salaries of the academics who undertake the peer review process and fund the libraries that buy the output, without receiving a penny in exchange from the publishers for producing and reviewing the content….We do not see this as sustainable in the long term, given pressure on university and government budgets. [From SPARC's comment, page 4]

Happily, the NIH public access mandate will do a great deal to lighten this burden on the public.

What is the NIH public access mandate?

The NIH public access mandate provides free online access to full-text, peer-reviewed journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research. The NIH requires every scientist who receives an NIH research grant, and who publishes the results in a peer-reviewed journal, to post a digital copy of the article in PubMed Central, the online digital library maintained by the NIH. This free digital copy must be publicly available no later than 12 months after publication in the peer-reviewed journal. (As the Canadian Library Association recently pointed out, this kind of delay — designed to accommodate publisher concerns about loss of subscription revenues — should be seen as a temporary measure to help publishers adapt, as we eventually move to a world where access is open immediately upon publication.)

Why is the public access mandate important?

Innumerable people before me have made the case for why open access in general is important, and I highly recommend reading SPARC’s The Right To Research site for information on why open access is important to students. It is important to note that the NIH public access policy does not actually require the articles to be open access according to the BBB definition, i.e. released under a free license such as a Creative Commons license which explicitly allows for e.g. redistribution. Most of the articles that will be made available on PubMed Central will be covered by ordinary copyright. However, making all of these NIH-funded articles available for free online will have many of the same effects and benefits as open access publishing, and facilitate the transition to full open access.

The benefits of the NIH mandate in particular have also been exhaustively covered in documents such as SPARC’s response to NIH during the public comment period. Given the focus of NIH on medical research, the NIH mandate will have a huge impact on people who are ill or at risk of disease, as well as the people who care for them or who are researching treatments for their ailments. I found the comments of one mother to be particularly compelling:

My children have a genetic disease. It is rare, not well understood, and there is no treatment or cure. However, the most disturbing obstacle we face is the wall around published scientific research. Information critical to health and biomedical research is held hostage by questionable and arcane publishing practices. It is time for publishers, both private and academic, to redesign their business models in response to a new age of information sharing and a stronger sense of the scientific commons.

The research that is funded by the NIH has great potential to improve or even save lives, and it’s vital that it be made available to as many people as possible.

How are the publishers trying to get the NIH mandate overturned?

The publishers are trying to derail the NIH public access policy in a number of ways — mostly behind closed doors, since they have lost quite publicly several times. One method is publicly revealed in a comment by the Association of American Publishers which can be found on the NIH site. The publishers are making bogus claims that the NIH policy constitutes a change in copyright law, which requires further review by various executive and legislative bodies. This is silly because all that is happening here is that the people paying for the research — the US government through the NIH — are requiring a non-exclusive license to publish the research that they paid for. The NIH policy is a perfectly normal case of contract law and does not impact copyright in any way.
Nevertheless, we can expect the publishers to use this bogus interpretation of copyright law to try to overturn or undermine the NIH mandate, whether through legislative action, lawsuits, or executive action.

What can you do to support the NIH policy?

The NIH has just completed a public comment period, and the publishers have not yet made any overt moves which can be opposed by the public. However, you can be certain that your help will be needed in the future, especially if the publishers start pushing to repeal or weaken the NIH public access mandate.

To stay informed and be ready to respond if the publishers make their move, you can subscribe to the SPARC mailing list or to SPARC’s RSS feed. Check the websites for the Alliance for Taxpayer Access and SPARC now and then to catch up on the latest news. And to support open access in general, check out SPARC’s page on what students can do to support open access.

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Dr. Samir Chopra. Dr. Chopra is an associate professor of computer and information science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He is the author, with Scott Dexter, of Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software, published in August 2007.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

In this post, I’d like to offer some observations on the academic publishing process, based upon my experience in publishing my book Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software with Routledge. (You can see the discussions that took place when the book was released at the book’s link).

We were not able to release the book under an open license, though my co-author and I did try for a more open license, for a paperback edition, for a cheaper book, and so on. [Ed.: List price for the book is $95.] Our experience with Routledge in attempting to make the book open access was roughly, that they said, “These are the terms; either you agree or you walk”. We did not have enough academic cachet or a great deal of power with which to try and make the publisher come around to our point of view. Both Scott and I were junior academics (I was untenured at the time) at a public university, and this was our first book, in a field that is poorly defined. The problem with university presses, our other choice of publisher, was that as we made some preliminary inquiries we realized we did not fit into their disciplinary niches. We were not sociology, not political science, not law, not philosophy, not computer science. University presses are quite conservative and do not take to interdisciplinary work so easily. Unless someone like MIT Press’ Leonardo Division becomes the norm, interdisciplinary work will often fall between the cracks. Routledge, fortunately, has the reputation of being a slightly “cutting-edge” publisher, and so they were able to “take a chance” on us. But it came with a price; our book is expensive, and is published under a traditional copyright license [Ed.: "all rights reserved"].

