Open Educational Resources

Elsevier may have hushed the blogosphere when it dropped its support for the Research Works Act but Stephen Curry doesn’t see the issue of open access fading into the background. He explains why he hesitated to write for an Elsevier journal and warns researchers of the need to be wary of fragmentation of literature into institutional repositories.

Open access publishing is growing increasinly important so the Peer Project has built an observatory to investigate potential effects of a major switch to open access models. Julia Wallace finds that the scholarly web is a complex environment where author self-deposit rates are likely to be low and usage scenarios for green open access are more complex than generally acknowledged.

New taxpayer-funded research must be made available to the public free of charge within a year of its publication, the Obama administration has said.

The movement to make academic literature freely available, dubbed the Academic Spring, is gaining momentum, having recently obtained the support of both the Department of Education and Harvard University. Advocates have built a solid case, citing the burden of subscription costs borne by universities, as well as the limitations on sharing information that characterises the existing system. As proponents have rightly argued, freeing academic literature will increase readership, by some estimates up to 250%.

Unintended consequences of RCUK policy mean that if academics want open access publishing, publishers are happy to sell it to them, writes Stevan Harnad. He argues that researchers should not have to choose gold publishing when green open access is available.

While protecting human subjects’ confidentiality is a long-standing practice in the social sciences, new types of digital datasets present new challenges. Tensions between privacy and openness were explored in the recent International Digital Curation Conference. Limor Peer reflects on the session she chaired on participant confidentiality in a time of open research data. While community efforts on establishing best practice are well underway, questions still remain on who is responsible for data protection and whether practitioners and policy-makers could be more involved in this ‘data life cycle’.