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Interesting article including an interview about current challenges and strategic options for green OA repositories. The blog itself also contains many more articles in the field of open access.

Another good interview by Richard Poynder, with Indian OA advocate, Subbiah Arunachalam. Focuses on the challenges faced by Indian scholars and next steps.

This very short, yet engaging piece challenges us to think more critically about the opportunities and implications stemming from open access principles.

Browse through 12609638 journal and book articles on ScienceDirect.com

Scientific publishing. Quality vs quantity?

I think the quality of a scientific publication brings more benefits than an amount of irrelevant matters.

I agree! Open publishing is highly important, but having tons of low quality material doesn't serve any good. There should be some guidelines or measures that would ensure accuracy.

Publishing has transited from traditional to Electronic format making information resources available to users without much subscription. E-publishing is engendered by the introduction of information and communication technology (ICT), this development has brought about increase in the number of scholarly communication in circulation. The awareness and rate of e-publishing differs among faculties, it based on this that this study was carried out to survey the situation of e-publishing and open access of librarians in three federal universities in Southern Nigeria, five research questions were formulated to guide the study. The methodology adopted is descriptive survey, questionnaire was given to a total population of 64 librarians consisting of librarians from the institutions understudy, the data collected from the study shows that though librarians are aware of e-publishing but they have not being publishing as should have been expected in University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) out of the 95% that aware of electronic publishing only 30% have published there articles electronically, in University of Lagos (UNILAG) 100% indicated that they have published electronically while in University of Benin (UNIBEN) 45.4% percent indicated yes while 54.5% said they have not published their articles electronically. On availability of open access it was discovered that they have access as a total of 84% from UNN responded Yes, UNILAG 100% said Yes while in UNIBEN 90.9%. The following problems based on their scoring militating against e-publishing and open access in Nigeria. Inadequate power supply; inadequate computer terminals; inadequate funding for subscription payment.

The massive expansion of higher education across all continents is one of the defining features of our century. This volume examines two dimensions of this: those of access and equity. Building on the country studies undertaken by this group of Fulbright New Century Scholars, the book offers a unique focus in its commitment to bring together an analysis of the theoretical literature on equity; a focus on the methodological problems of measuring access and equity from a comparative perspective; a comparative analysis of trends and policy developments set in a global framework; and a comparative analysis of targeted initiatives which are currently in place in different societies. The need to develop a comparative research programme addressing the question of measuring equity is noted

Compares the cost of articles from society and non-profit publishers to those of the major commercial publishers.

Its crazy. The numbers (of profit and control) for the publishing companies is astronomical!

Universities have received a poor deal from the system of private, subscription-based access to knowledge production since the port WW2 commercialization of the scientific publishing industry. It is absurd that the university or research funder supplies the content (the research), pays for the authoring (the time of the researcher writing the article), and provides and pays for the time of peer reviewers and academic editors. In addition, it often pays page charges or formatting charges to publishers. It then cedes copyright and finally buys back its own research at prices that have escalated at four times the rate of inflation in the past decade and a half! Considering most of this research is conducted using public funds, it becomes a moral argument when public resources are used once again to purchase access to the outputs of this research. The commercial model of disseminating research does not obey the rules of supply and demand. A relatively small number of 'core' journals occupy monopoly positions, in that university libraries have to subscribe to access their content, whatever the cost, because these journals have been established as 'must-have' resources. While the practice of 'bundling' offers the advantage of bulk pricing, it reduces room for choice, as bundles consume large chunks of library budgets, making it difficult to subscribe to smaller, individual titles. In addition, the inflexibility of indexing systems makes it difficult for new journals to establish themselves; thus compromising the potential for smaller niche subjects and newer interdisciplinary areas. Thankfully the global inequalities engendered by the commercialization of scholarly publishing are being challenged by open access.

