Seb Schmoller › Comments

"@Hadas_Shema" - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

"Andrew Delbanco’" - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

"Promote the hell out of the square and triangular pegs" - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

"Research results published through Open Access on the Internet are available for anyone to read and download. Researchers who receive funding from Formas from 2010 and onwards must guarantee that their research findings will be available through Open Access within six months of publication. Researchers may either publish in journals with an Open Access practice or those that archive published articles in large public access databases. The Open Access regulations currently only apply to scientifically peer-reviewed text published in scientific journals and conference reports. The regulations do not currently apply to monographs or book chapters. Funding to cover publication costs in Open Access journals can be included in research project applications as a direct cost." - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

" - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

"Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and Chris Cook" - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

I've added a comment to Alan Cann's piece which awaits approval. - Seb Schmoller

Conclusion: "The evidence, both ours and that of others, clearly suggests that disseminating research results via OA would be more cost-effective than subscription or toll access publishing. In an all-OA world, it seems likely that the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA, although Green OA would have a higher benefit/cost ratio. However, we are not in an all-OA world yet, nor anywhere near it. The most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA in the meantime is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at little cost. Moreover, Green OA may well be the most immediate and cost-effective way to support knowledge transfer and enable innovation across the economy." - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

Self-referential comment: http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/4920... is a report that JISC commissioned that "validated" JISC's earlier in principal decision to plug ORCID. - Seb Schmoller

[Via http://www.economist.com/news... in this week's Economist.] - Seb Schmoller

still no love, eg querying for doi:10.5061/dryad.89735cr0 (known hit http://europepmc.org/article...) Ideas? Do I just have my syntax wrong? State of finding attribution to datasets is worse than I thought :( - Heather Piwowar

Alas Google's terms of use don't let me harvest and use those results in ways that I need to. No open api. But good for some uses, thanks for the reminder. - Heather Piwowar

"The real opportunity, I think, is in trying to build longer arcs. Now that the cycle of new is eating itself in a race to ever-faster, there's a bigger chance to make long term change by consistently focusing on what works (and what's important), not what's new and merely shiny. What's important, what's always important, is useful change." - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

"The evidence, both ours and that of others, clearly suggests that disseminating research results via OA would be more cost-effective than subscription or toll access publishing. In an all-OA world, it seems likely that the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not in an all-OA world yet, nor are we likely to be in such a world in the foreseeable future. The most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA in the meantime is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at little cost. Moreover, Green OA may well be the most immediate and cost effective way to support knowledge transfer and enable innovation across the economy." - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

"I want to be sure that the new arrangements have sharp enough teeth and enough ability to act on their own decision to deal with that tax-avoiding, morality-free monopsony that is Amazon. It is a very good place to shop, but it is a very oppressive business. It has extraordinary contracts with its suppliers. Its arrangements with its Marketplace sellers must breach something, but I have, in the past six months, been unable to find a single major UK publisher who was willing to have tea in the Lords to tell me what they think of Amazon. It has got the whole business frightened." - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

See also Godwin's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Seb Schmoller

"Almost 3K words in this NYT piece on MOOCs, but couldn’t spare a single one to mention Siemens, Downes, Couros, Cormier… Did you recognize any of those names? They’re the people who actually invented massive open online courses (MOOCs)". - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

Did a child in 2012 do as well as a similarly taught child did in 2011? I would like to see graphs showing the probability of children of different ability ranges getting a C, say, in 2011 and 2012. That would cut to the heart of it. - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

"For now, the funding mechanisms are the same and the requirement to publish in journals with a reputation is still paramount. Until now, arguments against open access publishing have tended to focus on quality issues. The argument goes that the premier (subscription) journals take the best submissions and then there is a cascade downwards through second tier journals (which may or may not be subscription-based) until you get to a pile of leftover papers that can only be published by the author paying a fee to some sort of piratical publisher. This does not stand much scrutiny. Plenty of subscription-based journals are average and have been churned out by publishers looking to beef up their portfolios and justify charging ever-larger sums. Good research gets unnecessarily dumped by leading journals because they adhere to review policies dating from the print age when limited pagination forced them to be highly selective. Other academics, as we have seen at Social Sciences Directory,... more... - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

"A good start might be to simply acknowledge that this group actually exists, and to adopt a more nuanced understanding of what it means to actually use the Internet in a meaningful way." - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

