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I followed a trail about Wikipedia that led me to their funding model. This is an interesting rebuttal to their strategy of asking users for donations atop the page (sort of a PBS/NPR model for those in the US). Interesting to think about how advertising or marketing might play into the Wikipedia model, and how it might change the dynamic of the conversation.

Thanks for the post! I also thought it was interesting to read the arguments for and against an ad-driven business model at the link below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Funding_Wikipedia_through_advertisements A limited advertising model actually makes a lot of sense to me. I think the real obstacle to changing business models is how passionately and adamantly Jimmy Wales has rejected even the future possibility. Strong wording sound heroic, but not allowing some flexibility could greatly limited Wikipedia's positive impact.

This article employs queer theory and challenges the notion of fitting emergent open access practices within current frameworks of academic success. While I was partially surprised by some of the assertions made early on in the article regarding open access journals being perceived as not as valuable as more traditional journal models, I think in part I may just hang out in academic circles that gravitate towards open access (hence... this course). But, I am very compelled by the conclusions made by Gurfinkel. That is, rather than trying to figure out how to systematize open access models to be respected within current academic standards, open access (as informed by queer theory, in this article) challenges us to investigate and question our standards in a more radical way. For example, in open access peer review models or post-publication review, the notion of a "peer" and thus who are considered credible and worthy sources of knowledge--and consequentially, what "knowledge" is-- are put into question. So, more than trying to figure out how to systematize and make more "legitimate" open access models, Gurfinkel wants us to ask what about the academy currently excludes open access models from being meaningful and legitimate practices in the first place.

Our mission is to represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journal and book publishers globally in all scientific, technical and scholarly disciplines. This mission will be carried out through exchanging information, setting standards, advancing models, advocacy, education, and the promotion of innovation. Through a shared interest in developing appropriate business models, tools and standards...

Our mission is to represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journal and book publishers globally in all scientific, technical and scholarly disciplines. This mission will be carried out through exchanging information, setting standards, advancing models, advocacy, education, and the promotion of innovation. Through a shared interest in developing appropriate business models, tools and standards... Read full article >

Our mission is to represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journal and book publishers globally in all scientific, technical and scholarly disciplines. This mission will be carried out through exchanging information, setting standards, advancing models, advocacy, education, and the promotion of innovation.

"New technology and innovative business models offer proven opportunities for enhancing the sharing of scholarly information - research papers, primary data and other evidence, creative activity and other products of research and scholarship - across institutions and audiences. This scholarly communication - understood as the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use - promotes a shared system of research and scholarship. ACRL sees a need to vigorously re-orient all facets of library services and operations to the evolving technologies and models that are affecting the scholarly communication process. There is wide variance in the background understanding of and engagement in scholarly communication as a critical perspective and worldview for academic librarians. This Scholarly Communication toolkit was designed by ACRL's Scholarly Communication Committee as a resource for education and advocacy efforts in transforming the scholarly communication landscape."

From classic model to IT model in University learning.

"Who will attend to the skills gap and create stronger linkages to the workforce? This book illuminates the great disruptive potential of online competency- based education. Workforce training, competency-based learning, and online learning are clearly not new phenomena, but online competency-based education is revolutionary because it marks the critical convergence of multiple vectors: the right learning model, the right technologies, the right customers, and the right business model."

"'Connectivism' is a label for a family of related theories and models about learning in a networked age that recognize the implications of the network itself in supporting and playing a central role in such learning. These theories and models consolidate various ideas, facts and theories that relate to networked learning then make predictions and prescriptions as well as imply patterns that are a consequence of them. "

"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."

"A recent story in the Chronicle of Higher Education covers a phenomenon all of us have suspected, mainly because we've seen it via our editorial boards and editorial advisors - the proliferation of open access (OA) publishers with new names, unknown pedigrees, big promises, and fulsome editorial boards, which often spam our editors and advisors with offers to join the parade." This article does a good job of outlining the pitfalls of the author pay model of open access journals. With open access journals the whole idea is to make it so that information is accessible to the public, but unfortunately that access comes with a cost. The cost of predatory open access journal undermines the whole democratic and altruistic intent behind open access journals. By taking advantage of recently endowed academics these predatory publishers cause many problems for both the individuals affected as well as the Open publishing industry. I also like how there is a clear definition of what predatory open access publishing is.

The Knowledge Unlatched model depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single Title Fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons licence via OAPEN and HathiTrust as a fully downloadable PDF.

Great concept! This goes to show that Open Knowledge does not equate to free and giveaway. I love the blend of effectively using a crowd-funding model through libraries to ensure appropriate fees are paid to cover costs and compensate authors and publishers to enable open access under a CC license across a global library network. It would be interesting to see the follow up to this. I would think this approach would be useful for school libraries in a district or region to use this approach and effectively share the resources.

Interesting take on what will happen to the future of libraries and how information will be published and sold. It's important to realize that nothing comes free and that we should promote a business model that benefits content-producers as well as consumers.

A hundred years ago, higher education seemed on the verge of a technological revolution. The spread of a powerful new communication network-the modern postal system-had made it possible for universities to distribute their lessons beyond the bounds of their campuses. Anyone with a mailbox could enroll in a class.

This article provides a clear overview of the evolution of higher education along with the rapid development of technology during the past 100 year, and raises the issue whether today's networked education model has posted threat to higher education. Today's the rapid development of Internet and social networks have changed the way we learn, access information and connect with others. The emergence and popularity of MOOCs and various social media have brought a new learning model, connected learning, which is largely used in university and college courses. It expands learners' opportunities of learning, and brings them huge convenience to access information, share thoughts, and communicated with learners from world wide on the same topic. Learning in the current information age subverted the way we learn in traditional learning models, and sometimes caused problems. But I think it's normal for a new thing to cause problems, but as long as we figure out ways to overcome the problems and best utilize the new learning model and resource, it will bring us huge opportunities.

