Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Toward a culture of academic sharing

Larry Johnson, NMC and UOC Release Call to Action for Open Education, New Media Consortium, November 1, 2009.

Forty internationally known leaders in open education and technology met in Barcelona on October 19-20, 2009, at the NMC's first official European event, the Open EdTech Summit, cosponsored by the Open University of Catalunya and the New Media Consortium. ...

Summit attendees generated fifty action items necessary to realize the goal of creating an institution that can meet the needs of students today and into the foreseeable future, and then ranked them. Those which ranked highest are captured here, and framed as a Call to Action - five major tasks that are perceived as critical to achieving the promise of open education: ...

4. We must enable a culture of sharing. Recognizing that the sharing and reuse of scholarly work is a key component of the university of the future, we advocate building a culture of sharing in which concerns about intellectual property, copyright, and student-to-student collaboration are alleviated and the model of proprietary work dissolves in favor of a more open one. To this end, we must establish reward structures that support the sharing of work in progress, ongoing research, highly collaborative projects, and scholarly publications of all kinds, including reputation systems, peer review processes, and new models for citation of such content. ...