Harvard Library to faculty: we're going broke unless you go open access. Henry sez, "Harvard Library's Faculty Advisory Council is telling faculty that it's financially 'untenable' for the university to keep on paying extortionate access fees for academic journals. It's suggesting that faculty make their research publicly available, switch to publishing in open access journals and consider resigning from the boards of journals that don't allow open access. " Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75M.
In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands. Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices.
Wikipedia web science project open research article google content blogs | Closing tabs. As mentioned in this previous post , I need a place where to dump links that I have come across, that I think would be of interest to me and that I didn’t yet have the time to take a closer look. I find this kind of blog posts annoying as a reader, so in order not to annoy those who read my primary blog , I have started this auxiliary one. I do not expect anyone other than crawlers to ever take a close look at these pages, but if you find something to comment on, please do. The code used for generating the title of this post is sed 's/ ]*>/ /g' closingtabs.txt | sed 's/[^a-zA-Z]/ /g'|grep -Eo "[^ ]{3,}" | sort | tr A-Z a-z | uniq -c| grep -viwf ~/nowords.txt |grep -v "^[ ]*1" |sort -fnr | sed 's/^[ \t]*//' | cut -d " " -f 2- | sed 10q | sed -n -e ":a" -e "$ s/\n/ /gp;N;b a" – on the growth of retractions of scientific papers.
Open Textbook Panel, Open Textbook Panel opened09 on USTREAM. Co. Booklist Online - Off the Shelf: Exploring Open Access E-textboo. Open isn’t so open anymore. We need some good ol’ radicals in open education. You know, the types that have a vision and an ideological orientation that defies the pragmatics of reality. Stubborn, irritating, aggravating visionaries. Today, I fear, open education is beset with a more moderate spirit. People are trying to make a living off of being open – i.e. openness as a utility to advance a career, gain recognition from peers, or make money.
This is fine. This was made rather clear to me in a recent exchange on Twitter. Well, then the gloves were off. Most people who contributed to the conversation, while questioning my mental acuity, were at least willing to discuss/debate (one individual, however, took the passive/aggressive stance of someone responding as if I had questioned the Pope’s religious affiliation). That’s how we got here.
Let me start by stating that “open” is a term that is now essentially meaningless. David Wiley states that open is a function of gradients (”a continuous, not binary, construct”). Beyond Textbooks – Andy Chlup Discusses Digital Learning Models. There was a large touch of irony in an August NY Times post discussing the demise of a fixture in the world of education, the school textbook. The article, In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History, predicts the death of an industry that is becoming “antiquated” with each passing tech innovation.
Though always considered exceedingly expensive, textbooks were once deemed as fundamental to the classroom learning experience as the teacher. These tombs were the source of knowledge, the drivers of curriculum, and the teacher’s most important resource. But all that has changed in the digital world. First, there is the assessment of the value (learning produced per dollar) of these texts: “They are expensive,” writes Seth Godin. “$50 is the low end, $200 is more typical.” Yet, “Textbooks have very little narrative,” writes Godin. And of course, in today’s lightening-fast world, they are out of date before the ink is even dry. “Kids are wired differently these days,” said Sheryl R. Beyond Textbooks. As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks May Become History - NYTimes. Textbook torrents a-crashin’ In the Net… shared CC by ALA staff Nothing more annoying than argument by anecdote… I read a thread on Facebook where a young relative of mine posted a status message that a textbook he needed was sold out at the bookstore.
A friend of his responded “why don’t you just download it?” To which the lad replied “you can do that?” Students torrenting textbooks is nothing new, but I thought this little episode was worth a Tweet. The seeds of revolt are planted, and again I think this is a huge opportunity for open educators. Math in Society. Free Programming and Computer Science Books. Online texts.
Professor Jim Herod and I have written Multivariable Calculus ,a book which we and a few others have used here at Georgia Tech for two years. We have also proposed that this be the first calculus course in the curriculum here, but that is another story.... Although it is still in print, Calculus,by Gilbert Strang is made available through MIT's OpenCourseWare electronic publishing initiative. Here is one that has also been used here at Georgia Tech. Linear Methods of Applied Mathematics, by Evans Harrell and James Herod. Yet another one produced at Georgia Tech is Linear Algebra, Infinite Dimensions, and Maple, by James Herod. I have also written a modest book, Complex Analysis, which I have used in our introductory undergraduate complex analysis course here. Textbook Media. §. TextbookRevolution. CK-12.org. Welcome | Flat World Knowledge.
Open Source Textbook Company Now BMOC at 400 Colleges | Epicente. What did you do this summer? Flat World Knowledge stayed busy on campus and now has 40 times as many students and more than 10 times the colleges using their freemium, open-source digital textbooks as they did spring semester. And they did it the old-fashioned way — one professor at a time. After a sort of beta earlier this year, Flat World is set to announce Thursday that more than 40,000 college students at 400 colleges will use their digital, DRM-free textbooks fall semester, up from 1,000 in 30 colleges in the spring.
Digital textbooks remain a nascent business and a tough market to enter. By comparison, Flat World has a pricing scheme that starts at zero for online access using a browser, and $20 for a PDF, which they believe will be the most popular format. Perhaps best of all: Textbooks are available a la carte, chapter by chapter. But the key buy-in has been from teachers who make the assignments and who, in my college days, could not care less how much the textbooks cost.