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I presented this paper to a conference in South Africa in 2005, and it was described as "too radical" by the top leaders in libraries in South Africa who attended. :) So am rather happy that my vague perceptions and musings about the emerging trends have been vindicated today. "This paper will focus on another aspect that is integrally linked to the ability to access literature and information - that of cost and economics. Both the broader macroeconomic context and the more focused microeconomic (South African) environment will be referred to. We will examine the assumption that the economic development of a nation is linked to the ability to access information and test whether this is a valid assumption. From there, we will take a brief look at the issue of the cost of books, specifically in South Africa. The advent of the electronic revolution and the many paradigm shifts that the Internet and electronic media have initiated and the effects on the publishing industry, will be outlined. We will explore the "information as commodity" paradigm and briefly look at the related Copyright and Intellectual Property developments before weaving these seemingly disparate threads together to form a picture of innovative solutions that have arisen in response to the information access crisis in South Africa. These solutions have arisen from the popular notion that information should be freely available for societal good, rather than commodified. Finally, we will ponder the effect that these solutions may have on the traditional book publishing industry in South Africa."

Thank you all, very much, it is quite a new experience for me to have the paper well received. :)

Thank you for sharing this. I really appreciated the non-North American context. I grew up in the States, and am working on my Master's degree in Canada, so it's really easy to get caught up in always looking at these issues from the North American point of view. Seeing papers like this really help to confirm how global these issues are, and cement their importance in my mind.

"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/

In this society crowded with information, people can freely access to any kind of information. Intellectual property seems to unimportant. Many people even don't aware that they steal intellectual property from others. Is this a definite trend or do we have ways to protect authors?

One place the tradition of fans recording live shows and trading the bootleg tapes (ala the Grateful Dead) is being brought to the digital world is at archive.org's Live Music Archive Bands officially agree to allow the practice, and then archive.org stores and allows access to the files for eternity... Some info about those details: http://wiki.etree.org/index.php?page=TradeFriendly For example, here is my friends, a ROCKING bluegrass band from Duluth Minnesota: https://archive.org/details/TrampledbyTurtles The rights statement is actually an email: On February 7, 2007 Trampled by Turtles a GO! for archive.org: "Hello, This is Dave Simonett from Trampled by Turtles. I'm writing to give permission for our music to be posted at archive. Please let me know what you need from me. Thanks for the email. Dave Simonett trampled by turtles info@trampledbyturtles.com www.trampledbyturtles.com" "Welcome to Internet Archive's Live Music library. etree.org is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree.org to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future..."

Cool...

Awesome resource - thanks for sharing. I have often found the conflict between quality recordings and open access to be a challenge. It seems the music that is free isn't usually high-quality, whereas the higher quality isn't usually free. :)

This essay takes a look at comic book scanners and why they do what they do -- namely, risking legal repercussions for the violation of IP laws without monetary reward. It's an interesting look at the participatory culture aspect of fandoms in the digital age.

Chirospasm22 thank you for posting, I had never heard of comic book piracy until now!

Photo courtesy of Intercontinental Toronto Yorkville. There is not much restriction in this photo. You can copy or save the photo as you wish. I love to take pictures and during my recent trip to Canada, Toronto particularly, I was actually hoping that I could snap the beauty of this city at night looking at the Toronto Island Park, just the way it's supposed to be at this picture. But the chance was just elusive. It suddenly rained when I was at the park until I get back to the Harbor square. I am documenting all my travels abroad and planning blogging them. I might use this photo should I blog all my travels abroad.

Very nice photo Shirley!

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

This article sintetiza a instancia de parte del Trabajo de Tesis de Maestría en Propiedad Intelectual. FLACSO Argentina, Titulada "Propiedad Intelectual y Derechos Humanos. Tensiones existentes Entre la Ley 11.723 y el marco constitucional de los Derechos Culturales en Argentina."

Actualmente se emplea el derecho de autor en el entorno digital no no altera sus derechos morales y económicos

Christopher Kelty has written a book on the cultural importance of open source software and made it freely available under a CC license. It looks at free software from both a technical and social perspective, allowing for greater insights into its significance for today and for tomorrow.

This is a very interesting and thought provoking ebook. Not only does it provide a helpful historical view of how free software came to be, but it posits the impact of such a phenomenon on industry and culture. I particularity liked the view that the pervasiveness of free software - thanks to the Internet - is such that free software itself is instigating much change beyond its original perceived sphere of influence, being software applications. A good read if open source software, free software and impacts on culture interests you.

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.

Amateur professionalism and consumer driven innovation are challenging our ideas about intellectual professionalism,

An intellectual professionalism along with consumer driven is something interesting for a market that only thinks about the exaggerated profit!

Next: New economic models: Externally Up: Free Software / Open Previous: Cooperation and competition   Contents The economic impact of open source models is going to be very high, not only in the software industry, but in society in general. In this section, we discuss in some detail some of the more foreseeable issues related to this impact.

There's a loto of debating after Rifkin's book publishing: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558

Open source software also demonstrates how prices fall for consumers in a free and competitive market. Niche markets develop that serve as means of income for developers and programmers. The availability of free distributions serves as advertising for these specialists.

In a surprise move, the publisher plaintiffs in the closely-watched Georgia State University copyright case have asked for a full (en banc) hearing by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, despite the fact that a three-judge panel handed them a victory last month when it unanimously reversed a 2012 district court verdict against them.

"Like many millennials today, Yale classmates Henry Luce and Briton Hadden left their jobs to create a startup. They found newspapers dry, longwinded and boring and thought they could do better by presenting stories in a faster paced, more personality centered format. In 1923 they launched Time magazine and it became a runaway success."

"The greatest challenge for publishers today is to create new business models. Unfortunately, most haven't even begun the process due to misplaced nostalgia for distribution revenue. In that sense, paywalls represent the greatest threat to old-line publishers."

And also due to the inherent feature of every human being of being resistant to changes. And all of that without taking into account some economical interests.

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.