Universities are self-accrediting, autonomous institutions, yet the sector is one of the most heavily regulated in the country. Universities report on numerous fronts to multiple authorities and jurisdictions, and much of this is in relation to regulations and requirements aimed at other sectors. The problem is getting worse. Servicing these obligations diverts resources that would otherwise be directed to teaching, learning and research.

Universities Australia recommends that an incoming government:

■ appoint the Productivity Commission to review the regulatory burden placed on the university sector, with special attention to removing duplication between jurisdictions and excluding universities from regulatory regimes where a strong public interest rationale and benefit cannot be identified. This could build upon work recently completed to identify regulatory reporting burdens and set out opportunities to streamline reporting

■ monitor, and amend if necessary, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency’s operation to ensure adherence to principles of proportionate and necessary regulation.

 

edufactory

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the Research Works Act is buried, but will it rise again?

The “zombified” US Research Works Act was dropped this week following a boycott and protest of Elsevier, one of the major sponsors of the bill and a campaign contributor to the acts’ sponsor, Carolyn Maloney. Maloney and Elsevier are attempting to circumvent the 2008 changes to the US National Institutes of Health which ensures all research funded by its grants are freely available to the public.

Moar zombie politics

Great big-picture piece at text2cloud on the zombama image.

Pirates versus Zombies

Pirates are way cooler than ninjas (as the meme goes), but are they greater than zombies?

In the pirate corner is Aaron Swartz, a blogger, programmer and activist, currently the director of the political lobby group Demand Progress, (http://blog.demandprogress.org/). Swartz, described as a “respected Harvard researcher” and “Internet folk hero” by the New York times, was charged with computer fraud last week in Boston. He is accused of unlawfully downloading millions of documents from JSTOR (who represent our zombies), one of the largest online databases housing articles from hundreds of academic publishers.

At 24 years of age Swartz is a controversial figure, he has worked with some of the most interesting datamancers and legal luminaries of the information age, including Tim Berners-Lee at MIT, and Lawrence Lessig and the Creative Commons Foundation and has worked on the software architecture of the Open Library project at the Internet Archive. He help co-author the RSS 1.0 standard at age 14, and was involved with Reddit.com a social news site that enables user ‘upvote’ and ‘downvote’ content. Swartz provided programming for the site when his start up merged with the site’s was ‘founders’ Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, in 2006, and he was fired soon after Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, acquired Reddit in 2006.

This is a long term battle for Swarz, he wrote the ‘Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto’ in 2008, and is accused of downloading the JSTOR files in 2009.

News of Swartz’s indictment has recruited new pirates to the battle, most notably self-described ‘scientist hobbyist’, Greg Maxwell who published a torrent file earlier this week on The Pirate Bay. Maxwell has seeded a massive collection of academic publications (more than 30 gigabytes of data) from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society published before 1923 ( and therefore technically in the public domain) with a manifesto of his own that is worth a read.

The zombies definitely have the legal, if the not the ethical high ground, but the pirates have opened up with a massive broadside.

Zombie Awareness Month

As you may know, we’re now halfway through Zombie Awareness Month:

Supporters of Zombie Awareness Month wear a gray ribbon to signify the undead shadows that lurk behind our modern light of day.

If you have a quiet moment, spare a thought for the decrepit university undead.

They don’t know why, they just remember. Remember that they want to be in here.

The New York Review of Books: Academic Capitalism and the New Economy

“The growth of the contingent academic workforce brings the labor economics of the call center and the Wal-Mart store to higher education.“