Opening Up Yale

More good news on the open courseware front:

Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to seven introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.

(Via Creative Commons.)

Oooh-Er OA

This sounds slightly worrying:

After careful consideration, the Cushing/Whitney Medical and Kline Science Libraries have decided to end their support for BioMed Central's Open Access publishing effort. The libraries previously covered 100% of the author page charges which allowed these papers to be made freely available worldwide via the Internet at time of publication. This experiment in Open Access publishing has proved unsustainable. The libraries' support will continue for all Yale-authored articles currently in submission to BioMed Central as of July 27, 2007.

The libraries’ BioMedCentral membership represented an opportunity to test the technical feasibility and the business model of this OA publisher. While the technology proved acceptable, the business model failed to provide a viable long-term revenue base built upon logical and scalable options. Instead, BioMedCentral has asked libraries for larger and larger contributions to subsidize their activities. Starting with 2005, BioMed Central page charges cost the libraries $4,658, comparable to a single biomedicine journal subscription. The cost of page charges for 2006 then jumped to $31,625. The page charges have continued to soar in 2007 with the libraries charged $29,635 through June 2007, with $34,965 in potential additional page charges in submission.

Eeek: I wonder what the backstory to all this is?

Update 1: Matthew Cockerill, Publisher, BioMed Central, has put together a reply to Yale's points. But I can't help feeling that this one will run for a while yet.

Update 2: And here's the full analysis I should have done.

Open Content Meets YouTube

Yale has jumped on the open courseware bandwagon - with a twist:

Yale University is producing digital videos of selected undergraduate courses that it will make available for free on the Internet through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Happily, this is rather more than just open courseware for the YouTube generation:

The project will create multidimensional packages—including full transcripts in several languages, syllabi, and other course materials—for seven courses and design a web interface for these materials, to be launched in the fall of 2007.

(Via LXer.)

Access to Knowledge - or Not...

I came across the Access to Knowledge conference, which is currently running at Yale under the aegis of the Information Society Project. The latter's sub-head is "memes, genes and bits", so you can see why my interest was piqued.

Unfortunately, the main conference page given above uses a crazy non-transparent navigation system - so much for Access to Knowledge - so I can't give direct links to some of the more interesting sections. At least I can point to the obligatory conference wiki; there's not much there at the moment, but in the days to come it should fill up with some juicy light reading for those of us that way inclined.