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This article describes how the Notification Service of SHARE (SHared Access Research Ecosystem) has come about. It clearly specifies the associations and organisations which have collaborated to alert scientists and others to the status of the latest scientific research being conducted to drive their mutual goals of the advancement of science and access to this research for all.

A great news, especially for the "immediately" aspect! "A consortium of six leading UK medical research charities will support the costs of making research articles from their funded research immediately and freely openly available to scientists, patients, and donors alike, through the recently announced joint Charity Open Access Fund."

OMICS Group is a scientific organization that drives the progress of research through open access journals and organizes international conferences. Se pueden ver journals open access

"A Bournemouth University Open Access Event presented on 7th May 2014 by Alma Swan"

ZBW Website German National Library of Economics - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ZBW is the largest library for literature in economics world-wide. This is one great example of "open access" whereby access for data is openly made available to users nationally and internationally. ZBW was is recently honoured by the German Library Association as the 2014 Library of the Year for its "a radically modern library whose customer- and innovation-oriented approach is exemplary for other libraries". Through its Econbiz Open project, ZBW was able to partner and create participatory culture among its partner countries.

I believe that one of the best ways to look for truthful information happens through the specialized free access library Julia.

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.

Who has heard of this festival about Open Knowledge? Who has been there?

Why Open Education Matters video competition.

I think this is a beautifully simple and clear wonderful explanation of why open education matters! I like how it discusses the conflict that exists without too much judgement and explains some of the open jargon such as OER. Thank you for sharing.

An online course by David Wiley covering a wide range of topics within open education and open knowledge in the wider sense.

Opened in a broader sense knowledge and a broad range of topics is something wonderful for those wanting to learn more and more from anywhere in the world!

Una manera diferente de ver la Educación, muy interesante.

"The Accelerating Science Award Program (ASAP) recognizes individuals who have applied scientific research - published through Open Access - to innovate in any field and benefit society". It's funded by 27 different organizations. 

"If, as rumoured, google builds a platform for depositing unrefereed research papers for "peer-reviewing" via crowd-sourcing, can this create a substitute for classical peer-review or will it merely supplement classical peer review with crowd-sourcing?"

Two facts that makes me think, peer-reviewing via crowd-sourcing, at best would supplement the traditional peer-review process. Fact one, there are already open access repositories that allow "deposit first; review later", but those repositories have not taken over other journals. Fact two, Wikipedia is an example in that, though theoretically anyone can contribute and edit the articles, there is definite number of people who would do it. Therefore, I don't see crowd sourcing peer review would really substitute the traditional route.

I appreciated that this source was framed outside of dichotomous thinking by not pitting more traditional and open access peer review models directly against one another, carrying the assumption that a particular publishing process must choose one or another. Although, I think I would challenge Harnad to take this thought process further. Rather than supplementing or complementing one another, traditional and open peer review models are distinct enough to also be applicable in different types of contexts, without necessarily needing to rely on one another. That is not to disagree with Harnad that the two do not "substitute" one another, but precisely because they cannot substitute one another indicates that they serve different purposes and could thus be useful in different contexts…. Or, as Harnad suggest, supplement each other in the same context. I think this very well parallels the context of taxonomies and folksonomies.

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

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.

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 love the idea that progress and science being based on communication. Often the idea that I have in my mind is a scientist working alone, and that is never truly how the great break-throughs come, but rather from building on the science that we have learned about previously. I still have a problem with the Author Pay part of Open Access publishing, and it seems like it is not actually "Open" if you have to pay to play. The Utopic Version is really the way that I think of "Open" publishing even with all the pit falls of finding the Utopia. I like the rebirth by giving the onus to the reader to review, and that is a model that works as seen by Wikipedia, because people are willing to aid progress with out conventional compensation. I understand all of the problems with this, but I love the possibility.

Shule.Info is a project that puts data about Tanzanian schools online, providing information for the overall country, regions, and individual schools. The website is also in both English and Swahili, the language of the majority of Tanzanians. This is a great attempt at making this open data accessible and understandable to the people to who need it. "We all know that education in Tanzania is in a state of crisis. Massive failure rates. Not enough teachers. Not enough books. Poor teaching. And many more problems. So what do you do if you are a parent, brother or sister and want to find a good school? What if you are a council or national government leader and want to track progress? Right now it is very difficult to do so, because data is not easily available. And when you can access data, it is very difficult to understand and use. Open data is in fact relevant to all of us in making beter decisions. It is not just a concept for technical experts. If we knew which medicines were available in our nearest health centres we would save ourselves wasted trips. If we had live traffic updates we could better plan our travel. And if we had data on school performance we would have the chance to make better decisions about our children's education and potentially shape the course of their future differently."