Rosario Rogel explica el movimiento de Acceso Abierto y algunas de las vicisitudes de los países latinoamericanos para hacer visible su producción científica en el mundo de las publicaciones legitimadas por los sistemas científicos mundiales.

derecho humano

I liked this article on the tension between indigenous knowledge, which wants to be closed and contained, and open knowledge which wants to be freely accessible to all. It highlights the need to find a balancing middle path between the two trajectories. This issue speaks to the sources found in Additional resources in Module 1.

The Canadian Government promoting how sharing private content of someone is illegal. Having the internet and our social media tools, it is so easy to share and connect with people. It is great in many ways, like education, social life, work etc. but when it comes to personal life, maybe it is not as great. People like to share because it is easy and fast, there are no physical restrictions. There are consequences but because there are too many people doing it, it is hard to target everyone. With this digital age coming so quickly, maybe rules, regulations, and education are still trying to catch up. If I have not taken this course, I would not have known that sharing a screenshot on Whatsapp with friends is actually illegal. The point is when everyone is doing it now, and we were not deeply educated on this topic beforehand, how is this going to stop? When sharing screenshots has became a trend, how is it possible to stop?

I think this video does an excellent job of not victim-blaming, or casting any moral judgement. I think it's easy to say "don't take pictures", etc., but approaching it as a strictly legal matter may be a better route to take. Speaking of the general open access movement, I think some valuable lessons could be taken from this for raising awareness about appropriate uses of open access information. It reminds me of the Disney compilation copyright video we watched at the beginning of the course - using some very literal imagery to get a point across, and explaining what the law is, not what people are doing with it.

I think this PSA does a really good job of communicating a 'touchy' subject in a tasteful manner. The message is simple and very relatable for adolescents. Cyberbullying is a tremendous issue among youth in Canada and I am really glad to see the government taking preventative initiatives.

"MOOCs offer opportunities but are also pose the danger of further exacerbating existing educational divisions and deepening the homogeneity of global knowledge systems."

Very interesting! Thanks. "MOOCs and MOOC-type courses have added a new dimension to the educational landscape by strengthening the non-formal educational space and providing opportunities to experiment with the disaggregated components of the educational experience"

After watching the Willinsky video, this hit home even more. I think the value of quality education is extremely important, and creating a "global village" of learning is still in its growing pains. Having a face-to-face instructor/professor/facilitator lets you ask the questions that pop to mind and being in a classroom setting allows an idea to flow and develop into other ideas. There are a lot of social media tools that are familiar to a lot of students living in a Western culture, but those social tools are not always available to developing countries; many do not have access to schools or even have a computer - as this article indicates, MOOCs are certainly a venue that opens learning opportunities for those who do not have access to learning in a formal environment, but may have access to the internet. What I particularly found interesting were the various MOOC categories - Gateway: MOOCs for prepping to get into higher learning; Research showcase: promote an institute's research areas; Professional skills: MOOCs for those who need to "upskill" or specialize…and there are others. The main reason for taking this course was to improve my knowledge of what social media is out there (MOOCs are part of it), how it is being used, and how useful is this "new" media is within the publishing realm. It is a challenge.

Gobbled up an hour here today.

Open vs closed source software: The quest for balance I think it is interesting to think about how the two spheres of open and proprietary knowledge can actually fuel each other, and possible to co-exist. This is an interesting article from the perspective of economists / policy makers, and discusses how much government should control the balance.

The School of Open Community

Una lista de los mejores sitios para alojar proyectos de código abierto como: http://sourceforge.net/, https://github.com/ entre otros más. Estos sitios permiten la colaboración de proyectos de software de código abierto, crear nuevos repositorios y su administración.

Una lista muy relevante a los contenidos del curso, gracias por la información compartida

I'll preface this by saying I've shared a few things from the Biodiversity Heritage Library on Twitter. The Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog is a blog that I've been following for a few years. The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a project in coordination with the Internet Archive to digitize historic natural history journals and field notebooks. I find the digitization of field notebooks very interesting in terms of open science. In the module on open science there was a lot of discussion of modern science, but I feel it is equally important to open historic or legacy data.