Did we have an option to publish with a lower-prestige press that would have accepted the book, and would it have allowed open access to the manuscript? There might have been; we tried with Blackwell and Routledge first out of the non-university presses. However, it is not clear that lower-prestige presses are better in terms of open access as they are more concerned about their financial bottom line. Ironically, the bigger the press the better placed they are to try and experiment with open access. But the less willing they are to offer contracts to first-time authors doing interdisciplinary work.

The overarching problem is that in the academic world, regular printing presses still command all the power and prestige. Online publication counts for nothing. Yes, readership is important, but if I was to apply for tenure, promotion, grants, fellowships, or get invitations for visiting positions or talks, it’s a regular publication with a regular publisher (and there is a definite hierarchy amongst presses) that counts. Saying that my book had been ‘published’ by putting it online with no peer review, even though plenty of peer review would result from readers’ comments, would not count for as much. Currency in the academic world is has a great deal to do with prestige. When you tell someone you have a book contract or have published, the first question is, “With whom?” Scott and I went to conferences when we didn’t have book contracts; two years later, when we were making the same circuit, with a book on its way with Routledge, the way we were treated was interestingly different. The political economy of this world is structured very differently from that of the music or software world.

What were our alternatives? We could have published the book’s chapters piecemeal, in Open Access journals, and we did consider this. Perhaps this way, we could have published the book’s contents as open access journal articles and then put them all together to edit and publish as not-necessarily open access book. While that might have been possible, we were both keen to go for a book for several reasons. We wanted to make a substantial contribution to an area that was new for both of us. Journals are an incredibly inefficient way to get your work published: they delay endlessly; they lose papers; and there is a huge gap in publication. Importantly, we wanted the book’s contents to go together because of the narrative impact of pointing out that the liberatory possibilities of free and open source software went together.

Once we had decided to go with a book, we had to hope we would get lucky with a publisher in making it open access. We didn’t. We hoped then, and still hope now, that this will enable us to make enough academic capital so that we can drive a harder bargain in the future (I’m still finding it hard though; I just signed a contract with the University of Michigan Press and while they have agreed to make the book available for reading online, it won’t be so for printing or downloading).

Many people pointed us to Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler’s books, and asked us why we didn’t follow their lead. The problem is that those gentlemen have tremendous cachet already. They are professors at two of the top law schools in the country. If I’d been a professor at Columbia Law school, I’d have had a far richer network of contacts, and way more academic power and clout; with that, I could have negotiated a contract more to my liking. While Lessig and others have fashioned themselves into public academics, they only did so after being academically established at a top school.

What could change this situation? For one thing, senior academics could take the lead and start publishing with more open licenses. Tenure and promotion committees have to be educated, as does the rest of the academic community. Presses have to see this pressure coming on them from not just junior academics who are desperate for tenure, but from established folks as well. I’m glad Lessig and Benkler are doing what they do; it’s a small, but very important step toward the right kind of situation. The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research is a very good online journal with very good peer review; they are starting to get good people publishing in there. This needs to happen more often, across different disciplines.

In many ways, academia is a good story of a gift economy gone wrong (Gavin made this point to me in email). It is a very conservative institution overall. It abides by the Matthew Principle: those that have, shall get more; those that don’t, can scrounge for themselves. If you land up in the not-so-fast lane in academia, your career is pretty much condemned to stay there. It becomes very hard to break out of it, and those that are in the fast lane have very little inclination to help others speed up. Go to a good school, tap into networks of influence, get the letters of recommendations, get invited to academic gigs (or contribute chapters to edited collections) and it continues. Land up in the slow lane, and you slowly, slowly, spin off into the bylanes and backwaters. Its no wonder that someone in that situation would want to tap into the sources of traditional prestige.

The only change will come when those who have sufficient power, those who can easily get their fifth book published again by Cambridge University Press, will finally say, “I choose to make my book open access and make it available online.” And we need to set up a peer-review system for online, open access publications that the community comes to recognize and give due credit to. A few years ago, Erik Sandewall, a Swedish artificial intelligence researcher, proposed a journal called Electronic Transactions in Artificial Intelligence. The idea was, submit a paper to the journal, it’d be placed online, and open for community review, mark-up and commentary. This period of review would last for a few weeks. After this, the author would take the piece offline (or leave it there) and work on revisions. The piece would be submitted again, and then subject to the editor’s final decision, based on their assessment of responses to community comments. If approved, the paper would be placed in the accepted category and marked as “published”. The ETAI started off well, and then petered out. My guess was that not enough people trusted it to bring them enough prestige. It is a frustrating situation; how do we get this ball rolling?

