Unfortunately, the situation at the Open University is far worse than you reported (Open University plans major cuts to number of staff and courses, 22 March). Despite the university’s warm words about working with academics, the relationship between the vice-chancellor’s executive and the academic body is now characterised by deep mutual contempt. More...
In November 2016 I was invited to speak at an Open University reception in London celebrating the launch of a new chair of economics named after my late father, Harold Wilson, who, together with Jennie Lee, brought the Open University into being in the 1960s. More...
Lecturers express concern over future quality of degrees and £2.5m fees spent on consultants. More...
By Lindsay McKenzie. Concerned about commercial publishers profiting from open educational resources, a group of advocates wants organizations and individuals that benefit from OER to think about giving back. More...
By Lindsay McKenzie. Legislators rewrite bill that originally required use of freely accessible educational materials, amid criticism that legislation would have infringed academic freedom and harmed, not helped, the open-access movement. More...
Techno-News Blog. Open licences are the outcome of an effort to protect the authors’ rights in an environment where the content (particularly when digitised) can easily be copied and shared without permission. Open licences seek to ensure that copying and sharing should happen within a structured legal framework that is more flexible than the automatic all-rights-reserved status of copyright. More...
Techno-News Blog. Interest in open educational resources — freely accessible and openly licensed learning materials — is booming. But while OER’s growing popularity with faculty members has delighted supporters, it has also attracted the attention of commercial publishers. More...
PKP Donation Drive
Press Release, Public Knowledge Project, April 3, 2014
I never post donation drive news (so please don't ask) but the Public Knowledge project has very quietly and very effectively been providing Open Journal Systems and Open Conference Sustems for years now. More...
Panelists Consider the 'Business Case' For Open-Source
I think this could be a significant shift in the way open source should be depicted: "When you look at the Free Software Foundation's Web site, they have an explanation right on the page: 'Not free as in beer, free as in speech.' We're not terribly interested -- from a business point of view -- in 'free as in speech,' but we don't think of 'free as in beer' as the best way to build a business either. We like to think of it as 'free as in market.'" Yes. More...
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