Open Resources

VuFind 

An open source modular library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC including various records, such as digital library items, catalogue records, institutional repository...

Open-educational-resources
Open educational resources，o.e.r are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or creative common area and are freely available to anyone over the Web. They are an important element of an infrastructure for learning and range from podcasts to digital libraries to textbooks and games. There are more resources about open source multimedia and open content curricula_
Open Access meetings in Africa

Reflections on OA after the Berlin10 Conference, this 3-part series comes from COAR and highlight some of the major issues and themes which were raised during the 2012 Open Access Africa and Berlin 10 meeting. It should be enlightening reading for those interested to learn more about the issues and opportunities of OA. By the way, this meeting was the first such one to take place in Africa and was held in Stellenbosch.

COAR meetings:

part1/
part2/ part3/


You can also listen to podcasts and vodcasts of the Berlin 10 programme content on OA.

This week’s Nature has a whole feature on libraries and their role in data management, curation & scholarly publication.

A very interesting comment was made by Stevan Harnad:
UNIVERSAL GREEN IS THE PATH FROM FOOL'S GOLD TO FAIR GOLD to Gold on Hold

"The fundamental force driving the speed of the move towards full open access is what researchers — and research funders — want. Eisen says that although PLoS has become a success story — publishing 26,000 papers last year — it didn't catalyse the industry to change in the way that he had hoped. “I didn't expect publishers to give up their profits, but my frustration lies primarily with leaders of the science community for not recognising that open access is a perfectly viable way to do publishing".


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The Cost of Science publishing

Jevin West, a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle...earlier this year, released a free tool that researchers can use to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of open-access journal
Measures of scientific quality...Deep Impact: Unintended consequences of journal rank

"Most researchers acknowledge an intrinsic hierarchy in the scholarly journals ('journal rank') that they submit their work to, and adjust not only their submission but also their reading strategies accordingly. (...)as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice. Moreover, the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact. Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of a library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be necessary. This new system will use modern information technology to vastly improve the filter, sort and discovery functions of the current journal system".

Open Monograph Press (OMP) an open publisher for books
A new open source software book publishing platform to publish monographs: "The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) announce the 1.0 release of Open Monograph Press, an open source software platform for managing the editorial workflow required to see monographs,edited volumes, and scolarly editions through the internal and external review, edition, cataloguing, production and publication. OMP will operate as well, as a press website with catalogue, distribution, and sales capacities".

Open Access Monographs in the in the Humanities and Social Sciences : JISC

OA presentation - a sneak preview
After hearing it's to be only 5 minutes of non-waffling when presenting, I'm sharing a few background slides ....for those who might just visit here.

Nambitha on OA


Open Access (the book) by Peter Suber