"The development of the ISP as a conceptual framework is the result of more than two decades of empirical research that began with a qualitative study of secondary school students and the emergence of an initial model, that was verified and refined through quantitative and longitudinal methods of diverse library users and further developed in case studies of people in the workplace." Very interesting to compare this model developed by Kuhlthau with Siemen's model of Connectivism.

Publicado el 7/5/2012 This is a brief overview of several Open Peer Review Models, including ETAI, Nature, ACP, PLoS One and EJCBS. It is recorded based on a Prezi Presentation first developed for Open Access Week 2011 at UBC.

I found this presentation, in particular the visual representations, to be very useful in understanding just how diverse open peer review models can be. Several things stuck out to me throughout the presentation. First, I was surprised that many of the open peer review models either maintained anonymity of the reviewers or self-identification was optional. For example, PLOSone and the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics journals did not require self-identification. This raises a tension for me in that it does enable more people to participate in the publishing/review process, but it still inherently indicates context does not matter, which is something I disagree with. That is, if, for example, a paper is on student-faculty partnerships or feminism, it seems to me that crucial insights pertain to the particularities of the people reviewing an article. The other aspect that stuck out to me was how crucial it is for a journal to be intentional about implementing, integrating, and valuing an open peer review process. The Nature experiment is a good example of this. While I am sure they spent a great deal of time figuring out how to construct and enable an open peer review process, it was not necessarily emphasized as important by the journal nor well integrated into people's current practice. In contrast, the ETAI did this by permanently archiving the peer comments rather than deleting them unannounced, and editors also sent notifications to people that articles were ready rather than assuming people would seek out articles themselves.

"In truth, publishing is flourishing, creating massive new fortunes for entrepreneurs and more choices for consumers. It's also attracting large investments by established companies and venture capitalists. Though not everyone prospers, there has never been a better time for publishers."

Good overview with fundamental advice for publishers: innovate

Good read, Kevin! :) I agree with this article that said "As long as people want to be informed, entertained, and inspired, there will be profitable opportunities in publishing." The main key to keep the business running is everyone must adapt. Traditional publishers need to moves to digital media in order to survive and meet the modern readers' needs.

"In a nutshell, Knowledge Unlatched would act as an intermediary between a global library consortium and individual academic publishers. The latter would approach Knowledge Unlatched with titles they would like to see published in Open Access. Knowledge Unlatched would then regularly send out a list of titles to libraries which would opt in to fund the unlatching, that is, the publication in Open Access, of certain titles. The titles so funded would be released with a Creative Commons licence by the publishers which retain the right to sell special editions and extra services around the titles. "

InTechOpen is a leading global publisher of Journals and Books within the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine. We are the preferred choice of over 60,000 authors worldwide. Hello everybody, Editorial Intech is a good example of Creative Commons Publication Site: www.intechopen.com They are focused on the scientific world with a great variety of topics including engineering, mathematics, linguistics, software, radio mobile communications, etc. In this sense, let me one of my recent publications there: "A unifying statistical model for atmospheric optical communications", focused on the generation of a new statistical model that unifies in a single closed form expression many of other probability density functions employed in the literature to model the turbulent atmosphere as an optical channel of communications. http://cdn.intechweb.org/pdfs/20889.pdf Best regards, Dr. Antonio Jurado-Navas University of Málaga (Spain)

Thank you, Ibraghimova.

I have now only realized that this site is an Open Knowledge site, and I had used it over a year ago to cite some research for a paper on renewable energies. You might be interested in this site for sharing scientific data: http://www.researchgate.net/

Writing my post about AI and summoning the demon led me to re-read a number of articles on Cathy O'Neil's excellent mathbabe blog. I highlighted a point Cathy has made consistently: if you're not careful, modelling has a nasty way of enshrining prejudice with a veneer of "science" and "math."

Is There a Sustainable MOOC Business Model? Is "open" in open eduction will remain open and free from restriction? Can Coursera, Khan Academy, and other MOOC platforms be a $100-million business or a billion dollar business? It will take more time to learn the answer.

YouTube, Full Sail University, Published on Mar 12, 2014 "Technology has made it easier than ever to publish your own work. This Full Sail University panel discusses how to successfully self-publish your own work, and how to do it without getting lost in the sea of all of the other content that's out there." A panel of successful self-published authors talk about the flexibility of new technology within the publishing realm to sell books/music: formatting your work, business models, copyright , print on demand options, music aggregators,, marketing, worldwide distribution, etc.

The video length of one+ hour might seem a bit daunting at first, but I ended up watching most of it in one go - this is really an excellent and easy-to-follow overview of all the important aspects of self-publishing. (I was especially pleased that this video listens to well in the background, as opposed to most other videos that I find require more "involvement" and that do not fit well with a busy day schedule.) What is best about this is that it is all based on actual people experiences - successful self-published authors participating in the panel, and sharing their knowledge & tips in real-time. I was especially curious to find out about the marketing side of of self-publishing a book, and was pleased to discover quite a few helpful ideas and tips. As someone who is thinking about self-publishing soon, this has answered a lot of questions and definitely sparked confidence in the process as a whole. Thank you very much for sharing! Hopefully, this will help and encourage many more self-publishers to be.