Free Culture X is coming up very quickly and we’re working hard to finalize the preparations for the event held at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. on February 13-14th. As you know, on the first day, Jonathan Zittrain will be giving the keynote address and there will be panels on open educational resources, open access and access to knowledge, campus technology policy, and university patent policy.

In the meantime, students interested in attending should investigate travel funding from their universities. The SFC Board is working hard to secure donations, but we need your help. Most schools provide money to registered student groups and many departments have discretionary funds to support educational opportunities for students. Look around and apply early because these things can take time; and don’t hesitate to contact the Board if we can provide any documentation to help!

Secondly, to make this a success, we’ll need volunteers to help with both pre-conference and during the event. We have set-up a mailing list to coordinate planning and encourage you to sign up for it here.

Finally, we would like to hear ideas for the second day’s workshops. If you have ideas, send them out to the FC X mailing list or add them to the call for workshop proposals and we’ll collect them.

The following is a guest post from Nick Shockey of SPARC.

Last Wednesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a Request for Information on the issue of Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research. Executive action stemming from this RFI could potentially open all federally funded science research to the public for free online access.

This has the exciting potential to greatly advance the goals of your Open Education Campaign. Not only could the more than $60 billion in research the US government funds annually be made available to all, but the government would also be endorsing openness as an academic ideal, sending a strong signal to publishers, universities, and various other stakeholders that this is the new standard.

With all the work Students for Free Culture has done on the issue of expanding access to educational materials, you are in a unique position to appreciate the tremendous impact executive action could have. Opening up all federally funded research to every student in the country (and world) would break down strong barriers to access that currently force students to settle for the materials their library can afford rather than what they truly need. A student’s education should be limited only by curiosity rather than the rapidly escalating journal prices that put the complete scholarly record out of reach for students at all but the most well funded institutions.

So what can you do to make public access a reality? The answer is that you can do a lot.

• First, you can take the time to respond to the questions in the RFI (the full text can be found at here) by submitting a comment to the Federal Register by January 7th (email comments to publicaccess-at-ostp-dot-gov).
• Second, there is a rotating set of questions on the Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog which changes every ten days – you can respond thoughtfully to the questions as well as other people’s comments right in the comment section of the blog (the first round ends December 20th, so don’t wait!).
• Finally, you can encourage other students and advocates to comment as well.

A strong student response in favor of a mandatory public access policy will truly help ensure that such a policy becomes a reality and that it follows SFC’s ideals of openness as closely as possible. I can’t wait to see the impact students make on this groundbreaking process and look forward to your responses!

Nick Shockey
Director of Student Advocacy, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

Whether it be improving one’s own health, finding more efficient fuels or better understanding far-flung parts of the world, access to scholarship is essential to improving our society. Too often, though, that knowledge is locked behind pay-walls that place it out of the reach of most of the world’s population.

In an effort to make academic publications more accessible, AcaWiki has been created. Billing itself as the “Wikipedia for academic research,” AcaWiki allows scholars to post summaries of their work on a site that aims to foster discussions. This is a great way to help build the academic commons. So, if you’re a researcher or academic, consider posting summaries of your work. If you’re a student, turn to AcaWiki when researching.

The next Students for Free Culture conference is February 13-14. That’s sooner than you think—and it’s never too early to start planning.

If you’re a student leader, now is the time to seek travel funding from your schools and departments. You’d be surprised to learn how much support is available for you to represent your school at an international conference. Consult with your professors, counselors, and department heads to find out about grant opportunities.

We will be working hard to secure travel funding for representatives from SFC chapters to attend the conference. But we can’t guarantee funding, so ask around! Contact us if you need an invitation letter or any other support.

If you’re interested in volunteering, we now have a collaborative mailing list. We’ll use the list in the day-to-day coordination of the conference, up to and after the event. Sign up here.

Stay tuned for more updates. To stay in touch, consider following us on Twitter/identi.ca or subscribing to our RSS feed.

A little over a month ago, we called for widespread participation in our current campaign based on the Wheeler Declaration. In that time, we have made substantial progress to create a series of surveys to gather data on university openness with regard to open educational resources, open access, network management, FOSS, and patent policy.

Surveys

In the coming weeks, we hope to contact a number of universities to solicit their responses to the surveys that have been created to gather data about university openness. Today, the surveys for open access publishing and open educational resources are largely completed. I encourage you to check out the previous links and add your thoughts, either on the wiki or by emailing board-at-freeculture-dot-org. Even more, feel free to add to the other surveys which need elaboration.

We also need to identify the administrators at each university who should receive the surveys. If you attend a school that you believe should be surveyed, please add administrators names to the wiki or contact board-at-freeculture-dot-org. Recipients should include librarians, learning technologists, academic coordinators (such as provosts) and potentially faculty leadership.

Branding

Secondly, after speaking with a number of people, we believe that it would be best to slightly re-brand the campaign. As you know, up until now, this effort has been known as the Open University Campaign. However, the term ‘open university’ has proven to be slightly problematic due to its reference to an older concept of distance-learning. Not only is this a trademarked term, it has proven to be confusing to a number of people – something we definitely don’t want. Obviously, it’s not ideal to change and lose any reputation (and googlejuice) that the name has, but to avoid having this problem even later in the game, we think the name Open Education Campaign would be for the best (especially because it doesn’t limit the work strictly to universities). Anyone with thoughts (or interest in doing design for this brand), should definitely get in touch.

We’re excited about this project and hope you’ll join us.