Comments on: Episode 20 – Open to Change

By: Amalyah Keshet

Amalyah Keshet — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:22:49 +0000

I enjoyed the podcast driving home from work this afternoon. There – perhaps Apostolos and I have helped answer the question you guys voiced: who listens to these podcasts, anyway?

Commuters like myself are probably a representative sample; totally bored with broadcast radio, I go to the trouble of downloading podcasts, Digital Campus included, and burning them to CD because my car only has a CD player. After all, I only have so much time to read, i.e. never enough, and podcasts like this are a great way to make time work for me.

But that’s just the technology. Regarding demographics: my commute is to and from Jerusalem, Israel.

By: Tom Scheinfeldt

Tom Scheinfeldt — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:22:32 +0000

Yes! That is exactly what I want! Thanks for listening.

-Tom

By: Apostolos K.

Apostolos K. — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:50:11 +0000

I enjoyed the podcast driving to work this morning.
In terms of the technology discussed on the show (the larger iphone like device) – seems like you are describing a cross between a Nokia Internet Tablet and the Apple Newton (model 2100) – both of which I own (the newton I use less and less these days)

By: Erik Hetzner

Erik Hetzner — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:20:15 +0000

I enjoy your podcast, so your discussion of open access was a bit of a disappointment. It would have been nice if you have been more clear about the meaning of open access. You could, perhaps, have discussed the the Budapest Open Access Initiative, or the Bethesda statement. I’m sure that you all understand open access, and that you are all interested in moving it forward, especially in the humanities were it has lagged behind. But by mixing your discussion of open access with other issues, you give some ammunition to the opponents of open access.

Open access does not mean lawyers who only publish to their blogs. It doesn’t mean that things must be available online now instead of being available in 6 months. It does not mean articles that are not peer-reviewed. It does not mean works that are not properly copy-edited, or blog postings, or any of that. It does not even mean not publishing through the big publishers (although practically it often does). It doesn’t even mean just putting an article on your website. Like the free software movement, or the free culture movement, it is primarily about freedom, from which the other benefits flow.

Rather than discuss how historians just aren’t as up-to-date, it would have been nice to discuss the economic pressures which have partially driven open access in the sciences, and which may be less in the humanities, or the practical aspects which make open access to articles easier than to monographs. You did touch upon the idea that employees of public universities might have an obligation to provide their work to as wide an audience as possible, which was great. But otherwise, the discussion was a bit mixed up.