Good Morning and Happy Monday! As we enter the month of April, here at Saylor, we look at the world of open access. Some changes have occurred as to what one can easily access in the world of open education. edX, a journal’s editorial board, and others have taken a stand on what they believe about open education and access. However, challenges still lie ahead for courses like Humanities, and  also copyright licensing laws. Still, one professor has even found a way to open one’s mind to only one main task to minimize distractions.

We begin with a non-profit MOOC provider, called edX. This platform created by Harvard U. and MIT, has decided to release a portion of its code under an Affero GPL license. The purpose of this license is to provide useful services over a network, and in effect, it better protects software. This requires a course creator who use the same code, to give credit to the source.

MOOC provider EdX goes open source – with an interesting choice of licence (OSS Watch Team Blog)

Journal’s Editorial Board Resigns in Protest of Publisher’s Policy Toward Authors (Chronicle of Higher Ed.)
The editorial board of Journal of Library Administration has decided to resign in ” response to a conflict with the journal’s publisher over an author agreement.” Board members have found it to be out of touch with the author’s expectations. Some of the seemingly “unreasonable” terms of this agreement were a $3,000 price tag for an author to be an included in the journal and overall confusing jargon. One board member even voiced a ‘crisis of conscience’ over the issue as he, himself is an open access advocate.

Open access and the humanities: reimagining our future (the Guardian)
Some course subjects have jumped more readily onto the open education bandwagon than others. Humanities, in particular, has instead been taking a few cautious steps and is still trying to see if it can gain balance. Open Humanities Press, has already taken the giant leap for this major, but the rest of the story is still waiting to be told.

Licence restrictions: A fool’s errand (Nature)
Similar to edX’s new licensing endeavors, others have followed the “recommendations laid out by leaders of the open-access movement in 2001.” These recommendations basically state that as long as one has access to the internet, then one has access to the article. Creative Commons has now gotten into trouble with International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers as to which tenets of licensing should be accepted.

You’re Distracted. This Professor Can Help. (Chronicle of Higher Ed.)
Have you ever had trouble concentrating because your mind was too open to distractions? Then focus on this course from a professor, who has designed a unique course ” to raise students’ awareness about how they use their digital tools.” Meditation and videos of how the students, themselves multitask are also key components of this course. Professor David M. Levy acts as the mastermind of this idea, as he aims to take the opinion of the internet as a distraction and turn it into an “abundance of information.”

Have a great week! In other news…
Carnegie Mellon U. Students Use Fingerprint Scans, Not ID Cards, for Payment (Chronicle of Higher Ed.)
Israel’s Education Technology Oasis (Ed. Surge)
For Libraries, MOOCs Bring Uncertainty and Opportunity (Chronicle of Higher Ed.)

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