Group items tagged

This book presents the background and recent developmentos about the partnership between the European Union, Latin America and the Caribbean, important topic to understand the global comunication.

On my navigation searching for initiatives to see how Open Knowledge are making the difference on the Latin America society I found this... nowadays unfortunately on South America (and in other places as well) open knowledge initiative are not divulgated. Universities seem to be not interested about promoting these initiatives and few people know about them. I was amazed reading the text from Francisco J. García-Peñalvo (Open Knowledge. Challenges and Facts) and seeing that a lot of Universities on Europe and North America are promoting and working with open and free access to texts and online courses. It's incredible how people have the possibility of learning in a world that each day is more competitive. I really hope that this great news about Brazil helps more and more people to understand the impact and the changings on the educational process.

"Just as important as learning these helpful tools, however, is unlearning and avoiding the most common pitfalls of common sense. Reminding us of where society is most vulnerable to those, Sagan writes: In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions.He admonishes against the twenty most common and perilous ones - many rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity - with examples of each in action"

The 20 fallacies: "ad hominem - Latin for "to the man," attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously) argument from authority (e.g., President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia - but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out) argument from adverse consequences (e.g., A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn't, society would be much more lawless and dangerous - perhaps even ungovernable. Or: The defendant in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men to murder their wives) appeal to ignorance - the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist - and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don't understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don't understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - each in their own way enjoined to

Wonderful post, Kim! These are great guidelines alongside which to test ideas.

Really nice slide deck by Dominque Babini (CLASCO)

Acceso abierto a la producción científica de América Latina y el Caribe. Identificación de principales instituciones para estrategias de integración regional Open access to scientific output from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Un poco de historia sobre Acceso Abierto, y desde la perspectiva de Redalyc

Creo importante empezar por conocer un poco sobre el uso de Internet y penetración que tiene en algunos países para entender mejor algunos de los alcances y limitaciones del Open Access.

América Latina avanza con paso firme hacia el Open Access pero todavía quedan desafíos importantes para que esta corriente se consolide. Los gobiernos ya parecen convencidos de que el acceso abierto es el futuro, y así lo demuestran las leyes de acceso abierto que se han aprobado en y .

If Google Translate gets it right, the article suggests 7 ideas to promote open acces in Latin America: - Promote a culture of open access among the young - Invite the new generation of researchers to build a new set of rules governing scholarly communication.- - Manage national access strategies - Promote awareness of the potential of open access - Provide training to scientists regarding intellectual property - Improve and standardize the taxonomy of documents to increase their visibility - Help Open Access journals to gain prestige These will apply to all other regions of the world as well. It shoul be noted that much of it can be done by the indivdual researcher, while some will best be untertaken by universities or libraries or even the state.