The Openness of the University of the Philippines…

Statut

The Openness of the University of the Philippines Open University: Issues and Prospects :

“This paper is a self-reflection on the state of openness of the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU). An exploratory and descriptive study, it aims not only to define the elements of openness of UPOU, but also to unravel the causes and solutions to the issues and concerns that limit its options to becoming a truly open university. It is based on four parameters of openness, which are widely universal in the literature, e.g., open admissions, open curricula, distance education at scale, and the co-creation, sharing and use of open educational resources (OER). It draws from the perception survey among peers, which the author conducted in UPOU in July and August 2012. It also relies on relevant secondary materials on the subject.”

URL : http://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/view/26

Strategies for gaining and maintaining academic support for…

Statut

Strategies for gaining and maintaining academic support for the institutional open access repository :

“The impact of research can be measured by use or citation count. The more widely available that research outputs are; the more likely they are to be used, and the higher the impact. Making the author-manuscript version of research outputs freely available via the institutional repository greatly increases the availability of research outputs and can increase the impact.
QUT ePrints, the open access institutional repository of research outputs at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia, was established in 2003 and is managed by the QUT Library. The repository now contains over 39,000 records. More than 21,000 of these records have full-text copies attached as result of continuous effort to maintain momentum and encourage academic engagement. The full-text deposit rate has continued to increase over time and, in 2012 (August, at the time of writing), 88% of the records for works published in 2012 provide access to a full-text copy.
Achieving success has required a long term approach to collaboration, open access advocacy, repository promotion, support for the deposit process, and ongoing system development. This paper discusses the various approaches adopted by QUT Library, in collaboration with other areas of the University, to achieve success.
Approaches include mainstreaming the repository via having it report to the University Research and Innovation Committee; regular provision of deposit rate data to faculties; championing key academic supporters; and holding promotional competitions and events such as during Open Access Week.
Support and training is provided via regular deposit workshops with academics and faculty research support groups and via the provision of online self-help information. Recent system developments have included the integration of citation data (from Scopus and Web of Science) and the development of a statistical reporting system which incentivise engagement.”

URL : http://eprints.qut.edu.au/59212/

Fulfilling an Institutional and Public Good Mission A…

Statut

Fulfilling an Institutional and Public Good Mission: A Case Study of Access :

“Access to higher education has been and remains a critical issue, yet research typically focuses on students and programs which may overlook the role of the faculty. Through an in-depth case study, the perspectives of tenured and tenure-track faculty at a predominately White, Midwestern land-grant, research institution are described as they relate to issues of student access to higher education. The context of the case was instrumental in understanding faculty perspectives of access and centered on the fundamental notion of education as public good and its association with institutional history and mission. The findings suggest that faculty members uphold the belief of higher education serving a greater purpose, or public good. However, faculty participants rarely saw themselves as actors in the issue of access.
The faculty held many expectations for students, some of which were reflected in the access literature and models, such as academic preparation and ability to navigate the university. Other expectations are absent in the access literature. Faculty members expect students to demonstrate a certain cultural capital and rewards students who demonstrate these skills, behaviors and knowledge. These expectations are often implicit and hidden from students. These finding suggests that some students or groups of students, especially those that face the biggest barriers to higher education, have the potential to be overlooked without advocacy and faculty buy-in. This study also advances the emerging theory of Academic Capital Formation (St. John et al., 2011) by presenting the faculty’s view of access.”

URL : http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cehsedaddiss/125/

Open Access Self archiving in Library and Information…

Statut

Open Access Self-archiving in Library and Information Science: Indian contribution to E-LIS Repository :

“Open Access (OA) is a widely debated issue in the scientific community as well as in the publishing industry. Although people in all walks of life are greatly benefitted by the OA philosophy, libraries and information centres have been the prime beneficiaries of the new model of information access and delivery. The main objective of the OA ventures is to make the recorded scholarly output freely available to all readers over the Internet. The paper is a case study of E-LIS repository which provides open access LIS literature worldwide. The study found that India is the highest contributor to the repository among all the 42 Asian countries with 658 submissions followed by Turkey and China. M. S. Sridhar, former librarian of ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore found to be the highest individual contributors to E-LIS from India with 106 (234%) papers.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18655/

The cost and quality of online open textbooks…

Statut

The cost and quality of online open textbooks: Perceptions of community college faculty and students :

“Proponents of open educational resources (OER) claim that significant cost savings are possible when open textbooks displace traditional textbooks in the college classroom. We investigated student and faculty perceptions of OER used in a community college context. Over 125 students and 11 faculty from seven colleges responded to an online questionnaire about the cost and quality of the open textbooks used in their classrooms. Results showed that the majority of students and faculty had a positive experience using the open textbooks, appreciated the lower costs, and perceived the texts as being of high quality. The potential implications for OER initiatives at the college level seem large. If primary instructional materials can in fact be made available to students at no or very low cost, without harming learning outcomes, there appears to be a significant opportunity for disruption and innovation in higher education.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3972

When press is not printed : the challenge of collecting digital newspapers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France

Since its birth in the early seventeenth century, the press has played a prominent role in the political and social life of France. Over the two last decades, the economic and even cultural pillars on which the press ecosystem is built has been challenged by the growing use of digital technologies, and by the increasing role of the Internet as a way to distribute and access information.

Heritage libraries need to address the accelerating shift from analogue to digital in order to maintain the continuity of their objectives and of their missions. Many aspects need to be taken into account: legal, scientific, technical, economic and organizational issues have to be identified and addressed.

This paper looks at the example of the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France or BnF), and at the way it has dealt with collecting newspapers in digital form. During the ten last years, the BnF has launched several experiments, testing different approaches, with varying degrees of success: – Direct deposit of electronic publications on physical media (CDs and DVDs) or through FTP. – Fully automated web harvesting.

Since December 2010, almost 100 news websites (national and daily newspapers, pure players, news portals…) are collected on a daily basis. -Web harvesting through agreements with producers.”

URL : http://hal-bnf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00769084

Open Textbooks and Increased Student Access and Outcomes…

Statut

Open Textbooks and Increased Student Access and Outcomes :

“This study reports findings from a year-long pilot study during which 991 students in 9 core courses in the Virginia State University School of Business replaced traditional textbooks with openly licensed books and other digital content. The university made a deliberate decision to use open textbooks that were copyrighted under the Creative Commons license. This decision was based on the accessibility and flexibility in the delivery of course content provided by open textbooks. More students accessed digital open textbooks than had previously purchased hard copies of textbooks. Higher grades were correlated with courses that used open textbooks.”

URL : http://www.eurodl.org/?article=533