By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Are OERs Sustainable?
Martin Poulter, OPENEDSIG Archives, 2016/05/23

This is an excellent posts looking at five key questions regarding the sustainability of open educational resources (OERs), backed with examples and references. Here they are

1. "Is the production of OERs sustainable?" After the end of the UKOER funding stream, there was "a dramatic decline in the number of resources added to JORUM." But a "huge amount" of content is being produced on other platforms. "I see this not as a petering out of OER production, but a shift in its context."
2. "Are OER platforms sustainable?" We don't know yet. "Entire platforms can disappear. In the non-open world, the closing of a platform means the loss of its content. We don’t have that problem in the OER world."
3. "Are communities of open practice sustainable?" There are examples both ways, but "the continuation of the OER conference itself suggests a positive answer to the question about communities."
4. "Are the OERs themselves sustainable: are they being updated so as not to lose relevance?" A tiny number of resources get remixed, but is that bad? Most academic publications aren't cited, but a small number get a huge number of citations. "To decide whether too much or too little adaptation is happening, we need to know the distribution that “'should' exist, and it’s not clear how to do this." 
5. "Do OERs promote an awareness of sustainability across all subjects?" We don't know.

Great stuff. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. SSRN has been captured by the enemy of open knowledge
Paul Gowder, Medium, 2016/05/18

As the Press Release announces, Elsevier has acquired the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) and plans to in some way roll it in with Mendelay. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review
Jonathan P. Tennant, François Waldner, Damien C. Jacque, et al., F1000Research, 2016/05/12
This is a solid and (as the title suggests) evidence-based argument from a variety of perspectives in favour of open access. To this point I think the case has been conclusively made and this article offers an excellent summary. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ten years of open practice: a reflection on the impact of OpenLearn
Patrina Law, Anne Jelfs, Open Praxis, 2016/05/31

The best part of this article (7 page PDF) is the last page, where the author draws a number of interesting conclusions from a ten-year review of OpenLearn, an Open University open educational resources (OER) initiative. The paper itself is a bit loose (possibly because of brevity) so we don't see how these conclusions are established. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Framework for the Ethics of Open Education
Robert Farrow, Open Praxis, 2016/05/31
"This paper proposes a framework that focuses on the ethical significance of a particular group of educational technologies usually referred to as open education," writes Robert Farrow, noting " is “a paucity of literature” addressing the socioethical dimensions" and the suggestion that while open learning such as MOOCs is intended to extend access to learning, it tends to support the already privileged. More...