Group items tagged

"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).

Canadian community activism organization that rallies for open internet, and launched the international organization openmedia.org "OpenMedia.ca works to engage, educate and empower citizens to defend and advance their communication interests, values and rights. Engage: Through online campaigns and participatory events that resonate with everyday people, and civic engagement around media and communications policy in Canada. Educate: Through educational events high school and university presentations and workshops, and online resources.

eLife is a unique collaboration between funders and practitioners of research to communicate influential discoveries in the life and biomedical sciences in the most effective way. eLife began following a workshop at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2010, where attending scientists concluded that there was a need for a model of academic publishing that better suited the needs of their community. In eLife a team of highly regarded, experienced and actively practicing scientists ensures fair, swift and transparent editorial decisions followed by rapid online publication. The editorial team are editorially independent of the funders. They rely on their scientific expertise and active research experience to identify the best papers, make scientifically based judgements and exercise leadership in steering these papers through peer review. The entire content of the journal is freely available for all to read and reproduce for unrestricted use.

Very interesting project. I spent some time exploring some of the papers. They do seem to be opening up the peer review process slightly be publishing a "decision letter" and "author response" with each paper. I also appreciate the seeming attempt to include data publication in the publication of the paper. Though it does seem to me that some of the papers don't have enough data accompanying them, so I wonder what their data publication policy is.

Description: "This post discusses some of the tensions that exist between the increasing effort to enforce Intellectual Property Rights and the impact of the Internet." "It suggests that Internet users and IP owners are not fully reconciled on the impact of the Internet on IP. IP owners are often eager for the support of users in promoting their products, ideas, services online, still want to have almost exclusive control of how those activities are conducted, which often and inherently undermines the desire (and opportunity) to share. Hence although a mutually beneficial relationship between IP and IT can exist, there are still a number adjustments that ought to be made to better accommodate the changing paradigm that is occurring due to the Internet."

"Open data could add up to $3 trillion worth of economic activity per year worldwide, according to a study by McKinsey Consultants. But in the race to liberate thousands of data-sets from the government and business sectors, the African continent is seen as lagging behind. "

If there is any continent that needs Open Data most, it is Africa. African needs transparency and accountability, which are the core foundation of Open Data, to create meaningful change on the continent. But making data available and Open is just the initial stage of accomplishing something. The challenge here is how to ensure that the people of Africa have knowledge of the information and are ABLE to ACCESS the information. What use is information when still limited Internet access, scarce electricity, and other ICT infrastructure, including language barriers continue to act as roadblocks to accessing Open data? Wow!! Just when I finished this short posting, the light went off. Couldn't access the Internet. Everything is dead. I have being waiting 30mins, 1hr, 2hrs, 2hrs 45mins … and now its 4hrs and my laptop battery power is running down. ALAS!! Finally power is restored after 4hrs 49mins for me to make my post. You feel me? This is not the exception, and this is not a coincidence but the norm

"The Macaulay Library is the world's largest and oldest scientific archive of biodiversity audio and video recordings. Our mission is to collect and preserve recordings of each species' behavior and natural history, to facilitate the ability of others to collect and preserve such recordings, and to actively promote the use of these recordings for diverse purposes spanning scientific research, education, conservation, and the arts." A great example of what citizen science can build!

Open Access repositories promote the widespread dissemination of scientific and scholarly production. Researchers and teachers publish free on line digital assets for claiming their activity and for sharing research results with other researchers. In particular universities, research centres, libraries and, for limited subsets of their collections, museums, administrative archives and other cultural institutions are promoting open access. In the future, a considerable section of scholarly, academic and cultural institutions memory will be formed by born-digital assets, stored in open access archives. Their digital collections will have an ever growing relevance in making up the scientific and information heritage of the next generations. In order to ensure that these objects will survive and continue to be cited, scholarly and academic communities should be committed to the long term preservation of their repositories.

Awareness will make a difference since privacy is the price we pay for freedom.

If you are browsing Commons for the first time, you may want to start with Featured pictures , Quality images or Valued images . You can also see some work created by our highly skilled contributors inMeet our photographers and Meet our illustrators . You may also be interested in Picture of the Year .

In Module 4, one of the activities is to complete the open multimedia searching exercise. The assignment description contains a nice and well sorted list of internet resources. "Commons", the multimedia repository of Wikimedia contains exclusively material with an open license, CC-BY-SA or GFDL.

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."

Crowd sourcing for social change.

This site is really inspiring, I follow Andrzej since he got this page, I really like how he has analyzed the psychological typology of players. Normally I apply this typology in my courses. recommend follow September, 2014Teaching to early learners means teaching fundamentals in a supportive and engaging way. It is no surprise that many learning tools for young students include some element of gamification. Here are a few that teachers recommend. Matific Want hundreds of FREE math activities for grades K-6? Look here!

This slideshow provides a very stimulating and entertaining view of the world of open science. It deals with the key dimensions of open science such as the meaning and scope of openness , opportunities in being open, funding , problems and other related issues.

Thanks for sharing. I like the slideshare website; it was fun to just click through some nicely presented information. I am getting a bit confused with all the core reading and additional reading (!right?) and all the activities and whatnot so this was a good way to end my 1hour scheduled time today for this MOOC. I especially liked the hierarchy vs wirearchy slide. :) Peace.

ghee thanks arren7, I am seriously concerned about my" intellectual deficient contributions",...feel better now!:) peace

The Identity Ecosystem Steering Group (IDESG) has been established as a new organization led by the private sector in conjunction with, but independent of the Federal Government. As a key stakeholder and active participant in the Identity Ecosystem, the government has funded Trusted Federal Systems, Inc., through a competitive grant, to provide technical, administrative and operational support for the Identity Ecosystem Steering Group. IDESG is an open collaboration charged with realizing the goals of NSTIC: National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (http://www.nist.gov/nstic), helping individuals and organizations utilize secure, efficient, easy-to-use and interoperable identity credentials to access online services in a manner that promotes confidence, privacy, choice and innovation.

In 1990, after seven years of teaching at Harvard, Eric Mazur, now Balkanski professor of physics and applied physics, was delivering clear, polished lectures and demonstrations and getting high student evaluations for his introductory Physics 11 course, populated mainly by premed and engineering students who were successfully solving complicated problems. Then he discovered that his success as a teacher "was a complete illusion, a house of cards."

The thing that I liked most about this article (and I really liked it!) was the mention of numerous research studies that have looked into the effects of active learning. Also how Mazur himself collects data on his students' results. The fact that interactive learning can be backed by empirical research only adds to its strength as an effective pedagogical method.

A short guide for using Twitter for academic purposes, aimed at beginners.

thanks Kevin. Very useful. I'm new to twitter but i strongly believe in it as a "right" tool in research and teaching context

Thanks for sharing it! I'll tweet the post

Support for Open Archives Initiative activities has come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Digital Library Federation, Microsoft Corporation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and from the National Science Foundation (IIS-9817416 and IIS-0430906).