Open Access Policy Draft from Australian Research Council

The Australian Research Council (ARC) have released a draft Open Access Policy for comment. The current policy was adopted in 1 January 2013. The policy requires researchers receiving a grant to make their research papers available in open access format within a year of publication, or tell the ARC why they can't. What is missing from the review are any statistics on how successful the current policy is. I suggest the new policy require institutions to publish a list of all publications on their web site, indicating which are open access and an annual count of the number open and closed, along with the amount of public funding received for those open and closed. The ARC should then use this information to produce statistics on openness of Australian research, in terms of numbers of publications and proportion of funding, along with the full list of institutions ranked by openness.

Promote Professionalism with Free Online Ethics Course

Straight after the ACS Canberra Conference, I attended a focus group run by Oliver Burmeister from Charles Sturt University, on promoting professionalism in ICT. This is part of a two year study funded by the Australian Computer Society (ACS) and the Australian Research Council (ARC) on "Investigating which strategies are most effective in overcoming ethical problems facing information and communications technology professionals". My suggestion was to provide free open access educational materials online which meet the requirements for ACS accredited education programs.

ACS could assemble material into the form of free online self paced courses. Thse could be used by anyone wanting to improve their understanding of professional ethics, used by ACS in its own educational programs, by an educational institutions in their programs and as an example of the minimum standard ACS requires for all accredited programs. For the last ten years I have been teaching ICT Ethics using materials from ACS to students at the  Australian National University:  "Professional Ethics and Social Issues in Networked Information Systems".

Previous published work by Oliver on ICT ethics includes:"Ethics of Computing Committees: Suggestions for Functions, Form, and Structure (2008).