...[The Open University's] vice-chancellor, Brenda Gourley...[has won Outstanding Achiever of the Year at] last month's 2009 Women in Public Life Awards....
[She] had already won the International Public Servant of the Year prize...in March for her commitment to providing free educational material to developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa....
The biggest change during her seven years in charge of The Open University has been the technological progress that has made open-access study possible, she said.
"I've always been interested in education as a means of changing people's lives and pursuing social justice. There are so many who don't have access to decent libraries and textbooks. To them, being able to access good material on the web must be like manna from heaven." ...
Professor Gourley was "frantic" for the institution to be in the vanguard of the [OA and OER]movement, since The Open University is already a global leader in distance learning....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/24/2009 02:33:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
