Opening Scholarship: OA and OE strategies for promoting "Public" education

For the genuine neophyte seeking orientation in the world of Open Access, one could not ask for a more helpful overview than that provided by Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Institute in their session yesterday. A quick review of the BBB agreements on "open access" vision, Budapest OAI, Bethesda Statement and the Berlin Declaration, lead to a concise recap of the rich resources that have since flowed from these initial fountainheads
~ OAJs like PLoS Bioline International, BioMed Central, Springer Open Choice, Hindawi Publishing Corp and the well that contains these DOAJ
~ OARs like Cornell U's arXiv.org and MIT's DSpace, PubMed Central, ePrints Soton and that deep well called OpenDOAR.

So "open access" is developed around 3 operating beliefs, 1) that research funded by governments should be available to the public, 2) we should maximize the dissemination of research, 3) research is cumulative and that science advances only through the sharing of results. From here its also an easy step to "open education" vision that was developed through the 2002 UNESCO's "Forum on the impact of Open Courseware for higher education in developing countries" which has since lead to a further reservoir of OERs ~ such as Wikipedia, conneXions MIT Open Courseware and Free HS Science Texts. Last year in South Africa, a number of committed individuals came together to forge a Cape Town Declaration a vision "that we are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning," the workshop panelists Melissa, Mark Surman and Eve Gray were now taking to the streets to promote (Heather Joseph was unable to attend due to an illness in the family). I'd love to hang around to describe the details of the various networks, initiatives and efforts that undergird, inform and flow from the Cape Town D but Willinsky starts in about an hour and I have one more post before that talk. Suffice it to say that there are some brilliant and thoughtful tools out there in development and that Mark Shuttleworth (the man behind Ubuntu) has funded a fabulous Foundation in South Africa to help promote active.effective.and open education on the continent and for the world. I'll come back after the conference to post the links from the innumerable resources cited . . . but look also for Danny Fekete's post here on the same workshop since he is keenly interested in these new forms of education as he begins his Master's program here at U of T. Danny stayed for the balance of the session while and I moved on to Les Carr's conversation on Repositories after the Break (see next post).