Group items tagged

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."

Emotional expression and linguistic style in online collaboration differ substantially depending on the contributors' gender and status, and on the communication network. This should be taken into account when analyzing collaborative success, and may prove insightful to communities facing gender gap and stagnation in contributor acquisition and participation levels.

lubajong and taylor_cole thank you for your comments. From my part I will add a critical evaluation of this resource as well. The talk pages of Wikipedia provide a rich source for researchers to study communication patterns. On Wikipedia talk pages they have found signals for status differences between groups of participants, notably between admins and ordinary contributors. Those findings support in general the theories of the researchers about status differences and communication style differences between managers and employees in firms. They have also found differences in communication style bases on gender, which also support their general theories about gender (which is a social construct). What I - as a Wikipedian insider - finds missing in the article is the selection bias. Wikipedia admins aren't appointed by Jimmy Wales or some other body. Admins are community selected. The exact process differs per language version. On the English Wikipedia admin selection is by a community consensus process. Future admins are selected who show the preferred communication style of admins by other contributors including existing admins. For me, the patterns in communication style do not explain the gender gap on Wikipedia. There is a gender gap in many language versions of Wikipedia, but not in all. The Armenian language version of Wikipedia is a notable exception, showing a gender balance in the conbtributor base. An explanation of that exemption requires further research. What taylor_cole notes about neutrality and bias is a valid point. People volunteer to write for Wikipedia, and volunteer in topic choice. My guess is that in general people will opt to write about something they like, care about, know about. A lack of diversity in contributors will naturally reflect in lack of diversity of topics. For example nerdy males will write about things male nerds like. In general females tend to be interested in other topics than nerdy males. A lack of topics covered in Wikipe

Levels of participation influences emotional expression and phrasing? has the function of sex and status of the taxpayer. 4 strands to study and find a result! Interesting!

Report from the World Wide Web Foundation (with IDRC funding) Claims to "explore the need for a more nuanced understanding of how open data can generate outputs, outcomes and impact. We offer a series of insights and provocations, moving towards different models for thinking about open data, development and social change...We need to explore practices that present the 'best fit' for particular countries and contexts, rather than advocating interventions based on externally defined best practices." (Introduction, p. 5)

As a scholarly publisher, we enable scholarly journals to take full advantage of the opportunities unlocked by electronic publishing and open access. Through our comprehensive and modern publication practices and technological expertise we realise each journal's full potential, and improve their scientific impact whilst upholding international publishing standards and ethical practices.

2014 Library Edition Examines key trends, significant challenges, and emerging technologies for their impact on academic and research libraries across the globe- 56pages of articles.

This handbook discusses the legal, social and technical aspects of open data. Open data, especially open government data, is a tremendous resource that is yet to be tapped properly. It is targeted for civil servants, journalists, politicians, data professionals or anyone interested in open data. It can be used by anyone but is especially designed for those seeking to open up data. It discusses the why, what and how of open data - why to go open, what open is, and the how to 'open' data. This book explains the basic concepts of 'open data', especially in relation to government. It covers how open data creates value and can have a positive impact in many different areas. In addition to exploring the background, the handbook also provides concrete information on how to produce open data.

This is a brief synopsis covering the main aspects of Research4Life, including information about the creators and stakeholders, criteria for access, its composition and training given. In 2001 Research4Life was initially started by WHO with HINARI (Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative) to enable developing countries to access free or greatly subsidized biomedical and health literature. From 2003-09 this type of access to the AGORA, OARE and ARDI databases of scientific journals and books became available to over 77 poorer developing countries by Cornell and Yale Universities, FAO, UNEP and WIPO with other publishers. Institutions are required to meet specific criteria and categories to be entitled to the right to use of Research4Life resources. A few case studies are described which clearly show the impact Research4Life has had so far. We are informed of the future plans for the project too. This article gives a clear insight into how first world organisations are giving researchers and the populace of less developed countries the opportunity to advance their own research and development by providing access to current information and data.

As a librarian, research4life boosts my morale. Truly, librarians can be the unsung heroes in scientific researches. Librarians happily serve researchers without expecting anything but ensuring that they get the information they need. Research4life values the role of the librarians in the field of research and I appreciate that. I wish to express my gratitude to resesarch4life organization for giving value to the contribution of librarians in research

This volume in the New Media Consortium Series of reports (NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition), examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry within the environment of higher education.

" Who is responsible for the quality of data deposited in repositories? "

Eager to find out what impact blogging and social media could have on the dissemination of her work, Melissa Terras took all of her academic research, including papers that have been available online for years, to the web and found that her audience responded with a huge leap in interest in her work.