"This research investigates the current awareness of, and participation in, the open content movement at one UK institution for higher education. The open content movement and the open educational resources can be seen as potential methods for reducing time and cost of technology-enhanced learning developments; however, its sustainability and, to some degree, its success are dependent on critical mass and large-scale participation. Teaching staff were invited to respond to a questionnaire. Respondents (n= 59) were open to the idea of sharing their own content and, similar to other studies, demonstrated existing practices of sharing resources locally amongst colleagues; however, there was little formal, large-scale sharing using suitable licenses. The data gathered concurs with other research suggesting a lack of awareness to the Creative Commons licenses as well as a lack of participation in large open educational resource repositories." - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

Spoke too soon. Some of the registration and account management parts of the site are under https; but some are not. Looks like revisions have not been made to internal links to make it all work properly. Sigh. - Seb Schmoller

The principal author, Peter Suber's explanation: "In anticipation of worldwide Open Access Week, the Harvard Open Access Project is pleased to release version 1.0 of a guide to good practices for university open-access policies. Gathering together recommendations on drafting, adopting, and implementing OA policies, the guide is based on policies adopted at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and a couple of dozen other institutions around the world. But it's not limited to policies of this type and includes recommendations that should be useful to institutions taking other approaches. The guide is designed to evolve. As co-authors, we plan to revise and enlarge it over time, building on our own experience and the experience of colleagues elsewhere. We welcome suggestions. The guide deliberately refers to "good practices" rather than "best practices". On many points, there are multiple, divergent good practices. Good practices are easier to identify than best practices. And there can be wider... more... - Seb Schmoller

"But in his comments to the Sloan-C crowd, Thrun from the very first took great pains not to aggrandize himself or his fellow MOOCsters. He peppered his comments with statements like "I'm not the first to think about online education" and "as you surely know better than me," and at one point told the assembled that he was "just stepping in your footsteps." (In a nod to those who have complained that much of the recent news coverage has ignored an earlier iteration of massive online courses staged several years ago by Stephen Downes and George Siemens, Thrun himself referred to the "MOOC hype" and acknowledged that various people had beaten him to the idea, even if his and other recent courses are "perhaps a bit more massive." - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

"But in his comments to the Sloan-C crowd, Thrun from the very first took great pains not to aggrandize himself or his fellow MOOCsters. He peppered his comments with statements like "I'm not the first to think about online education" and "as you surely know better than me," and at one point told the assembled that he was "just stepping in your footsteps." (In a nod to those who have complained that much of the recent news coverage has ignored an earlier iteration of massive online courses staged several years ago by Stephen Downes and George Siemens, Thrun himself referred to the "MOOC hype" and acknowledged that various people had beaten him to the idea, even if his and other recent courses are "perhaps a bit more massive."" - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

"Mr Friend: True, and the answer to my mind is open access, when everybody could have free access. What I would urge this Committee to consider is the recommendations to government that any articles based on publicly-funded research should be freely accessible over the Internet." "Professor Williams: .... in my journal, and I publish papers all round the world, the vast majority of institutions do not work in this area, they could not, in fact, understand what we publish, and I think one has to be very careful in determining policy on the basis that everybody should have free access to what we publish." - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

"The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse." - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

"I think that Daniel is correct to point to the similarity between the current crop of xMOOCs and the elite universities’ previous unsuccessful forays into the world of online learning (does anyone remember Universitas 21 or California Virtual University?) but given that we (the cMOOC people) were around then and that this is what we built instead, it is all more disappointing that Daniel didn’t attempt more than a cursory look at cMOOCs." - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

Peter - is http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/bitstre... in the intended format? I want to copy and paste from it. Seb Schmoller - Seb Schmoller

Seb - I don't think I've seen PMR leaving a comment on FF before. Probably best to ask the same question on Twitter or better still, on the post itself ;-) - Graham Steel

Graham - thanks. I will follow your advice. Seb - Seb Schmoller

Students and their families are being shoved into the machine that is the national testing system and mashed up for the purposes of the national testing system and not for the learners, their families and the schools. - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet

"Even more important will be to improve the quality of the existing 440,000-strong workforce. Sutton Trust research shows that English schools could move into the world’s top five education performers within a decade if the performance of the least effective 10th of teachers were brought up to the average." - Seb Schmoller from Bookmarklet