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Open Futures in Open Access

by Amber Thomas 26 October 2012 3 comments

As Heather Morrison describes in her blog post, there is plenty to celebrate in the continuing growth of open access.

Here at Jisc we have been supporting emerging open access practices for over a decade. We’re busy building services and communities to support universities to respond to the changing landscape of education and research on a global, networked scale.

This week we has been highlighting some of the recent work that supports developments in open access and helps to raise awareness of the tools available:

Watch our Jisc open trailer and find out what open can do for you for the future
Explore CORE the Jisc-funded place to visit for open access research papers from across the world
Hear how Open Education Resources could help your part-time tutors in our podcast
Take a look at Jiscs animation to find out about open data licensing
Senior managers: find out what we can do for you by exploring our open education resource info kits
Caren Milloy, Head of Projects at Jisc Collections is exploring open access to save monographs, the question is – how?
Read a blog post on the UK's contribution to the European progress of open access from Rachel Bruce, digital infrastructure innovation director at Jisc.

Key themes in the global discussion around International Open Access Week this year for education and research seem to be:

the potential of opening up communications for greater public engagement and impact
the relationship with open educational resources and concepts of digital learning and research
the various approaches emerging to academic publishing; such as green, gold, self-publishing and new forms of journals
the issues around opening up research data
the renewed focus on Creative Commons licensing options into open access research articles

There is so much happening that it can be difficult to keep track of! What do you think the challenges and opportunities are for #openfutures?

... You could be thinking about challenges - how do we ensure we can benefit from text mining?

... You could be thinking about new aspects of open - will designs for 3D printers become an important area for exploring the potential of open approaches; do universities need to focus more on open innovation?

... You could be thinking about how to scale up good practice in areas like open educational resources?

There has been great progress and there is a lot to celebrate but we recognise there is also a lot to do and we want to ensure that Jisc can help the sector realise the benefits offered by an open future...

Comment on this post or tweet with the #openfutures by 3pm GMT today and we will report back this afternoon!

3 Comments

Debbie 26 October 2012, 11:28am
In terms of Higher Education, we haven't yet made the change to exciting, innovative, student based assessment - how about students negotiating with their tutors as to how they will meet the learning outcomes and how these will be marked? Students can then start to develop / seek out / consider OERs to classify, explore, repurpose, reuse, adapt, adopt, as part of a wider student journal to expertise in their discipline area - much of the assessment process is still institutionally driven and to pseudo measurements so much in vogue by current Government policy - an old adage - what gets measured gets done....
Amber Thomas 26 October 2012, 4:18pm
Thanks Debbie - it does seem that there is a surge of interest in the sorts of learning approaches described in the OU's Innovating Pedagogy report: http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/innovating/ . As you say, it's not just about academics having the ideas but about the funding environment being conducive to different ways of doing things. That's also why Open Access mandates from funders are so important to innovating in open scholarship too. Thanks for your comment!
Amber Thomas 26 October 2012, 4:34pm
Well ... 3pm came and went and it looks like you were busy at your work, dear readers! The comments we had were:

For open data, open is just the start. We need to address the challenge of making it usable for a wide audience.
Opening up data and scholarly discourse will give the public a better chance to engage with, question and enrich research.
tension between overwhelming human case for openness and existing business models hardening during global economic depression
Open futures will be underpinned by open standards: Not necessarily their creation, but their effective implementation.
We haven’t yet made the change to exciting, innovative, student based assessment – how about students negotiating with their tutors as to how they will meet the learning outcomes and how these will be marked?
Effective communication within / between communities; devs (implementing open standards), pedagogs, students, lifelong learners

We've hardly scratched the surface of what our readers really think.

So what can be said about the future?

“The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different”
Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, Chapter 4.

“The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed”
William Gibson, repeated in "The Science in Science Fiction", Talk of the Nation, NPR, 30 November 1999,

This thought-provoking “map of the future” [ http://www.behance.net/gallery/The-map-of-the-future/319690 ] is a reminder of how hard it is to imagine how things might be. But for sure, open access to knowledge has a crucial part to play in getting us there.