The open-access journal Innovate, published by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University, is ceasing publication, Stephen Downes announced on his blog and a university spokesperson confirmed.

The peer-reviewed online journal focused on how information technology could be used to enhance academic, governmental, and business settings. It was started in 2004 by James L. Morrison, professor emeritus of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and had 76,282 subscribers from 271 countries.

In its last issue, Innovate had stories about creating learning environments in Second Life, approaches to develop quality assurance in online education, and a...

WASHINGTON, D.C. Public access to research is "inevitable," but it will be a slog to get to it. That was the takeaway message of a panel on the role libraries can play in supporting current and future public-access moves. The panel was part of the program at the membership meeting of the Association of Research Libraries, held here yesterday and today.

"I now believe that having public access to most scholarly communications is inevitable," said David Shulenburger, vice president for academic affairs at the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. "Faculty are coming to understand, finally, that this has to happen if they're going to have the most scholarly opportunities to get things done."

Still, many scholars need the hard sell from colleagues and librarians about the benefits of open access. Lorraine J. Haricombe, dean of the University of Kansas...

In an effort to support alternatives to traditional scholarly publishing, five major research universities announced their joint commitment to open-access journals on Monday.

The institutions—Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley—signed a compact agreeing to the “timely establishment” of mechanisms for providing financial support for free open-access journals.

While conventional journals require institutions to pay subscription fees to access articles, open-access publications make their material free to the public, thus aiding libraries forced to cut back during difficult financial times,...

The Utah State University OpenCourseWare project has shut down because it ran out of money, according to its former director, making it perhaps the biggest venture to close in the burgeoning movement to freely publish course materials online.

The project published a mix of digital content -- lecture notes, syllabi, audio and video recordings -- from more than 80 courses before its demise. Its aspiration had been to open up access to materials from every Utah State University course, said Marion R. Jensen, the former director.

Instead, Mr. Jensen was laid off on June 30. And, while the Utah OpenCourseWare Web site remains up for now, it no longer has any dedicated staff and is no longer adding new courses.
 
David Wiley, an associate professor at...

Professor Mary Flanagan wants students to go online and label library archives – for free.

Ms. Flanagan, a digital-humanities professor at Dartmouth College, is creating an Internet-based game in which users create descriptive tags for library images to improve searching through the library's database. Although the program will be tested at the college’s library, Ms. Flanagan says the game will be open source and available for others to download and build upon.

She says the program could save libraries time and money. “It’s costly and time consuming to go in and add keywords,” she says. “If you create a game where people actually are actually getting points for generating metadata, you create a system of motivation and a fun way of doing this kind of stuff that people, it turns out, will do for free.”

The...

The Internet has proved itself to be a democratizing force for a range of human endeavors, such as the simple act of selling a car or the complex task of shaming a repressive government. Could it also be leveling the playing field in scientific research?

A study led by Waverly W. Ding, an assistant professor of business at the University of California at Berkeley, suggests that it is.

For their research, Ms. Ding and colleagues at Georgia State University and the University of Missouri at St. Louis compared user data involving Bitnet, an Internet forerunner established by Yale University and the City University of New York, and the Domain Name System, which is the naming protocol currently used to identify addresses on the Internet.

Their findings, published by the National Bureau of Economic...

Madison, Wis. – OK, maybe backlash is too strong a word.
 
But some distance-learning leaders are starting to raise questions and concerns about President Obama’s new online-education proposal, a great course giveaway that would pump $500-million into freely available Web-based courses.
 
Are new courses needed? Would students get help working through them? Would their privacy be protected as they use the material? All of those issues came up here during last week’s Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning.
 
Janet Poley, president of the American Distance Education Consortium, argued that course development wasn’t a “terribly high...

Amazon, the online retailing giant, is now offering educators, researchers, and students the chance to apply for free access to its hosted computing, or “cloud,” services, the company announced this week. The services can be used to work with massive amounts of data that would jam a regular desktop computer.

The company is offering computer-usage credits, worth up to $100 per student, to instructors who wish to utilize its cloud services in the classroom. Grant applications are available through Amazon’s Web site. Amazon says its hosted services are already being used at institutions such as Harvard University and the University of Oxford.

For example, Oxford scientists at the Malaria Atlas...

In the latest and perhaps broadest effort to provide instant access to scholarly resources, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization today inaugurated its World Digital Library, a Web site that allows visitors to browse through a trove of artifacts spanning the history of civilization.

The site, four years in the making, brings together historical manuscripts along with secondary literature describing them—translated into seven different languages. The library includes scanned documents from 27 libraries in 19 countries so far, including a manuscript from ancient Japan that is believed to be the first novel ever. James H. Billington, the U.S. librarian of Congress, who heads the project, says all...

Students have suffered another defeat in their legal fight against the company that runs a plagiarism-detection tool popular among professors.

A federal appeals court last week affirmed a lower court’s decision that the Turnitin service does not violate the copyright of students, even though it stores digital copies of their essays in the database that the company uses to check works for academic dishonesty.

The opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit “will be cheered by digital fair-use proponents,” says the E-Commerce and Tech Law blog.

Last year’s decision in the plagiarism...