The HardiBlog

  "A more ethical publishing infrastructure" - Open Voices interview with Stephen Eglen For this Open Voices interview, we talk to Stephen J. Eglen, Professor of Computational Neuroscience at Cambridge University. Hardy: Stephen, you are Professor of Computational Neuroscience at Cambridge University but today we are talking to you as a vocal advocate for Open Access. Many will have seen your posts on Twitter for example. Where does your interest in and passion for Open Access come from? Stephen : I guess there are all the moral reasons about why publications should be Open Access to which I fully subscribe to, for the good of everyone to make things freely available. But my starting point was actually more historical. When I was doing my PhD in the 1990s, I was in a department where there was an ethos of sharing of computer programs. We were writing a lot of code and the ethos was very much “you share what you can”, making your research open well before it became a tre...

The NUI Galway Library is digitising volumes of Galway Corporation Records. Galway Corporation Records feature minute books, statutes, laws, and the different corporation records taken in Galway since the 1400s.  Digitising these records shows us what decisions and laws have shaped Galway and gives insight into how Galway has formed into the place it is today. This blog post is about the Minute Books of the Galway Town Commissioners (1890-1909) . You can also view more volumes from the Galway Corporation Records collection . Minute Books of the Galway Town Commissioners (1890-1909) The Galway Town Commissioners were established under the provisions of the 1828 Act for the improvement of lighting in towns. The board of the Galway town commissioners itself was established by the Galway improvements bill which was passed in Parliament in 1836. The board took over all the local authority functions of Galway Corporation following the Corporation's abolition in 1840. The Galway Town...

  Could NUI Galway use an Enabling Policy to Encourage the Use and Production of OER? by Kris Meen I'm writing this post as a member of the NUI Galway Library’s Research & Learning division, where my role is primarily that of an educator, teaching information and digital literacy skills as part of the Academic Skills team. I ’m interested in Open Educational Resources (OER) , in part due to my engagement with them in my own teaching and learning support. It has been a great pleasure to be involved with the Library -led, Student Project Fund-funded OER pilot project , which seeks to establish a sustainable OER support service at NUI Galway and is funding and supporting the local creation of ten OER by means of the popular open textbook creation software, Pressbooks. While there are varying definitions of OER, the pilot project has adopted the UNESCO definition of OER , i.e. that they are “ teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – th...