After a bit of hiatus, here’s some recent news on students and open access:
The winners of the Sparky Awards contest for videos on information sharing have been announced. The contest, sponsored by SPARC(which also sponsors Open Students), invited students to create a short video on the value of sharing information. The grand prize winner was created by a group of students from the University of Illinois at Chicago.Check out the winners here!
Benjamin J. Keele, a law student at Indiana University - Bloomingtonand editor in chief of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, published an op-ed in Student Lawyer magazine calling for open access to student-edited law journals. The student newspaper at Virginia Tech editorialized in favor of open access, medical students at the University of Michigan published an op-ed supporting open access, and a Ph.D student at Queensland University of Technology published aletter to the editor extolling the school’s open access repository.
Instructors at several colleges, including Michigan State University,University of Toronto, San Jose State University, had their students produce an open access journal as a class assignment. We previously posted a similar assignment for students at the University of British Columbia.
Several new open access journals published by students launched:Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (by students atErasmus University Rotterdam), New Social Inquiry ( Carleton University), PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication(University of Melbourne), Amsterdam Law Forum (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), aspeers (University of Leipzig), and Public Knowledge(Virginia Tech).
Temple University adopted a requirement that its doctoral students’ dissertations be made open access. Meanwhile, at Lund Universitystudents may choose to make dissertation open access, and 43% of them do. A survey of open access repository managers found that they expect theses and dissertations to be a top trend for repositories in 2009.
Mary Anne Kennan, a student at the University of New South Wales, wrote her dissertation on Reassembling scholarly publishing: open access, institutional repositories and the process of change. The dissertation is available open access.
A collection of papers by students at the University of British Columbia on libraries and publishing, including on open access, was published(and is itself open access).
Concern about unauthorized downloading of textbooks by students continued to grow: see e.g. articles in the Toronto Star and Times Higher Education. But Flat World Knowledge, a company dedicated to publishing open textbooks, released its first books. Nature also launched an open access educational site, Scitable, focused on genetics.Finals Club is a new open access, Creative Commons-licensed site for students to share lecture notes and discuss class topics.
The UK Serials Group announced the winners of its essay contest for library and publishing students, on the topic of accessing academic information in the Google Era.
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