#Open Textbook tweet: Driving the Awareness and Adoption of Open Textbooks
This collection of tweets seeks to answer key questions for those who might support open textbooks, and the future of the open textbook movement more
Access to Knowledge in Africa: The Role of Copyright
The emergence of the Internet and the digital world has changed the way people access, produce and share information and knowledge. Yet people in Africa face challenges in accessing scholarly publications, journals and learning materials in general. At the heart of these challenges, and solutions to them, is copyright, the branch of intellectual property rights that covers written and... more
Free to Learn: An Open Educational Resources Policy Development Guidebook for Community College Governance Officials
Open Educational Resources (OER) offer higher education governance leaders a cost-efficient method of improving the quality of teaching and learning while at the same time reducing costs imposed on students related to the purchase of expensive commercial textbooks and learning materials. Leading scholars around the world are already participating in the OER movement even without support from most... more
A Cover to Cover Solution: How Open Textbooks are the Path to Textbook Affordability
The Student PIRGs conducted this study to evaluate the long-term potential of new lower-cost options for college textbooks which include cost-reducing options for traditional text books, such as e-Books, e-Readers, rentals and alternative publishing models. In 2010 a survey was conducted with students from 10 campuses and an analysis of text book prices for 10 common college subjects. This... more
Resources for New Ways of Learning: A Manual for Developers of Learning Resources
During 2005 Saide conducted a series of workshops to build the capacity of a group of educators from FET colleges in course design and learning resource development. From the outset we envisaged the need for a manual that would support people who participated in the workshops as well as their colleagues. The manual is a practical resource that enables us to capture and reformat the various... more
Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now
Among the many important implications of Houghton et al.?s (2009) timely and illuminating JISC analysis of the costs and benefits of providing free online access to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal articles, one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield a 40-fold benefit/cost ratio if the world?s peer-reviewed research were all self-archived by its authors so as to... more
Openness in Academic Publication: The Question of Trust, Authority and Reliability
John Houghton and Charles Oppenheim have rebuffed many of the claims made around the prevalent economic model(s) of academic publishing. They support the contention that there is much to be gained from a shift to open access dissemination of scholarly research. While the economic case seems clear, unfortunately this is not the whole picture; there are other costs and benefits related to the... more
Minerva's Owl. A Reponse to John Houghton and Charles Oppenheim's 'The Economic Implications of Alternative Publishing Models'
Houghton and Oppenheim?s cost?benefit analysis of different forms of scholarly publishing is a major contribution in considering the case for open access and for open institutional repositories as a standard resource in publicly-funded universities.In what follows, I will draw out some specific aspects of Houghton and Oppenheim?s cost?benefit analysis in order to explore these wider issues. more
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