The Origin and Progress of the Academic Spring
In case you were wondering how this current “Academic Spring” started, well, apparently it was triggered by a posting on a university mathematician’s blog in January 2012. On April 9, The Guardian newspaper published an article on this, entitled “Academic Spring: How an Angry Maths Blog Sparked a Scientific Revolution”. The article identifies Tim Gowers, a distinguished, prize-winning Cambridge mathematician as the initiator of the Elsevier boycott. Gowers received hundreds of comments on his post “Elsevier — My Part in Its Downfall”, and one of his supporters started a site for collecting the names of academic boycotters. Thousands have signed up in just a few months, and incidentally, there are two from Lebanon already, including one from AUB.
A more recent Guardian article, dated May 1, shows British government progress on the issue of facilitating public access to research results: with the help of Jimmy Wales, all “taxpayer-funded research [will be] available for free online” (“Wikipedia Founder to Help in Government's Research Scheme”). The same article reports that Harvard University, angry at the high cost of journal subscriptions has followed suit: it has encouraged its faculty members to publish openly and “resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls”. The article cites David Prosser, executive director of Research Libraries UK (RLUK): "Harvard has one of the richest libraries in the world. If Harvard can't afford to purchase all the journals their researchers need, what hope do the rest of us have?...There's always been a problem with this being seen as a library budget issue. The memo from Harvard makes clear that it's bigger than that. It's at the heart of education and research. If you can't get access to the literature, it hurts research."
Having attended, in 2009 and 2011, international conferences on distance, open, and e-learning, and having witnessed the enthusiasm of participants, including that of UNESCO representatives, for open access to information, I am not really surprised by the momentum building up behind the Open Access movement; the Wellcome Trust and the World Bank are now also on board.
With one eye on the Arab Spring and another on the Academic Spring, one can easily lose sight of other important issues, however. One’s inner eye must always be on the lookout for less obvious but equally worthy causes.
Posted by May Mikati on 02 May 2012, 5:44 PM
In case you were wondering how this current “Academic Spring” started, well, apparently it was triggered by a posting on a university mathematician’s blog in January 2012. On April 9, The Guardian newspaper published an article on this, entitled “Academic Spring: How an Angry Maths Blog Sparked a Scientific Revolution”. The article identifies Tim Gowers, a distinguished, prize-winning Cambridge mathematician as the initiator of the Elsevier boycott. Gowers received hundreds of comments on his post “Elsevier — My Part in Its Downfall”, and one of his supporters started a site for collecting the names of academic boycotters. Thousands have signed up in just a few months, and incidentally, there are two from Lebanon already, including one from AUB.
A more recent Guardian article, dated May 1, shows British government progress on the issue of facilitating public access to research results: with the help of Jimmy Wales, all “taxpayer-funded research [will be] available for free online” (“Wikipedia Founder to Help in Government's Research Scheme”). The same article reports that Harvard University, angry at the high cost of journal subscriptions has followed suit: it has encouraged its faculty members to publish openly and “resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls”. The article cites David Prosser, executive director of Research Libraries UK (RLUK): "Harvard has one of the richest libraries in the world. If Harvard can't afford to purchase all the journals their researchers need, what hope do the rest of us have?...There's always been a problem with this being seen as a library budget issue. The memo from Harvard makes clear that it's bigger than that. It's at the heart of education and research. If you can't get access to the literature, it hurts research."
Having attended, in 2009 and 2011, international conferences on distance, open, and e-learning, and having witnessed the enthusiasm of participants, including that of UNESCO representatives, for open access to information, I am not really surprised by the momentum building up behind the Open Access movement; the Wellcome Trust and the World Bank are now also on board.
With one eye on the Arab Spring and another on the Academic Spring, one can easily lose sight of other important issues, however. One’s inner eye must always be on the lookout for less obvious but equally worthy causes.
Posted by May Mikati on 02 May 2012, 5:44 PM
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