academia and open content.

In the wake of the recent Harvard faculty decision to allow open access to their intellectual output and recent moves by some academic publishers (Columbia University Press, for example) to make electronic books freely available, the open access movement in higher education is definitely gaining momentum. Today’s Inside Higher Ed features an article that considers factors within academia that are helping to both prevent and enable this shift – Lisa Petrides discusses the essential interoperability that makes content exchange flourish, and how the principle of open access at times runs contrary to the protective nature of original scholarship and tenure culture.