Academic Spring

See the following -

5 Academic Publishing Trends To Watch In 2013

George Lossius | Publishing Perspectives | January 21, 2013

2012 was certainly an eventful, some would even say turbulent, year in the unpredictable world of academic publishing. [...] So what can we expect from 2013? Read More »

Academic Spring: How an Angry Maths Blog Sparked a Scientific Revolution

Alok Jha | The Guardian | April 9, 2012

Alok Jha reports on how a Cambridge mathematician's protest has led to demands for open access to scientific knowledge. Read More »

Academic Spring: Phase Two

Edward Fullbrook | Real-World Economics Review Blog | May 7, 2012

[The UK] Minister of State for Universities and Science announced last week that beginning in the near future all UK publicly funded academic research will be available on the Web free of charge to anyone anywhere in the world.  This is not a politician’s pipe dream; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has already been hired to set it up. Read More »

An Academic Spring?

Barbara Fister | American Libraries Magazine | April 4, 2012

A successful protest against Elsevier demonstrates that populist rebellions have a place within the information-sharing community. Read More »

Crisis in academic publishing

Joanie Lavoie, Dominique Bérubé | PhysOrg.com | June 19, 2012

In almost every country in the world, research is supported by public funds. When researchers publish their results in academic journals, they do so for free. The results are also reviewed by peers for free. And journals often require researchers to give up their rights to these articles. Then, major publishers or learned societies sell their journals at exorbitant prices to libraries... which are also financed by public funds! It's a vicious circle in which taxpayers pay for the production and access to researchers while publishers and societies make profits of 30-45% before taxes. It's outrageous! Read More »

Free Access to British Scientific Research within Two Years

Ian Sample | The Guardian | July 15, 2012

The government is to unveil controversial plans to make publicly funded scientific research immediately available for anyone to read for free by 2014, in the most radical shakeup of academic publishing since the invention of the internet. Read More »

In the UK, Open Access For All Publicly Funded Research by 2014

Ariel Bogle | Melville House | July 18, 2012

In one of the first moves to address these issues, the British government has unveiled plans to allow all publicly funded scientific research to be openly available by 2014... Read More »

Open access and the Academic Spring continues to blossom in the U.K.

Edward Fullbrook | Real-World Economics Review Blog | July 17, 2012

The Academic Spring has seen four major developments in the last 32 hours. Read More »

Open Access Plan is No Academic Spring

Bruce Reed | The Guardian | July 18, 2012

The UK government is currently making a fundamental choice concerning access to the results of publicly funded research...Everyone agrees that these results should be freely available. So the decision the UK faces is not about whether access to scientific research should be free. Rather, it is about how this should be accomplished. Read More »

Open, Free Access to Academic Research? This Will Be a Seismic Shift

David Willetts | The Guardian | May 1, 2012

Opening up access to academic research will put more data and power in the hands of the people who pay for it. Read More »

Rewriting The Journal

Michelle Fredette | Campus Technology | August 28, 2012

With faculty balking at the high price of traditional academic journals, can other digital publishing options get traction? Read More »

Scholars, publishers battle over access to agency research

Kevin Bogardus | The Hill | June 8, 2012

In a matter of weeks, open-access advocates have gathered more than 26,000 signatures for a petition on the White House’s “We the People” website — above the threshold that triggers an automatic response from the Obama administration. The petition calls on President Obama to “require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research” for all federal agencies.

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The Cost of Knowledge: Open Sourcing and the ‘Academic Spring’

James Appleton | openDemocracy.net | May 7, 2012

Academic publishing in the UK has conventionally been channelled through by a small number of companies who maintain high fees for journal subscriptions. But as open source software continues to provide high quality free alternatives for autodidacts and beyond, the lifespan of this model is increasingly being called into question.  Read More »

UK Government Will Enforce Open Access to Development Research

Alok Jha | The Guardian | July 25, 2012

The results of scientific research that tackles disease, food security issues and poverty in the developing world will become freely available as part of the government's plans to open up access to publicly funded studies. Read More »

Wellcome Joins Chorus Calling for Free Online Access to Medical Research

Ryan McBride | FierceBiotechIT | April 10, 2012

Wellcome Trust no longer wants to pay for medical research that ends up guarded behind a pay wall, and the U.K.'s largest private funder of medical research is considering several ways to bring a proverbial wrecking ball to such pay walls and make research papers available for free online under an open-access framework. Read More »