By Maurice Dawson - EvoLLLution. As costs globally continue to rise for education, institutions must become innovative in the ways they deliver the educational labs and other instructional materials. This delivery can be done effectively if professors and administrative staff push toward the insertion of Open Source Software (OSS) and virtual tools to enhance or supplement currently available tools. More...

UNESCO and SciELO have published an anniversary publication to follow up the 15th anniversary of SciELO.
SciELO (The Scientific Electronic Library Online) had its origins in Brazil at around 1997 and has since been expanded to 16 additional countries, most in Latin America, the Caribbean, but also including Portugal, South Africa and Spain. In their model, authors do not need to pay or pay very little, being subsidized by public funds. Open access expert Jean-Claude Guédon argued in an article in Nature that with respect to open access this was “one of the more exciting projects not only from emergent countries, but also in the whole world”. More...

By Paige Francis. Sound familiar? If not, it should. With the current pace of technology, if your technology strategy does not wholly mesh with your institutional strategy and mission, now is the time to proactively put on the brakes and map that out before continuing down any path. More...

HEFCE has agreed to fund the development of a new shared service to support compliance with the policy for open access in the next Research Excellence Framework (REF). At its core, this new service will enable authors and universities to check whether a given publication is compliant with the open access policy. More...

The Monographs and Open Access Project considers the place of monographs in the arts, humanities and social science disciplines, and how they fit into the developing world of open access to research. It concludes that open access for monographs has a great deal to contribute to scholarly communication, but that the challenges of introducing it will be real and policy should take account of the various issues identified in the report. More...