Impact of open access on teaching

During this year's Open Access Week, BioMed Central highlighted a number of open access articles that address questions of impact on society. Having just caught up with the collected tweets, we are delighted to see an article in BMC Bioinformatics by St Andrews authors Daniel Barker et al. mentioned as a way that open access can benefit the public:

.@univofstandrews lecturers use @raspberrypi & #OpenAccess materials to teach bioinformatics http://t.co/PZLjSxUdKw #OAWeek #imFact
— BioMed Central (@BioMedCentral) October 23, 2013

The article is about teaching bioinformatics to biologists at the University of St Andrews with a low-cost computing environment, and an embedded open access course:

By including an explicit Open Access licence, and removing or replacing material incompatible with this from 4273π Bioinformatics for Biologists, we have been able to share it with anyone interested, the world over, in such a way that they can – with minimal care – re-use and adapt it without accusation of plagiarism or copyright violation.

The article is of course open access itself, paid for by the University's membership of BioMed Central

The full list of stories are available from the BioMed Central blog