Category — Student Journals

• An op-ed in Georgetown University’s student newspaper criticizes Rep. John Conyers’ bill to overturn the NIH Public Access Policy and calls for open access to publicly-funded research.
• The Göttingen Journal of International Law is a new student-edited open access journal published by the University of Göttingen.
• Two students at the University of California, Berkeley used Creative Commons licenses for their dissertations. See the story in the Daily Californian and blog posts by Creative Commons and one of the authors.
• An op-ed in the University of Maryland’s student newspaper calls for open textbooks.

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.

The student-published law review at the University of La Verne, the University of La Verne Law Review, has joined Science Commons’ Open Access Law Program. Participating journals guarantee their authors the right to self-archive their articles and to permit re-use under a Creative Commons license.

A recent column in the University of Pennsylvania Alamanc highlighted three open access student journals hosted in the university’s institutional repository: the Penn McNair Research Journal, the Journal of Student Nursing Research (JOSNR), and CUREJ, the College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal. Check them out!

Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development is a new, open access journal led by students at Columbia University. Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia’s Earth Institute and author of the 2005 bestseller The End of Poverty, helped launch the journal this week.

From the inaugural issue’s Note from Editors:

Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development began as an idea: an idea that a group of ten students genuinely and passionately believed had the potential to make this world a better place. …

Widespread global poverty, hunger, environmental damage, and conflict are only some of the problems facing humanity today. As a bold collective of students intolerant of inertia, we push you to understand the urgency of forging solutions to these problems. …

The concept of consilience, “the joining together of knowledge and information across disciplines to create a unified framework of understanding,” runs through each article. With this in mind, we urge you to be active readers, to not only think deeply about each specific article but also to consider the interaction between the individual pieces.

We urge you to contrast theory against practice, one discipline against another, and your ideas against the authors’ ideas. The Editorial Board of Consilience has high hopes that this exchange of ideas, sparked by the written and visual media contained in this online space, will contribute to the progress of sustainable development.