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Peter Suber is Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication Office at Harvard, Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, a Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Senior Researcher at SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). He is widely considered the de facto leader of the worldwide open access movement.

Algunos datos recientes sobre academia y acceso abierto/some recent figures about academy and open access (http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4370) "Today, there are more than 9,000 fully open access, scholarly peer-reviewed journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and the DOAJ's net growth is a fairly consistent three-four titles per day. There are over 2,000 open access repositories listed in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR). A cross-search of open access repositories using the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine encompasses over 40 million documents, a number that is growing by the millions every quarter (Morrison, 2005-). The producers of academic journal are the same that consume such journals: "Returning to the topic of academic library budgets as the primary support for scholarly journals, Michael Mabe (2011), CEO of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), recently affirmed that about 80-90 percent of the US$8 billion in revenue that goes to producers of the world's peer-reviewed scholarly journals comes from library subscriptions, as reported by Ware and Mabe [4]. Ware and Mabe's analysis is based in part on research by the Research Information Network (2008), which found that journals publishing revenues are generated primarily from academic library subscriptions (68-75 percent of the total revenue), followed by corporate subscriptions (15-17 percent), advertising (four percent), membership fees and personal subscriptions (three percent), and various author-side payments (three percent)."

Thank you very much for sharing.

Good questions about The Participatory Cultures.

Participatory Culture is a culture that everyone inside the society can talk, share and control the media. People with loud voice and much money have the equal opportunity of joining in the culture with people with nothing. This is an ideal situation. In the article, Aaron Alan Delwiche and Dr. Jennifer Jacobs Henderson express their idea on Participatory culture. They think that people should join the culture and join in efficiently. People can not bully on minority or hurt others. On the other side, it is more harmful not to join the culture. I think they are right to a large extent. However, participatory culture is an ideal situation to a large extent. People can not achieve equality on the social media

About the book: Information Literacy and Cultural Heritage: Developing a model for lifelong learning Kim Baker, Cape Town, South Africa - covers cultural heritage in the museums, archives and... Kim is our fellow co-student from Cape Town. She already created a digital project, her blog. She also has created an analog project: a book, you know, something printed on paper :) Kim is a GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) expert. Her book covers anything digital and GLAM or cultural heritage, at least that is what the content section promises. So I'm very glad to have such an expert in her field in the class.

Thank you very much. :) And I am so happy to be here and learn from so many experts around the world!

There are two versions (at least) of this text. One earlier version is a first draft of sorts "A BOOK CROWDSOURCED IN ONE WEEK MAY 21-28, 2010" http://hackingtheacademy.org/ The url supplied above (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=dh;c=dh;idno=12172434.0001.001;rgn=full%20text;view=toc;xc=1;g=dculture) gives you access to the slicker version. Both can be read online. The text professes to a hacker ethos: "1 The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved. 2 No problem should ever have to be solved twice. 3 Boredom and drudgery are evil. 4 Freedom is good. 5 Attitude is no substitute for competence." One of the opening chapters encourages academics to "get out of the business." "Burn the boats/books" focuses on the need to move away from "librocentrism." Something I hadn't thought of: "A PDF document is not a web-based document. It is a print-based document distributed on the web." This is to make the point that online materials should be interactive, which a pdf is not. The focus is hacking scholarship, teaching, and institutions. Seems worth dipping into here and there .

This book present public access to the products of human culture and learning - access. to knowledge. The ultimate objective of the movement is to create a world in which educational and cultural works are accessible to all!

This is great. i think people should read it to know how to get the knowledge and how to create more useful information.

Some historical background on MOOCs.

A nice journey through the history of MOOCs - I like the storytelling version using the comparison to Foucault.

Compares the cost of articles from society and non-profit publishers to those of the major commercial publishers.

Its crazy. The numbers (of profit and control) for the publishing companies is astronomical!

Universities have received a poor deal from the system of private, subscription-based access to knowledge production since the port WW2 commercialization of the scientific publishing industry. It is absurd that the university or research funder supplies the content (the research), pays for the authoring (the time of the researcher writing the article), and provides and pays for the time of peer reviewers and academic editors. In addition, it often pays page charges or formatting charges to publishers. It then cedes copyright and finally buys back its own research at prices that have escalated at four times the rate of inflation in the past decade and a half! Considering most of this research is conducted using public funds, it becomes a moral argument when public resources are used once again to purchase access to the outputs of this research. The commercial model of disseminating research does not obey the rules of supply and demand. A relatively small number of 'core' journals occupy monopoly positions, in that university libraries have to subscribe to access their content, whatever the cost, because these journals have been established as 'must-have' resources. While the practice of 'bundling' offers the advantage of bulk pricing, it reduces room for choice, as bundles consume large chunks of library budgets, making it difficult to subscribe to smaller, individual titles. In addition, the inflexibility of indexing systems makes it difficult for new journals to establish themselves; thus compromising the potential for smaller niche subjects and newer interdisciplinary areas. Thankfully the global inequalities engendered by the commercialization of scholarly publishing are being challenged by open access.

