open access (OA)

A couple years ago, Sebastian Thrun, a robotics professor at Stanford started the first MOOC (massively open online course). Since that time, open access education has spread broad and wide, with major universities publishing whole courses to the internet for free. [...] In this setting, I have found a few open access biblical studies courses worth looking at. Read More »

While the movement to unlock the vaults of scientific, technical and medical (STM) research is revolutionizing academic journal publishing, scholarly and professional book publishers are experimenting with open models simply to keep the venerable monograph from extinction—this according to the most recent report from media and publishing intelligence firm Simba Information. The report, Open Access Book Publishing 2016-2020, found that there is promise in this strategy. While both STM and social science and humanities (SSH) book revenue is expected to decline at a compound annual rate of about 1% between 2016 and 2020, open access (OA) book revenue is expected to grow by almost 30% a year through 2020...

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Hundreds of scholars gathered in Stellenbosch, South Africa, last month to build a stronger case for making the results of scientific research freely accessible worldwide. Calling scientific knowledge the motor of economic development, delegates to the international gathering, the Berlin 10 Conference on Open Access, urged scientists to radically change how they evaluate and communicate their work. Read More »

Open Access Empowers 16-year-old to Create Breakthrough Cancer Diagnostic: An Interview with Jack Andraka and Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health Read More »

The conversation about scientific publishing has exploded lately, online, in print and in person. Last week, the journal Nature released a special issue called The future of publishing. Also last week, Michael Eisen [...] posted a speech he gave on the past and projected future of scholarly communication in the age of the Internet. I want to start there, because his remarks were thorough and persuasive, and they inspired me to think differently about the issue... Read More »

When MIT faculty adopted an open access (OA) policy for their scholarly articles in March 2009, they expressed a strong philosophical commitment to disseminating "the fruits of their research and scholarship" as widely as possible. The MIT Libraries are paying close attention to recent events in Washington that have the potential to expand this commitment... Read More »