It goes by many names, but no matter how you cut it, the new “Inclusive Access” model for college course materials is a bad deal for students. Educators are moving increasingly towards digital textbooks, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. This has… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘Open Access’
The Internet Archive Transforms Access to Books in a Digital World
In honor of Open Access Week, and particularly this year’s theme of structural equity, we wanted to highlight a project from the Internet Archive that is doing extraordinary work promoting access to knowledge. The bad news: that project is also… Read More ›
Activists Mobilize to Fight Censorship and Save Open Science
Major publishers want to censor research-sharing resource Sci-Hub from the internet, but archivists are quickly responding to make that impossible. More than half of academic publishing is controlled by only five publishers. This position is built on the premise that… Read More ›
Why Open Access Is Necessary for Makers
This is an Open Access Week guest post by Jordan Bunker, prototype engineer and open access advocate. After the world went into lockdown for COVID-19, Makers were suddenly confined to their workshops. Rather than idly wait it out, many of… Read More ›
Open Access Should Include Open Courts
It is a fundamental precept, at least in the United States, that the public should have access to the courts–including court records–and any departure from that rule must be narrow and well-justified. In a nation bound by the rule of… Read More ›
Open Education and Artificial Scarcity in Hard Times
The sudden move to remote education by universities this year has forced the inevitable: the move to an online education. While most universities won’t be fully remote, having course materials online was already becoming the norm before the COVID-19 pandemic,… Read More ›
Open Access Must Be the Rule, Not the Exception
Not Just for COVID-19, But for the Next Crisis Too The COVID-19 pandemic demands that governments, scientific researchers, and industry work together to bring life-saving technology to the public regardless of who can afford it. But even as we take… Read More ›
Education Groups Drop Their Lawsuit Against Public.Resource.Org, Give Up Their Quest to Paywall the Law
This week, open and equitable access to the law got a bit closer. For many years, EFF, along with co-counsel at Fenwick & West and attorney David Halperin, has defended Public.Resource.Org in its quest to improve public access to the… Read More ›
The Time Has Come to End the PACER Paywall
In a nation ruled by law, access to public court records is essential to democratic accountability. Thanks to the Internet and other technological innovations, that access should be broader and easier than ever. The PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic… Read More ›
Supreme Court Affirms That No One Owns the Law
In a major victory for open government and fundamental due process, the Supreme Court ruled today that the annotations in a state’s official legal code—summaries of court decisions and other sources that explain the state’s laws—cannot be copyrighted. That is,… Read More ›