Open Access Initiatives

Conferences

Courses & Curricular Initiatives

  • OpenLearn is the open courseware project at Open University. Their website offers free and open learning educational resources for learners and educators worldwide. Its entry received full marks from the award judges in the area of Expanded Access: Impact on reaching new populations. The Open University's OpenLearn project has won a platinum award at the IMS Global Learning Consortium Learning Impact Awards 2007. "The project's success in attracting a global audience since its launch in October 2006 was said by the judges to be a true innovation in open access which was to be applauded. " Press release

  • Open educational resources in a global context Can open educational resources help solve the global education shortage? Will a social authoring process enable developing and developed countries to create educational resources together? This paper analyzes these and other questions around the emerging use of open educational resources in a global context. Global perspectives are provided via analysis and extracts from discussion and case studies that took place in a UNESCO online discussion forum involving 480 participants from 90 countries. Open educational resource types, benefits, business models, and futures are explored.

  • MIT OpenCourseWare (USA)

  • Rice University (USA)
  • University of California (USA)

Declarations

Project Initiatives

African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR)

Corporación Universitaria para el Desarrollo del Internet A.C. (CUDI)

The Corporación Universitaria para el Desarrollo del Internet A.C. (CUDI) belongs to Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí (UASLP). This is a project that has an important joint search engine (metabuscador) from diverse universities around Mexico to sponsor and support the use of Internet and Open Access resources (e-learning, digital libraries, health, etc.).

D SPACE

D Space is an institutional digital ‘superarchive’ system jointly developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Over one hundred institutions around the world are using the DSpace platform to archive the scholarly output of their academic staff, such as research papers, technical reports, and copies of theses. The DSpace Federation was established to bring together different universities that use the DSpace software in order to discuss what sort of multi-institutional federated services might usefully be built on the DSpace platform, and to explore how nteroperability among these organizations’ systems could create a far more valuable resource than is possible with individual systems. Now, 17 universities around the world that are using DSpace have got together with Google to develop a pilot project to search the universities’ archives. The initiative involves universities in Australia, the USA, Canada, Italy and Hong Kong. The project is being developed with the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a non-profit computer library service based in Ohio, USA. The search is facilitated by the fact that these universities have tagged all the material in their superarchives with ‘metadata tags’, hidden codes that contain catalog information and summaries.[attachment:dspace.pdf

ional Autónoma de México.

OA-Hermes

OA-Hermes is a significant and influential search engine (Metabuscador) of digital sources which is fostering and giving support to the Open Access movement in Mexico. It belongs to UNAM, in collaboration with the Universidad de Colima and financial support from CUDI. It is main goal is to have access to databases and digital thesis and dissertations.

Instituto Politécnico Nacional2 (IPN)

The Instituto Politécnico Nacional2 (IPN) CINVESTAV has also an important online journal: Revista Morfismos, which focus is on mathematical issues.

Independent Media and Solidarity Networking in Chiapas, Mexico

The Independent Media and Solidarity Networking in Chiapas, Mexico is working with EZLN in Mexico (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional).

Open Access Law

  • Open Access Law Canada is part of the broader Open Access Law program that is working to support law reviews movement toward open access. The new site includes a model Canadian publication agreement in both English and French, sample licenses, and a list of journals that have adopted open access (which in Canada is currently limited to the University of Ottawa Law and Technology Journal).

Public Knowledge Project

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a federally funded research initiative at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University on the west coast of Canada. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments. PKP has developed free, open source software for the management, publishing, and indexing of journals and conferences. Open Journal Systems and Open Conference Systems increase access to knowledge, improve management, and reduce publishing costs. See Software & Services for demos, downloads, and information about these systems. IMPORTANT The Canadian Foundation of Innovation awarded $5.8 million to the Synergies project over the next 4 years, for the development of scholarly publishing technologies, featuring Erudit and Open Journal Systems.

Open Archives Initiative

The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. OAI has its roots in the open access and institutional repository movements. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the Open Archives program. Over time, however, the work of OAI has expanded to promote broad access to digital resources for eScholarship, eLearning, and eScience.

Open Access to Knowledge (OAK): Law Project

Open access to knowledge is increasingly important both as an economic and social force. Our project aims to make sharing knowledge across domains, and the world, both legal and efficient. The project will develop legal protocols for managing copyright issues in an open access environment. At a technical level it will investigate provision and implementation of a rights expression language. The project will integrate with existing open access repositories at both legal and technical levels. It will provide a vital infrastructure for the open access landscape. We encourage and value input from anyone interested in open access to knowledge: oaklaw@qut.edu.au. The OAK Law Project is funded by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training, under the Research Information Infrastructure Framework for Australian Higher Education, as part of the Commonwealth Government’s Backing Australia’s Ability - An Innovation Action Plan for the Future (BAA).

  • Other institutions involved:
  • Australian National University,
  • University of New England
  • University of New South Wales
  • University of Wollongong
  • Charles Darwin University
  • ODRL Initiative
  • Earlham College
  • Stanford University

  • Creative Commons

  • University of Melbourne (Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia [IPRIA] and Centre for Media and Communications Law [CMCL])
  • AAROW, ADT, APSR
  • DART, RUBRIC, BLUE [NET, MOLECULAR MEDICINE

    OAK Law Report : Legal Protocols for Copyright Management: Facilitating Open Access to Research at the National and International Levels. The Report examines research infrastructure and the economic impact of public support for science and innovation in Australia. It also identifies impediments to research and innovation affecting knowledge transfer, collaboration between research organisations and industry and the creation and use of intellectual property.

Open Society Institute

The Open Society Institute, the foundation network founded by philanthropist George Soros, is committed to providing initial help and funding to realize this goal. It will use its resources and influence to extend and promote institutional self-archiving, to launch new open-access journals, and to help an open-access journal system become economically self-sustaining. While the Open Society Institute's commitment and resources are substantial, this initiative is very much in need of other organizations to lend their effort and resources.

The Research Information Network (RIN)

  • The Research Information Network (RIN) has released a new report, of digital research data: a framework of principles and guidelines, April 2007. Excerpt from the full-text: The essential goals we are seeking to achieve are thus to facilitate the advancement of research and innovation, to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of research, and to maximise the value of public and private investment in research. In pursuance of those goals, the fundamental policy objective is to ensure that Ideas and knowledge derived from publicly-funded research should be made available and accessible for public use, interrogation, and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly and effectively as practicable....

Sakai

  • Sakai : Collaboration and Learning Environment for Education Many users of Sakai deploy it to support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, support for portfolios and research collaboration. Sakai is a free and open source product that is built and maintained by the Sakai community. Sakai's development model is called "Community Source" because many of the developers creating Sakai are drawn from the "community" of organizations that have adopted and are using Sakai.

  • Sakai deployments worldwide - map and Sakai deployments worldwide - listing

  • Sakai Québec Sakai-Québec est une association à but non lucratif qui a pour objectif de rassembler les différents acteurs du monde de la formation en ligne au Québec et ailleurs pour réaliser des projets pilotes d’envergure en logiciels libres basés sur des standards ouverts.

UNAM -Biblioteca Digital

The UNAM -Biblioteca Digital is an important digital library in Mexico city and national wide, that belongs to the Universidad Nac

Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México

The Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México has several online journals with open access, such as: Boletín de la Sociedad Botánica de México, Revista de Economía Mexicana, Revista de la Sociedad Química de México, Revista Técnica Pecuaria en México, and Revista Veterinaria México.