Open Scholarship

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Open Scholarship - Melissa Hagemann

We are seeing a tremendous move towards 'opening scholarship'. The first successful wave of this movement was Open Access to research literature. However, we are also starting to see significant efforts in the broad field of Open Education: course materials that are freely available to use, edit and improve; open source platforms for delivering education online; collaborative, learner-driven approaches to teaching and of course, freely available reference works like Wikipedia. As the Open Education movement gathers steam, it will be important to build on the lessons and successes of Open Access.

Open access was first defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI, http://www.soros.org/openaccess/) in 2002. Six years after the BOAI, open access is seeing significant successes with government and funding body mandates, including the recent mandate from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Now all publications resulting from the $29 billion worth of research funded annually by the NIH will be freely available online to doctors, researchers, patients and students throughout the world. Building upon the success of open access and the BOAI, leaders of the open content movement launched the Cape Town Open Education Declaration (http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/) in January 2008. The declaration calls for all publicly funded educational materials to be made freely available and the adoption of open content licenses for these materials. The presentation will provide an overview of open access and open education and draw the synergies between the two movements which together are laying the foundation for open scholarship.