The topics we have touched upon during these weeks are obviously far reaching and highly relevant. Regarding open education I entered in to these discussions and issues mostly with the view of an outsider I guess since I do not hold any classes myself. So my experience with OER and MOOC:s have been mainly from the perspective of a student. Now however I am working on the construction of learning resources in information literacy for our students so I guess I have to begin to reflect more thoroughly on the implications of openness and sharing. I have also been using quite a lot of material in the public domain in the construction of these courses which have been very useful. So I really can relate to potentials and gains of sharing in the digital realm. The rational for sharing and “open education” especially seems very compelling indeed. This is even more true when you consider the wider social justice implications. The webinar held by Maha Baly highlighted these issues and raised an I can imagine more enlightened following discussion. At least for me it helped in putting the topics at hand in a broader context.

There is an expression that says “information wants to be free” which may be a catchy phrase but I think there is some true to the matter as well. From the perspective of my profession as a librarian I think that the natural tendency is to regard information as a common good. We of course want information to be as easy accessible to our users as possible. That is not to say that the issues underlying sharing and openness are self-evident in any way. An illustration of the often complex issues regarding openness and sharing is the Open Access movement. Librarians have since long been advocating the benefits of making the content of academic journals open access. The most obvious benefit of open access is that it enables the results of scholarly research to be disseminated more rapidly and widely for the sake of the common good and future research. Another related benefit of open access is that recent knowledge can be put to immediate use for example in OER:s. Publishing in open access because of the worldwide visibility arguably also leads to more citations and hence wider impact. The perceived higher impact factor of renowned journals is however the most often mentioned and debated perceived negative impetus working against the open access development. For further readings on the perceived advantages and disadvantages as well as some arguable misconceptions on the open access model see here.

While the situation regarding the open access varies globally my impression is that the movement has been gaining new ground especially during recent years and that we now are at a sort of turning point where more and more see the potentials and rational of publishing open access. New interesting models for assessing the impact factor and peer review has also gradually emerged. The situation varies a lot between different disciplines however and much still needs to be done in changing the incentives towards promoting the open access model.