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Gloria Tavera. Ms. Tavera is an undergraduate studying neurobiology, political science, and public health at the University of Florida. She also serves as chair of UAEM-UF, the Universities Allied for Essential Medicines chapter at the University of Florida.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

You’re looking for academic articles in a peer reviewed journal, perhaps you even have some titles and authors picked out. You think you’ve found the article and…click, click, then, “Please choose the appropriate price according to the kind of subscription you like and the area of your address of residence”. At $30 a paper? Forget it. Whether you’re researching for a class or trying to look for papers related to your latest lab experiment, open access could make things a whole lot easier.

In 2006, at my own school, University of Florida, budget cuts nearly forced the library to cancel almost $750,000 in online journal subscriptions. It’s infuriating that we had to have hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for access in the first place.

As far as I can see, the journal publisher’s business model is antiquated and counter-productive—it’s out with the old and in with the new. It practically blows my mind that such a backwards idea could persist in a community where it’s particularly important to share information and ideas.

It’s good to know that PLoS is around, the Directory of Open Access Journals and some OA articles, but despite OA’s growth, we’re still far from 100% OA.

For students, one of the most exciting parts about the open access campaign is the potential to make a lasting difference, while still an undergraduate/graduate student at a university. I’m currently working on a campaign, with Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), to get universities to sign on to generic licensing of their biotech to impoverished nations and nations in health crises. UAEM is a non-profit who works with student and faculty groups across the U.S. and Canada to construct creative new approaches to improving the development and delivery of public health goods. The similarities between our campaign and the potential student campaign for open access are striking.

Both have an extremely just cause, especially within the university context: ethically, you really can’t argue with what open access is about: making knowledge accessible to the public is one of the grand missions of institutions of higher education.

Another point: if you can educate and gain support from a large number of faculty (especially research faculty) at your university, your campaign is almost guaranteed to succeed. Despite how monolithic university administration may seem, they do work hard to maintain good relations with their researchers. If enough (or highly influential) researchers come to them with complaints about the way the current system works, the university will be much more receptive to the open access campaign.

A final thought: the open access campaign can also be fought in the classroom. Students can work with their professors to design and/or integrate open access education and use of open access-only materials in classes. Professors who teach classes on how to write papers and do research should adopt at least some open access coursework Into their material. Making a difference could be as simple as reaching out to them.

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Dr. Sigi Jöttkandt. Dr. Jöttkandt is a researcher in the theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands where she co-edits S, the open access journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique. She is also a co-founder of the Open Humanities Press, a new open access publishing collective in critical theory launching this spring.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

I was really excited to discover Open Students and to see how student activists are taking up the cause of OA. This is a very heartening sign because it means there’s real potential now for long-lasting and deep-seated changes to take place in academic publishing and scholarly communication more generally.

I asked Gavin if I could do this guest blog, however, because I’m a little worried that students in the humanities might feel a bit left out from the OA debate, which has been largely dominated up till now by the sciences. I want to emphasize how OA has enormous implications for us, too, in that it currently represents the simplest and most obvious solution to the crisis in monograph publishing that is causing an insidious contraction in our fields, and is hitting younger academics particularly hard.

The real question is why humanities academics are not taking to the opportunities represented by OA in the same way as academics in the sciences. From speaking with colleagues, my sense is that free online publishing continues to have some way to go before it is fully accepted by our peers as a credible, let alone a desirable and prestigious, medium for one’s work. There’s still a lot of FUD among us: fear, uncertainty and doubt about the changes represented by new technologies, including whether online publications will count towards job offers or tenure, or even if OA journals will still be around and available on the web after a few years. These are important issues and they need to be seriously addressed before OA - both “Gold” (publishing in OA journals) and “Green” (archiving in OA repositories, which confronts its own set of issues in the humanities) - can really be adopted by the mainstream.

This is why Gary Hall, David Ottina, Paul Ashton and I - OA advocates and journal editors - founded Open Humanities Press (OHP) last year. This open access publishing initiative is intended to offer humanities academics assurances that the OA journals affiliated with OHP meet the strictest standards of academic publishing, scholarship and archiving. These issues are typically overseen by a publishing house and this is also the role OHP is intended to play: OHP journals are not only all peer-reviewed, they also go through a rigorous external certification process by OHP’s independent editorial board whose policies are clearly laid out and available on the OHP website.

