From http://www.sciencecodex.com/public_access_mandate_made_law:
President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.
The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.
What an experience! For all the wonderful comments that have come out of the last bit of writing about the course, I can assure you that no one has enjoyed it more than I have.
The OpenEd Italian Group created a great presentation summarizing their thoughts and feelings about the course. What teacher could ask for a better outcome for their students than:
We have learnt to interact at an international/multicultural level, thinking, commenting on other participants’ posts and dialoguing creatively and critically about current practices and possible alternative practices in open education.
Many of the participants were kind in saying wonderful things about the course. Others were even kinder in pointing directly to ways the course could be improved. I’ll be cataloging these as part of my post-course debrief and will share these in the future.
Lots of folks commented on how learning about OER and copyright was affecting their day-to-day work, teaching, and thinking. This is perhaps the greatest outcome.
Several folks liked the use of blogs and even said they would change their own teaching to work more like this course. Catia and some others thought the blogs were too static. Perhaps there is a way to tweak the assignments to make these more interactive? Either way, I agree that the inclusion of some push (email) and real-time (chat) technologies could improve the course next time it’s taught.
I’m absolutely exhausted here at end-of-term, but wanted to thank everyone who participated. I’ll be digging through the writing again over the holiday / early next term and reporting more about what I find… Please don’t delete your blogs!
Head straight to the transcript of Jimmy’s announcement, which also includes video. Also read the official Mediawiki Foundation resolution.
From the transcript of Jimmy’s announcement: “We’re going to change the GFDL in such a way that Wikipedia will be able to become licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.” So they’re changing the GFDL itself. Perhaps this will mean universal compatability between GFDL and CC-By-SA?
Wow. I’m all but speechless.
It wasn’t a question of whether or not Stephen would criticize Cape Town, just a question of when he would. 
A response to several of his criticisms is in order. His final criticism is the crucial one, so I’ll start there first and then return to the beginning and work through the others:
Continue reading ‘Responding to Criticisms of Cape Town’
A few of my favorite bits from this past week’s writing. Another post with more of my own thoughts and feelings will follow separately.
Continue reading ‘Open Ed Spottings Week 13′
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