FFIP just signed The Cape Town Open Education Declaration(CTOED). The CTOED is the next step in Open Access Education. The CTEOD identifies three strategies to increase the reach and impact of open educational resources:

1. Educators and learners: First, we encourage educators and learners to actively participate in the emerging open education movement. Participating includes: creating, using, adapting and improving open educational resources; embracing educational practices built around collaboration, discovery and the creation of knowledge; and inviting peers and colleagues to get involved. Creating and using open resources should be considered integral to education and should be supported and rewarded accordingly.

2. Open educational resources: Second, we call on educators, authors, publishers and institutions to release their resources openly. These open educational resources should be freely shared through open licenses which facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone. Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet.

3. Open education policy: Third, governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources. Accreditation and adoption processes should give preference to open educational resources. Educational resource repositories should actively include and highlight open educational resources within their collections.

One of the most progressive parts of this declaration is the understand that “Whenever possible, [resources] should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet” This is an important step towards embracing Human Rights and working to close the digital divide. The CTOED builds on the Budapest Open Access Initiative by expanding the focus and including collaboration which empowers communities to educate and learn cooperatively.

Take Action:
READ the full Cape Town Open Education Declaration
SIGN the Declaration as an Organizations or an Individual
ACT to implement the strategies

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FFIP Signs Budapest Open Access Initiative

The Budapest Open Access Initiative was drafted in December of 2001 and was clearly ahead of its time. This last week, while prepping for a meeting with the Seattle Journal for Social Justice, I went back and read this document again and was amazed at how simply it states the principles and reason for open access. I also realized that FFIP and myself personally had not officially signed the document. I fixed that oversight today and urge everyone else committed to open access scholarship to do the same.

The first paragraph of the initiative follows:

“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.”

Read and sign the Budapest Open Access Initiative.