The other idea behind forming OHP was that it would enable us to pool our individual resources. As a publishing collective, we can provide each other with technical help, coordinate a permanent archiving strategy for our journals, and share graphic design skills in an effort to bring all the journals - and eventually we hope, also OA monographs - up to the visual and technical standards humanities academics expect of prestigious professional publications. We believe this will have a positive impact on how OA journals are perceived by our communities. We’re hopeful it will also help build greater trust in free, peer-reviewed online scholarship in all disciplines by showing that there is nothing inherent about the digital medium that means publications cannot be peer-reviewed and have the high editorial standards of comparable print publications.

Currently lots of exciting independent initiatives are springing up in and around the digital humanities and its implications for rethinking scholarship and the university (e.g. Media Commons, Voice of the Shuttle, NINES, The Digital Arts and Humanities of the UK Arts and Humanities Council, alt.x, The Imaginary Border Academy, The EduFactory, The Experimental University, along with the new discursive networks proposed by the Institute for Critical Climate Change to name just a few). Part of what we’re hoping OHP will do is enable these groups to find one another and lend different voices to the OA debate with the unique perspectives that come from the specific questions and theoretical approaches of humanities disciplines.

Open Students is a clear demonstration that students already “get” the way OA enables us to do more rigorous research when we have access to all the relevant materials, not just those which our library and interlibrary loan budgets can afford to purchase. What’s been interesting to discover is that some of the strongest OA advocates in the humanities are leading senior figures like J. Hillis Miller, Jonathan Culler and Stephen Greenblatt (all of whom are generously sharing their expertise on OHP’s advisory board). It suggests that what we really need now is to make overtures towards mid-career academics, many of whom have yet to fully understand what Open Access means. As OA journal editors, we are working to raise awareness and trust in OA publishing among these scholars but we would also love to hear ideas from students about how we can work together. As with many of the cultural shifts in recent history, it is students who are on the front-lines of this transformative change too.

OHP will be launching in Spring 2008 with 7 of the leading OA journals in critical and cultural theory. Gary Hall and I will be speaking at HumaniTech at UC Irvine, and at UC Santa Barbara in early April about the project. We’d love to see some of you there. But of course if you can’t make it, we would be very interested to hear your ideas, strategies, comments, suggestions, etc. either here or by contacting us at info [at] openhumanitiespress.org

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Professor Jos van Helvoort. Professor van Helvoort is a senior lecturer in Library & Information Studies at The Hague University. Professor van Helvoort has previously conducted research on benefits of open access for students in higher education (see also this video).

Opinions are solely those of the author.

Higher education in the Netherlands (and in particular the education at universities for applied science) has oriented in recent years extremely on competence based education. In this educational system students not only learn from the instruction by a teacher or professor but also by exploring a problem or a theme in its professional environment. The didactics are, in other words, based on “learning by doing”. While working on the assignment students are of course coached by a ‘tutor’ and can ask an expert for help, but they obtain a lot of the knowledge and understanding while working on the task themselves. The tasks they work on are based on real life professional situations and sometimes are indeed real life projects. Examination of learning outcomes in competence based education is mostly done by evaluating the student’s performance while working on the task, and so it is often referred to as “alternative” or “authentic assessment”.

Click here to read the rest of the entry…

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our first guest blogger, Dr. Stevan Harnad. Dr. Harnad is Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences at Université du Québec à Montréal and Professor in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at University of Southampton. Dr. Harnad has been a prominent thinker in the open access movement for more than 10 years, including his “subversive proposal,” which predicted open access and self-archiving at a time few scholars were using the Web.

Dr. Harnad has cross-posted this entry at his blog, Open Access Archivangelism. Opinions are solely those of the author.

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SUMMARY: Open Access (OA) will not come until universities, the research-providers, make it part of their mandate not only to publish their research findings, as now, but also to see to it that the few extra keystrokes it takes to make those published findings OA — by self-archiving them in their institutional repositories, free for all online — are done too. Students are in a position to help convince their universities to go ahead and mandate OA self-archiving, at long last.

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My guess is that Open Access (OA) already sounds old hat to the current generation of students, and that you are puzzled more about why we are still talking about OA happening in the future, rather than in the distant past (as the 80’s and 90’s must appear to you!).

Well, you’re right to be both puzzled and impatient, but let me try to explain why it’s been taking so long. (I say “try” because I have to admit that I too am still somewhat perplexed by the slowness of OA growth, even after sampling the sluggishness of its pace for nearly 2 decades now!) And then I’ll try to suggest what you students can do to help speed OA on its way to its obvious, optimal, and long overdue destination.

Click here to read the rest of the entry…