Group items tagged

I presented this paper to a conference in South Africa in 2005, and it was described as "too radical" by the top leaders in libraries in South Africa who attended. :) So am rather happy that my vague perceptions and musings about the emerging trends have been vindicated today. "This paper will focus on another aspect that is integrally linked to the ability to access literature and information - that of cost and economics. Both the broader macroeconomic context and the more focused microeconomic (South African) environment will be referred to. We will examine the assumption that the economic development of a nation is linked to the ability to access information and test whether this is a valid assumption. From there, we will take a brief look at the issue of the cost of books, specifically in South Africa. The advent of the electronic revolution and the many paradigm shifts that the Internet and electronic media have initiated and the effects on the publishing industry, will be outlined. We will explore the "information as commodity" paradigm and briefly look at the related Copyright and Intellectual Property developments before weaving these seemingly disparate threads together to form a picture of innovative solutions that have arisen in response to the information access crisis in South Africa. These solutions have arisen from the popular notion that information should be freely available for societal good, rather than commodified. Finally, we will ponder the effect that these solutions may have on the traditional book publishing industry in South Africa."

Thank you all, very much, it is quite a new experience for me to have the paper well received. :)

Thank you for sharing this. I really appreciated the non-North American context. I grew up in the States, and am working on my Master's degree in Canada, so it's really easy to get caught up in always looking at these issues from the North American point of view. Seeing papers like this really help to confirm how global these issues are, and cement their importance in my mind.

This blog about Open Data Developments in Asia analyses the recent state of Open Data adopted in Asia and highlights some of the 11 Asian countries participants that attended the Open Knowledge Conference in Geneva in 2012. Of the 11 countries that attended the conference, the author of the post focuses on the East Asian and Pacific countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar and discusses their state and role in Openness. The author does a good job at providing statistics of the different countries in terms of the Worldbank Knowledge Economy Index (KEI), which analyzes the economic rankings of countries. The author then compares economic rank to that of openness, stating that countries low on the economic rank contribute little to no open data within their own countries or externally to other countries. Next, the author talks about the overall internet penetration in Asia as being only 27.5 percent and in that statistic, there is still a wide gap between North and South East Asia in terms of internet use and information distribution and acquisition from citizens and others. Moreover, the author continues to compare how many social, economical, political and cultural influence information distribution, contribution and acquisition in Asia countries. Openness is growing in the more developed Asian countries, but openness is limited, or even nonexistent, in developing (authoritative) countries. After reading this article, I've had a greater understanding of the current state of Open Data in Asia an the influences that contribute to enabling Openness. What I expected from the blog post or something that would've made the post even better could be some examples or projects of Openness or Open Data in Asia.

Traditional Healers Organization For Africa: " Biopiracy and Indigenous Traditional Medicine Knowledge The blatant plunder of indigenous knowledge and genetic resources in South Africa continues unhindered and without State monitoring. Since 1997, We have been monitoring private and public enterprises (or their intermediaries) who are actively collecting, sampling and acquiring traditional knowledge for the development of pharmaceutical products. What concerns us is that international organizations are entering South Africa to carry out this research. Not even the World Health Organization are free of scrutiny in this regard. "Biopiracy" refers to the use of intellectual property laws (patents, plant breeders' rights) to gain exclusive monopoly control over genetic resources that are based on the knowledge and innovation of indigenous peoples. Biopiracy and bioprospecting don't just happen in the field ; biopiracy is even more likely to take place in the laboratories of industry and academia, and in patent offices in the cities not even in South Africa."

"The results further showed that 64.8% of households in South Africa had no access to the Internet. Of those households that had access to the Internet, 16.3% accessed it via cellphone, 8.6% from home, 5.6% from elsewhere and 4.7% from work."

It's unfortunate that South Africa is still plagued by inequality. While it is good that some are accessing the web via mobile, ideally more efforts would be done to create infrastructure to serve entire communities.

This is core notes from a one day seminar in 2012 (http://www.stm-assoc.org/events/academic-and-professional-publishing-in-south-africa/) on academic publishing in South Africa and Africa. in South Africa it would seem that there are many barriers to prevent scholars from producing and publishing their work. Although these barriers are a huge concern, there is a wealth of information being gathered and research being completed. This article is interesting as it shortly summarizes the challenges for academic work to get published in Africa.

South Africa's National Assembly has today passed the controversial Protection of State Information Bill, despite the legislation being widely opposed and criticised. South Africa's Protection of State Information Bill, known informally as the secrecy bill, has been passed by the National Assembly with a majority vote of 229 to 107.

Since I'm in South Africa, ... --- "My campaign has been working on the National Key Points Act for over a year, and some of the people in my team have been working on it for more than a decade. In this session, people who'd never even heard of the National Key Points broke new ground within 20 minutes."

A dissertation by Tobias Schönwetter which comprehensively covers and compares digitalization, copyright and fair dealing not only in South Africa but in USA, Europe, Uk and Australia

from website: "Bioline International is a not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries. BI's goal of reducing the South to North knowledge gap is crucial to a global understanding of health (tropical medicine, infectious diseases, epidemiology, emerging new diseases), biodiversity, the environment, conservation and international development. By providing a platform for the distribution of peer-reviewed journals (currently from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda and Venezuela), BI helps to reduce the global knowledge divide by making bioscience information generated in these countries available to the international research community world-wide." The site offers a range of journals, with full text access. Areas include zoology, health, agriculture, and nutrition. There aren't a lot of journals so the site is manageable. Good source if you are a scientist seeking data/information from areas other than the west.

In the last 250 years, the number of freelancers in the South has gone up 126%. Why freelance: pros and cons? Benefits, lack of benefits?

Education South Africa - February 2013 With the 2012 Limpopo textbook delivery saga, and the rising cost of printed textbooks, one public school has decided to take a bold step into the future and convert to using E-books for all their learners.

This sounds like a good idea but then the students must have the tablets and computers to be able to read the books. Unfortunately I don't think this will work in many of the poorer rural schools that need it most.

The great idea of this project could be used by every educational organization, as the article say, the cost are clearly low.

"An interactive network aiming to gather observations on whether, and under which conditions, open approaches to research and collaboration could lead to various development outcomes in the Global South." Also highlights open development, goal is to construct "....a conceptual framework and a 'Theory of Change' on how open science norms and practices could be further established in developing countries via a community-based and networked-driven approach, while building on key lessons learned from the funded case studies, and from other ongoing open initiatives"

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.

"Responding to rapid and steep increases in the cost of scientific journals, a growing number of scholars and librarians have advocated "open access" (OA) to the scientific literature. OA publishing models are having a significant impact on the dissemination of scientific information. Despite the success of these initiatives, their impact on researchers in the developing world is uncertain. This article analyses major OA approaches adopted in the industrialized world (so-called Green OA, Gold OA, and OA mandates, as well as non-OA information philanthropy) as they relate to the consumption and production of research in the developing world. The article concludes that while the consumption of scientific literature by developing world researchers is likely to be significantly enhanced through such programs, promoting the production of research in the developing world requires additional measures. These could include the introduction of better South-focused journal indexing systems that identify high-quality journals published in the developing world, coupled with the adjustment of academic norms to reward publication in such journals. Financial models must also be developed to decrease the reliance by institutions in the developing world on information philanthropy and to level the playing field between OA journals in industrialized and developing countries."