The New York Times dubbed 2012 the year of the MOOC. And for many, the seemingly unstoppable rise of Massive Open Online Courses – courses which are offered for free by prestigious universities – is where…
Tectonic shifts are happening in the way scientific research is done. These changes, and the ways they may eventually affect us all, are chronicled in a new collection of articles commissioned by Nature…
The entire editorial board of a US academic journal has resigned in protest over restrictions that would require scholars to wait up to 18 months before making their published research more widely available…
The United States has backed a project that aims to translate American textbooks into Arabic and make them available without copyrights restrictions to educators and students in the Middle East. The Open…
Activists pushing for free, open access to academic papers will eventually defeat publishers who seek to lock scholarly findings behind paywalls, the founder of the world wide web said today. Sir Tim Berners-Lee…
The issue of open access to research findings has been in the media for a number of reasons lately, some positive - the release of the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) open access policy - and some…
If researchers go to the effort of getting funds, recruiting patients, and following them up, you would think that they would be keen to publish the results. So it’s surprising that our best estimates…
The Australian Research Council (ARC) is the largest funder of basic science and humanities research in Australia. So when the ARC talks, academics listen. And now the ARC has announced that articles resulting…
It promised to be a full year of reforms: pokies legislation, front-of-pack food labels and a dental system that doesn’t cost those in need an arm and a leg. But while we did see cigarette companies forced…
You’ll have read on this site, and perhaps others, about the push towards “open access” for journal articles. But what is open access, and how does it fit into the wider “open movement”? The topic has…
This week, we celebrate open access week – an event aimed at bringing attention to this rapidly emerging form of scientific publication and its ethical imperatives. Traditionally, knowledge breakthroughs…
In recent weeks we’ve seen a renewed push to introduce open access to science research publications. The concept is simple: research that is paid for by public funds should be made freely available, not…
While the Australian Research Council considers its policy on open-access publication and others within the scientific community call for the increased sharing of scientific data, the British are already…
The Australian Research Council (ARC) is considering a plan to require free public access to all scientific papers created as a result of projects it funds, potentially bringing it into line with the open…
“Open health” captures a broad set of information technologies that will change the way we approach health and health care. It encompasses “ehealth” (the storage and provision of personal medical information…
There’s an ongoing debate in the world of academic publishing about whether the public should be allowed open access to research publications we all pay for in the first place. “If we are paying for this…
Science (real science, not the summaries in popular books and the media) is needlessly closed to the outside world. Worse, it is closed within itself, with every lab its own silo, and little sharing of…
A committee convened to examine how UK-funded research could be made more accessible released its report this week. The committee, chaired by Dame Janet Finch, was set up last year by Minister for Universities…
Advocates of “open access” publishing in academia say a UK report that proposes spending £60 million a year to make all publicly-funded research free to access will protect the profits of publishers at…
Australia is preparing to join a worldwide push to map the wider social returns on investments in science. This week Professor Julia Lane, who developed and led the US National Science Foundations’s Science…