"The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) was a three-year research and implementation initiative that took place between March 2010 and August 2013. Hosted by the University of Cape Town, the programme engaged the Universities of Botswana, Namibia and Mauritius in a process aimed at better understanding the dynamics around scholarly communication in the Southern African higher education environment and advancing the open access agenda for the purpose of increasing the visibility of African research. This work was made possible by a grant from the Canadian International Development Research Center (IDRC). This report synthesizes research and findings from the four institutional case studies conducted at the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia. It provides an overview the scholarly communication activity systems at work in these four Southern African universities."

Thanks for this article. I think it gives a great overview of the current landscape of scholarly publishing in Africa, and concisely states the problems of visibilities (or the lack thereof).

Good article on how to look for the best information the internet has to offer and be a discerning consumer. Also good for availability of academic publishing as an important public good.

It's a good reminder to all of us to pay close attention to where we are getting our information. The main points are take advantage of academic publishing via Google Scholar, get 2nd opinions, check multiple sources, be aware of the potential motives of the writer and their affiliated organization, and follow links/sources and fact check. Additional suggestions that I would add to the author's blog post include taking a close look at the writer's credentials, asking yourself who the intended audience might be, looking out for emotion-rousing words, and doing a link search to find out if other people have sited the article. It's also good to ask whether the web is the best place to look for that particular type of information in the first place.

This is a great source about Digital Literacy and Digital Inclusion. You can find here worldwide research and news about these topics. 'The Digital Literacy "best practices" website is a reference and a celebration of the many good ideas that have been successfully used to promote digital literacy and digital inclusion'

Good resource. Thanks for sharing. "Information literacy," "media literacy," "digital literacy" are all similar but yet different ideas. I am wrestling with the specifics of each. This site provides great examples.

Thank you for sharing this resource. Nowadays, people just post things on the internet and doesn't consider the following effects. Many people lack the digital literacy. They need to learn it and then protect themselves. It is a good website to help me know digital literacy and digital inclusion.

Adobe has just given us a graphic demonstration of how not to handle security and privacy issues. A hacker acquaintance of mine has tipped me to a huge security and privacy violation on the part of Adobe. That anonymous acquaintance was examining Adobe's DRm for educational purposes when they noticed that Digital Editions 4, the newest version of ...

The Internet is challenging its users privacy, and privacy carries a different meaning in the Digital Age.

It seems internet users might just have to become "comfortable" with software companies now having access to large amounts of information about them…the new normal

I think more and more people are leaving the real world and going to the World Wide Web

I used this tool (among others) when designing wireframes for my final project. It's a helpful resource if you need to communicate design decisions to collaborators in different spaces.

One place the tradition of fans recording live shows and trading the bootleg tapes (ala the Grateful Dead) is being brought to the digital world is at archive.org's Live Music Archive Bands officially agree to allow the practice, and then archive.org stores and allows access to the files for eternity... Some info about those details: http://wiki.etree.org/index.php?page=TradeFriendly For example, here is my friends, a ROCKING bluegrass band from Duluth Minnesota: https://archive.org/details/TrampledbyTurtles The rights statement is actually an email: On February 7, 2007 Trampled by Turtles a GO! for archive.org: "Hello, This is Dave Simonett from Trampled by Turtles. I'm writing to give permission for our music to be posted at archive. Please let me know what you need from me. Thanks for the email. Dave Simonett trampled by turtles info@trampledbyturtles.com www.trampledbyturtles.com" "Welcome to Internet Archive's Live Music library. etree.org is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree.org to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future..."

Cool...

Awesome resource - thanks for sharing. I have often found the conflict between quality recordings and open access to be a challenge. It seems the music that is free isn't usually high-quality, whereas the higher quality isn't usually free. :)

This essay takes a look at comic book scanners and why they do what they do -- namely, risking legal repercussions for the violation of IP laws without monetary reward. It's an interesting look at the participatory culture aspect of fandoms in the digital age.

Chirospasm22 thank you for posting, I had never heard of comic book piracy until now!

this is an article from a few years ago that does a great job of telling the story of a major hack at Diigo--very interesting to see this as a narrative rather than just the headline, lets you understand the story more personally. I thought it was an interesting reflection considering the discussion of risks of a public course, public online life/profile. "Diigo, a social bookmarking and annotation site, is finally back online 50 hours after the domain was first hijacked. It's an incredible story that involves crisis management, blackmail, investigative research, payoffs, a clever thief, and points to potential problems with the domain name registry system that could affect anyone with a website."

Reading now...

Did you go get some Open Data this week? You need OpenRefine! A wonderful tool that lets you manipulate data files in amazing ways, i love working with it. Open source project spun off from google "OpenRefine : A free, open source, power tool for working with messy data"

Free internet for Africa

The sooner Africa gets the internet the better. The cost of internet is too high and out of reach for many people. Free internet will facilitate access to information. I hope this will reach rural areas and maginalised communities.

yes, it is very good to get free internet for Africa so that knowledge dissipation happens and open knowledge can will be useful to all of them and also benefit from that OK. IT infrastructure and internet is required to benefit from open accessible open knowledge.