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[News] [SOT] Courseware Going Open-Source with Backing of 1,000 Professors

Professors Gone Paperless

,----[ Quote ]
| Continuing their campaign to draw attention to the cost of textbooks, the 
| Student Public Interest Research Groups celebrated Tuesday what they’re  
| calling a major milestone — reaching 1,000 professors who’ve signed a 
| statement supporting the use of free, online and open source textbooks.  
`----

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/16/textbooks

The literature/publishing industry is affected just like the proprietary
software industry and media industry. It will need to adapt to new business
models.


Recent:

Information Liberation

,----[ Quote ]
| Other than in the realm of life-saving medicine, why should any of this 
| matter to nonacademics? Well, for one thing, barriers to the spread of 
| information are bad for capitalism. The dissemination of knowledge is almost 
| as crucial as the production of it for the creation of wealth, and knowledge 
| (like people) can't reproduce in isolation. It's easy to scoff at the rise of 
| Madonna studies and other risible academic excrescences, but a flood of truly 
| important research pours from campuses every day. The infrastructure that 
| produces this work is surely one of America's greatest competitive 
| advantages.        
| 
| In fact, open access might help to moderate some of the worst forms of 
| academic hokum, if only by holding them up to the light of day -- and perhaps 
| by making taxpayers, parents and college donors more careful about where they 
| send their money. Entering the realm of delirium for a moment, one can even 
| imagine public exposure encouraging professors in the humanities and social 
| sciences to write in plain English.     
| 
| Keeping knowledge bottled up is also bad for the world's poor; indeed, 
| opening up the research produced on America's campuses via the Internet is 
| probably among the most cost-effective ways of helping underdeveloped 
| countries rise from poverty. Closer to home, open access to scholarly work 
| via the Internet would help counteract the plague of plagiarism that the 
| Internet itself has abetted. Anyone suspecting a scholar of such chicanery 
| could search for a phrase or two in Google and see if somebody else's work 
| turns up with the same unusual text string.       
`----

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120486540450119149.html


Related:

1.8 million rulings online -- and free

,----[ Quote ]
| Sebastopol man posts half-century's worth of court decisions which could 
| shake up $5 billion legal publishing industry 
`----

http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/article/20080213/NEWS/802130315/1036/BUSINESS01


Berkman Center and CALI Partner to Create New Legal Education Resource

,----[ Quote ]
| “We are looking forward to renewing a fruitful relationship with Harvard Law 
| School through the Legal Education Commons project, which will provide 
| innovative tools and access to open-licensed course materials to our more 
| than 200 member law schools” said CALI Executive Director John Mayer.   
`----

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/newsroom/pressreleases/berkman_center_and_cali_partner_to_create_new_legal_education_resource


Harvard Research to Be Free Online

,----[ Quote ]
| Harvard University will soon begin posting research and articles produced by 
| its faculty on the Internet free of charge. 
`----

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/books/14arts-HARVARDRESEA_BRF.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin


A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free

,----[ Quote ]
| The domination of two legal research services over the publication of federal 
| and state court decisions is being challenged by an Internet gadfly who has 
| embarked on an ambitious project to make more than 10 million pages of case 
| law available free online.   
`----

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/technology/20westlaw.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin


Announcing the Open Library

,----[ Quote ]
| Early this year, when I left my job at Wired Digital, I thought I could look 
| forward to months of lounging around San Francisco, reading books on the 
| beach and drinking fine champagne and eating foie gras. Then I got a phone 
| call. Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive was thinking of pursuing a 
| project that I'd been trying to do literally for years.    
|
| [...]
|
| So today I'm extraordinarily proud to announce the Open Library project. Our
| goal is to build the world's greatest library, 
`----

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/openlibrary


Wikipedia Founder Joins EC Open Access Campaign

,----[ Quote ]
| Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he signed a petition calling
| on the European Commission to give the public open access to
| taxpayer-funded scientific research because it was "simple and
| obvious" that the public should have access to research they
| had funded. "Public money should result in public benefit,"
| he added.
`----

http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/56443.html

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