In this article Abby Clobridge discusses the Scholarly Publication landscape today as it relates to open access journals, and how we need to re-think some of our standards for publishing (both my authors and by publishers).

Part 2 of this article addresses OA and journal impact factors, and part 5 give examples on how libraries/librarians can contribute in spreading OA acceptance.

26 August To mark the launch of the Open Knowledge Foundation in Australia, founder Dr Rufus Pollock is touring Australia. His "Open Knowledge Down Under" tour will take in several capital cities and includes a series of public lectures.

BC Open Textbooks is an initiative started by the province of British Columbia in Canada. It is open textbooks adapted and created by BC faculty. It's difficult to tell which texts are complete and ready for use as Tony Bates incomplete text that I created another post about appears on the same page with complete texts (eg Chemistry, Biology Geography.) All the texts can be modified through Creative Commons licensing. This project has been creating concern for publishers who stand to loose business in BC and other provinces if the texts get adopted outside of BC. Initially, the project was focused on creating "a collection of open textbooks aligned with the top 40 highest-enrolled subject areas in the province. A second phase was announced in the spring of 2014 to add 20 textbooks targeting trades and skills training." Initially they looked for existing Creative Commons books they could adapt and they adapted 8 textbooks. From inception to fall 2014, 2244 students have used their open texts for a savings of $353,000 or $157 per student. The aim is to reach 200,000 students annually so they are at .6% and save each $900-$1500/year, still quite a way to go. Wondering how much this project is costing taxpayers, I googled and found this article http://www.ousa.ca/2013/04/24/textbooks/ which claims $600k-$1m/year. So the government has spent $1.2 - $2 million to save students $350k over the past two years. Still a long way to go to break even. In summary, 65 texts published, 45 adoptions, 2244 student users, for a savings of $353k to date. If this was a traditional textbook publishing company, they'd soon be out of business if they weren't already.

Thank for sharing, I believe that the conclusions that this article leaves us are not surprising, although yes very interesting. "Recently, the Babson Survey Research Group and Pearson conducted a survey of nearly 8,000 faculty members in higher education to find out more about how faculty are using social media. While we often post infographics showing trends or results from specific studies here at Edudemic, I found the results of this survey particularly interesting - perhaps because they were so different from what I expected." Julia Echeverria

You are so, so lucky. Here in South Africa, we are regressing, not even looking at online textbooks, but trying to reduce textbooks to only one per subject. The textbook crisis: http://mg.co.za/article/2013-08-23-00-south-africas-hidden-textbook-crisis and the regressive "solution" http://mg.co.za/article/2014-10-10-single-textbook-option-slammed. It is very frustrating for me, knowing all the possibilities, but not having any agency to get through to the authorities here.Llibraries are also failing horribly in advocating for the solutions that ARE available.

"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).

This year, the fifth annual Publishers for Development (PfD) conference explored current developments in scholarly communication including their impact on publishers, researchers and information professionals in the global South. The rapid growth in open access, the potential for social media to increase communication of research and also new measures for the way research is used were all topics viewed from a Southern perspective. The one-day conference was held in London on 15 October and titled 'Forward Thinking: Developing a global research cycle which fully engages South and North'. It brought together publishers from 16 publishing houses, librarians and researchers from universities in Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Also present were representatives of organisations involved in research access, production and use such as the World Bank, African Journals Online, Research4Life, Development Research Uptake in Sub-Saharan Africa (DRUSSA), Talloires Network and Partnerships in Health Information.

published by Mozilla, covers all sorts of open news. Interesting feature: unlike most news sites the content is actually CC-by-sa. "The Open Standard provides online news coverage of open, transparent, and collaborative systems at work in technology and our daily lives. Our purpose is to showcase the positive global impact of these systems and inspire more people to seek out, support and adopt open principles of accessibility, participation and experimentation. The Open Standard is published by Mozilla, a global community of technologists, thinkers and builders working together to promote openness, innovation and opportunity online. We will disclose and be transparent if we take a position on or promote the products and services of Mozilla or a partner company."

for example, check out this article about companies collecting data on school kids, https://openstandard.mozilla.org/whos-collecting-kids-personal-data-lots-of-people/

That is scary...

Where to publish is too important of a decision to put off until the end of the research process.

List of resources from the Center for Media & Social Impact, American University (DC). Includes best practices, guidelines, teaching materials, and info graphics for reuse. Especially helpful information about creating documentaries, etc. Interesting "Question of the Month" posts