From Peter Suber's blog

The OA workshop at Online Educa Berlin Online Educa tackles lifelong learning and open access, a press release from JISC, November 30, 2006. Excerpt: Delegates have been gathering for the world's largest e-learning conference which began in Berlin yesterday. The Online Educa conference on Technology and Supported Learning, now in its twelfth year, has attracted nearly 2,000 delegates from education, research, Government and commercial sectors from around the world.... Joint activities by JISC and SURF began in the afternoon with a workshop on open access. JISC Scholarly Communications consultant Fred Friend introduced the topic, saying that there were considerable economic, social and educational benefits to making research and other outputs available without financial, legal and technical barriers to access. It was also, he suggested, a question of giving more power to authors. He outlined the two complementary routes to open access. Self-archiving or the deposit of a pre-print or post-print in an institutional or subject repository is one route, he said, while the other is publication through an open access journal....Both routes, suggested Fred Friend, will enable the opportunities provided by technological developments, such as data mining and text mining, to be realised....There are significant economic benefits to open access too, he continued, through the sharing of developments in medical research, for example, and through the value for money gains of publicly funded research being more freely available.... Amber Thomas, JISC programme manager spoke about JISC's work to encourage the establishment and development of repositories in the UK.... Erik Saaman of SURF spoke about open access initiatives in the Netherlands, such as DAREnet (research), LOREnet (higher education), Edurep (non-HE) and Driver (European), and the common technical architectures which underpin them.... Ryan Hargreaves gave an overview of Jorum, the free online repository for learning and teaching resources which is aiming to create a culture of sharing of learning and teaching resources.... John May of the SURF Foundation spoke about LOREnet which is aiming to create a similar 'community of sharing' in the use of online teaching materials in the Netherlands.... ___________________________________________________________ To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre. http://uk.security.yahoo.com