Group items tagged

Reuters / Eric Thayer Internet giant Twitter is suing the Department of Justice in hopes that the United States government will let the web company publish more details about requests made for user data. The complaint, filed in federal court on Tuesday this week, asks the Justice Dept.

An interesting read. Freedom of speech is allowed as long it does not relate to the US government. One important thing to understand here is that the flow of information can never be stopped or banned (at least only temporarily.) There is no such thing as good or bad information - it all depends on who interprets the information and what point of views these people have.

So I stumbled across this article while I was searching the internet regarding Indigenous Knowledge here in the Philippines. The article on this link provides further information regarding Indigenous Knowledge all over the world. It's a very interesting 12 page article which sheds light on various people under different tribes in different parts of the world.

Argues that increasing corporate control is undermining the foundational values of higher education.

Here in Spain we have a similar evolution of higher education; private postgraduate private schools give masters that guarantee the access to top jobposts, but they are not focused on analysis, creativity and critical minds, but on pure business. What you need to be on your future job post is what you learn. Public institutions are still on air, but they are struggling with less and less public resources to survive. So I guess this is not only going on in USA.

Italy is going even worse...i'm an Adjunct Professor for maybe 1000 euro per year ... surviving by scholarships, call center mid term contracts, collaborations where i'm asked to pay for taxes the university should pay, all levels teaching.. I like "Some of the basic principles underlying effective pedagogy, such as small class size, individual attention and the importance of mentoring, are being sacrificed in order to increase head count, limit labor costs and create a one-size-fits-all educational experience." The problem is that universities are to make profits from fees (that's why they hire me instead of employing me) and offer any kind of courses, masters to increase their income! The problem is: how can we expect to increase the quality of learning as far as decisions are taking by political, business, organizational sides instead of scientific and educational ones?

This research study was an eye-opener for me. Until this point, I was completely unaware of these journal practices, although I had received several emails from journals I had never heard of wanting to publish papers based on conference presentations.

Although it is important to put those predatory journals under the spotlight so researchers don't fall in their trap, I always wince when I read one of those articles because too few take the time to talk about the good sides of open access journals and many readers will leave the article thinking that open access publishing is bad and not trustworthy. Of course, as mentioned in the Nature Mag article linked in the Guardian article, PLOS are excellent and have very high levels of evaluation, but they are not alone. And I have yet to find a paper that would make the same exercise with both open access journals and subscription-based journals so we could see how bad it is in the publishing world in general. That said, we must do everything within our power to stop those malpractices by predatory journals. (by the way, I have also received spam to publish in journals that were not even in my field of practice by BioMed Central. They are good, they are trustworthy. I wrote to them to say that it looks like baits to send spam calling me a Dr and inviting me to publish in fields that I know nothing about. They removed me from their mailing list but I don't know if they changed this practice)

A blog, Scholarly Open Access. Critical analysis of scholarly open-access publishing, http://scholarlyoa.com/, systematically lists fake academic journals and predatory publishers, who are taking advantage of a some open access naiveté.

Canada's new anti-spam legislation (CASL) helps protect Canadians while ensuring that businesses can continue to compete in the global marketplace. On July 1, 2014 Canada's anti-spam law came into effect. I believe it's the strictest in the world. If you email anyone in Canada you need to make sure you comply with this new law. We had to take a number of measures at my company including ceasing all bulk emails until we get our new opt-in database populates; including a footer in all our emails that allows recipients to opt out of receiving emails from us, and company-wide training on CASL and what we need to do to comply. People can be personally liable for violating this law. I'm not sure if the government has any manpower to actually monitor and prosecute any violators but we will see. As a Canadian, I don't think my SPAM had decreased - I actually received more emails to 'opt in' to mailing lists. I have also noticed that almost every message I receive has an unsubscribe option at the bottom, something I've been taking advantage of. I am not sure how this will ultimately affect open knowledge or if it will but it has made me think twice about reaching out to people I don't know over email.

Un breve repaso de lo que sucede en la región excelente artículo.

Open source La Universidad de Costa Rica desde hace algunos años desarrollo el código abierto acá en este enlace les comparto un poco de esta genial idea aplicada propiamente en Costa Rica.

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.

Bruce Thomas states, "Google Scholar's caselaw collection is a victory for open access to legal information and the democratization of law". The only downside is that it is only American case law and not other jurisdictions.

The working group on Open Science consists of Brazilian researchers who share an interest in discussing and promoting the understanding and practice of open processes in science, in its various manifestations: Open access to scientific publications open scientific data Scientific Instruments opened [1] citizen science [2] open and Education

This article discusses the start of open access publications and the arguments against open access journals.

Excellent and concise article, thank you for posting. I think this type of anonymous testing of open journals must continue to be applied to ensure standards are raised, and then consistently maintained. It also serves to call out frequent offending publications that may repeatedly demonstrate a lack of stringent review.

This is an interdisciplinary open access publication on sharing after a conference being held in Innsbruck, Austria 2011. I would especially like to recommend the article by Katherine Sarikakis (Sharing, Labour and Governance on Social Media: A Rights Lacuna), who is dealing with invisible 'online labour' on SNS from a political economy perspective. Very interesting one, because, in my opinion, this also applies to open knowledge projects as well.. But also the other articles by Andrea Hemetsberger ('Let the Source be with you!' - Practices of Sharing in Free and Open-Source Communities), Volker Grassmuck (The Sharing Turn: Why we are generally nice and have a good chance to cooperate our way out of the mess we have gotten ourselves into), and the others (half of it in English, the other in German) are definitely worth reading!

"Progress has been made toward making academic research, knowledge, and resources accessible to the broader public. This is a great cause. It is certainly a matter of justice and equality. Ironically, a number of scholars - particularly those from marginalized communities themselves (women, people of color, LGBT people) - cannot or are hesitant to participate in the move toward open access. However, many scholars, particularly marginalized scholars, participate in a different form of open scholarship: intellectual activism. "