Proceedings of the European Stakeholder Summit on experiences and best practices in and around MOOCs (EMOOCS 2016)
Mohammad Khalil, Martin Ebner, Michael Kopp, Anja Lorenz, Marco Kalz, ResearchGate, 2016/02/16

This is the full collection of papers from the European MOOCs Stakeholders Summit. If it had been up to me, I probably wouldn't have crammed all these papers into one single PDF, since you're faced with an all-or-nothing download (as I with an all-or-nothing decision about linking). I wouldn't have put it on ResearchGate either. And I would have used an open license (CC by-NC-SA would have been sufficient for me to repost it on my site to let readers bypass ResearchGate's algorithms). I wouldn't have put all the references in the text in ALL CAPS. And I wouldn't have encrypted the PDF copy/paste function (which also breaks the search function). Ah, but despite all these user-hostile features, it's still a free download, it's still a good read, and you might want to take some time to skim it. But as a research text it's currently useless.

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Slow or Sophisticated? Squandered or Sustainable?
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2016/02/16

David Wiley takes publishers to task for not comprehending the threat of open educational resources. And with $3 billion of financial aid money in the U.S. spent on textbooks and proprietary learning materials, publishers have a lot to worry about. But I'm not sure I agree with his exact argument. Wiley writes, "OER are not a threat to publishers simply because they’re free. OER are a threat to publishers because the 'open' in OER means free plus permissions." The permissions Wiley refers to are the five Rs - retain, revise, reuse, remix, redistribute. Now it's true I think that these are a deeper threat to publishers. But I think that publishers are threatened by free content in and of itself. Moreover, I think that once content is free, there is very little that stops it from becoming open in the sense of the five Rs - after all, if it's all free, where's the harm in retaining it or sharing it? So when Wiley says "Free isn’t the threat to publishers, open is," I think he's only half right. I think they're both threats to publishers.

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