Open academia

Type classification: this is an article resource.

Completion status: this resource is ~25% complete.

Open academia refers to scholarly work (research, education, and service) conducted in the spirit of free culture and following ethical principles characterised by valuing openness, freedom, and transparency. This requires use of open processes including open access, formats, licenses, and governance.

Two underlying principles of open academia are:

1. Open by default (e.g., (fully) openly licensed - use CC-0 or CC-BY-A or CC-BY-SA; avoid CC-by-NC and all rights reserved)
2. Everything should be maximally re-usable (e.g., use openly editable formats)

Intellectual property laws allocate ownership to the creator(s) who may determine the terms of use. If no terms of use are indicated by the copyright owner, then the default copyright license is all rights reserved. As a result, much intellectual property is restricted in availability and usability. It is a key responsibility of the public sector, including government and cultural institutions such as universities to foster the development and availability of "public information for the common good", that is the "knowledge commons".

Attitudes towards intellectual property are often not unlike attitudes towards:

1. body organs
2. property and possessions

i.e., If you give them away, you probably have less to live with

However, intellectual property is an entirely different beast and is more like:

1. love

i.e., the more you give, the more that tends to get returned—a positive feedback loop—knowledge grows when shared

Academic pursuit is about standing on the shoulders of giants and allowing others to stand on your shoulders. When knowledge is openly licensed, the shoulders upon which we can stand are higher, stronger, and more connected.

Key values underlying the practice of open academia including freedom, transparency, accessibility and re-usability.

Open academia utilises these processes:

The processes enable the three main functions or activities of open academics and open academic institutions such as universities: research, teaching and service.

• https://open.umich.edu

• Emerging scholar
• Going naked - Openism and freedom in academia
• Open by default (Wikipedia)
• Open education and research at the University of Canberra
• Open academia in practice
• Open educational resources
• Openness and flexibility: How open education can facilitate flexible learning
• Open journals
• Open science
• Open source
• Radical transparency
• Wikimedia and Open Academia

• Open Academia (Blog)
• Enabling Open Scholarship
• Open Source Education (Miles Berry, Blog post, 2010-04-08)
• Learning in an open world (Grainne Conole, slideshare.net, 2010-07-01)
• A bill of rights for online learners? (Tony Bates, 27/3/2013)
• University Flipped Faculty (Tom Worthington, 2013)