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This is a special issue from Nature Magazine on the future of science publishing and open access. In addition to the feature articles, the comments also provide different perspectives.

Judging by the mainstream media, the most pressing problems facing capitalism are 1) income inequality, the subject of Thomas Piketty's bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century , and 2) the failure of free markets to regulate their excesses, a common critique encapsulated by Paul Craig Roberts' recent book The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism .

This article is primarily about structural change in the global economy. But Smith notes, "[T]he middle class that has paid for its ever-expanding consumption with rising wages is in structural decline due to the displacement of human labor by software; and the state's ability to manage structural crises while protecting global cartel profits is being undermined...by the ever rising costs of providing healthcare and income security and paying the external costs of environmental damage." He goes on, "What could replace the current iteration of global state-capitalism? If we assemble these three potentially transformative dynamics-degrowth, the recoupling of risk and loss, and entrepreneurial mobile capital-we discern a new and potentially productive teleological arc to global capitalism, one that moves from a capitalism based on financial hyper-centralization and obsession with rising consumption to one focused on more efficient use of resources and capital via decentralization and localized innovation." We might ponder how open access/open knowledge can play a role these transformative dynamics.

Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators. Today Open Knowledge and the Open Definition Advisory Council announced the release of version 2.0 of the Open Definition. The Definition âsets out principles that define openness in relation to data and content,â and is the baseline from which various public licenses are measured.

AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW ASSOCIATIONAn Overview of Intellectual Property What is a Patent, a Trademark, and a Copyright? An Overview of Intellectual Property Our legal system provides certain rights and protections for owners of property. The kind of property that results from the fruits of mental labor is called intellectual property.

Regarding Open Source/Access, good article on whether students consider Wikipedia a good source for information. Since its introduction in 2001, Wikipedia has grown to host more than 19 million articles with 82,000 contributors in more than 270 languages. Wikipedia has 400 million unique viewers each month as of March 2011, According to ComScore, an Internet marketing research company that provides marketing data to large Internet businesses.

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.

CK-12 Foundation provides a library of free online textbooks, videos, exercises, flashcards, and real world applications for over 5000 concepts from arithmetic to history

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."

Although IASCP is devoted to the study of institutions for the management of environmental resources (such as forests, oceans and land) held or used collectively by communities, its WWW site provides a wealth of information for scholars of common pool resources in diverse disciplines. It also seeks to allow an exchange of scholarship between members, researchers, students and other CPR practitioners. Publishes quarterly journal called Common Property Resource Digest. WWW site includes: (a) Searchable CPR bibliographies (see entry for Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis) (b) abstracts of papers from past IASCP conferences (c) links to online articles, bibliographies and information sources on common pool resources (d) information on IASCP conferences and membership.

"But it's not the original, it's just a facsimile!" How often have we heard such a retort when confronted with an otherwise perfect reproduction of a painting? No question about it, the obsession of the age is for the original version. Only the original possesses an aura, this mysterious and mystical quality that no second hand version will ever get. But paradoxically, this obsession for pinpointing originality increases proportionally with the availability and accessibility of more and more copies of better and better quality. If so much energy is devoted to the search for the original - for archeological and marketing reasons- it is because the possibility of making copies has never been so open-ended. If no copies of the Mona Lisa existed would we pursue it with such energy - and, would we devise so many conspiracy theories to decide whether or not the version held under glass and protected by sophisticated alarms is the original surface painted by Leonardo's hand or not. In other words, the intensity of the search for the original depends on the amount of passion and the number of interests triggered by its copies. No copies, no original. In order to stamp a piece with the mark of originality, you need to apply to its surface the huge pressure that only a great number of reproductions can provide.

Our projects live within the 'Zooniverse', the home of Citizen Science on the web. Each is inspired by a science team who provide the initial ideas, the reassurance that what we're doing can make a real contribution and an audience who are willing to use the end result.

More than just playing and making, be able to reflect after creating something new is what makes this new mode of learning different. One step further would then be "open to critiques", then learn from both peers and master. Seemly Brown also discussed a new "networked identity": based on what one has created and what others have then built on it. This is the idea of building new things from other existing things, but give credit to where credit is due. Provide one's creation or product openly so that others can remix/build something new based on this product. This would be how an ideal knowledge environment would grow and sustain.

A really like the sequence of events he mentioned at the beginning: Create, Reflect, Share. It is so simple yet can result in so much production! And of course, it all starts with imagination :)

Great video! It will be/ is becoming the new mode of learning. We collaborate to create an active knowledge environment. It's definitely a mode of open learning, which can benefit all of us.

I found this is really useful for this week's topic! Thank you for sharing!

This document provides a great understanding of Open Access in an efficient way. Thanks for sharing

This is an open textbook that Tony Bates is writing as part of the BC Open Textbook initiative. The topic is Teaching in the Digital Age. It's interesting as it's a work in progress and Tony has been blogging parts of the book to gain feedback as he is writing it. It's a topic that I am interested in. I do think it could use a substantial amount of copy editing, which it may yet receive, as may inconsistencies jump out at me in the TOC alone. I will be continuing to monitor this one as it develops further into his finished book.

This report shows the importance of college education. With the rise in cost of higher education, it is all the more important to have alternatives to the traditional route for college. For those who question the value of college in this era of soaring student debt and high unemployment, the attitudes and experiences of today's young adults-members of the so-called Millennial generation-provide a compelling answer. On virtually every measure of economic well-being and career attainment-from personal earnings to job satisfaction to the share employed full time-young college graduates are outperforming their peers with less education.

There are also costs to society - countries with fewer educated citizens cannot be as competitive in the global environment. It behooves countries to try to figure out how to keep education economical for its citizens.

Well said. Thanks for bringing up this topic and adding it to the conversation. I don't doubt that those who keep learning and gain skills will be more valuable economically and probably then more economically rewarded. But I have serious doubts that the current program of institutionalized degrees is the best route for citizens.