In a timely and incisive talk at TEDxWaterloo, Michael Nielsen made the case for open science - the idea that research data and results should be freely available to the public, and that scientists should collaborate more freely with each other and with the public.
I think the big theme that open science is profit and has the power of knowledge, many think that the knowledge open to all profit will not exist and the power of knowledge too!
For a broader class of publications, which include scientific journals, see Academic journal. "Science journal" redirects here. It is not to be confused with Science (journal), the scientific journal named "Science". In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research.
This list is not to be taken at face value (many of the publishers on it do have legitimate journals), but it serves as a reminder that there are many predatory journals that ask scholars to pay a lot of money to share their work, and many that also skirt traditional peer review processes in order to get money from unwary authors.
while the list is not provided as an evidence based indicator of relative credibility, Beall's site and blog do give quite a bit of 'food for thought'. There are certainly a number of dodgy publications, and like many I have been bombarded by invitations to publish, act as a guest editor etc. If you dont work for an organisation willing to pay the cost for open access publishing, it is an expensive option for individuals. There needs to be a clearer means of determining relevance and credibility of material at times.
Thank you for sharing this! I am in a process of publishing article myself. I've been though some interesting stuff as well. It is unbelievable how much fraud is going on in publishing world! I wish I could've known this website before (added to my bookmarks :)
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.
Welcome to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up-to-date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they are made public. Consequently, our dynamic reference work maintains academic standards while evolving and adapting in response to new research. You can cite fixed editions that are created on a quarterly basis and stored in our Archives (every entry contains a link to its complete archival history, identifying the fixed edition the reader should cite). The Table of Contents lists entries that are published or assigned. The Projected Table of Contents also lists entries which are currently unassigned but nevertheless projected.
I like this encyclopedia, I already have used it to do my homework, it has very structured information, and is like consult a great book of phylosophy and very specialized!
Open educational resources (OER) have been defined by the Hewlett
Foundation as teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.
"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. "
The World Bank Policy on Access to Information sets forth a groundbreaking change in how the World Bank makes information available to the public. Now the public can get more information than ever before-information about projects under preparation, projects under implementation, analytic and advisory activities, and Board proceedings.
Interesting. Open education matters for so many reason, including to prevent information from being solely within the purview of those who can afford to attain said knowledge.
I'm glad to see there is structured initiatives supporting open learning. I was not glad to hear our own politician trying to make the U.S. the most educated by 2020, as that is an oxymoron to 'open' eduction, which has to be world supported, not nationally supported.
This video was created in 2012, where the OER was already promoted, and I just learned about it in 2014. I guess there are still a lot of people who does not know about it. Now I wonder, what is going to change in the teacher's role? If there are more MOOC courses, does that mean the need of teachers will decline? When he mentioned that they use public funds to develop these Open Educational courses, does that mean the rise of taxes? Although I do support the OER, it is still developing, adjustments need to be made for the balance of these courses and the public sector.
I like this article. I think students are limited to get access to knowledge, resulting from distance, poverty, politics. Open education resources can reduce the distance, making people all around world join a same class. Free makes poverty students get chance to take courses which he couldn't afford before.
"So why do we have an emerging digital divide in society where one group has easy and instant access to new research often funded out of the public purse yet others face significant costs, delays or barriers to accessing knowledge?"
"In the past, one might have expected society's 'critics and consciences' to be located in universities. Now many of these voices, including some who have retired, are outside these institutions."
Dive into data publicly available data and meaning, results are telling us that majority oppose the idea of paid priority for traffic. All data set is available for download.
I was lucky to be in Berlin with some colleagues earlier this month for the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival and associated fringe events. There's really too much to distill into a short post-from Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, making the case for " Embracing the open opportunity," to Patrick Alley's breathtaking accounts of how Global Witness uses information, to expose crime and corruption in countries around the world.
A useful summary of some of the key take-aways from the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival, courtesy of Tariq Khokhar
From the article:
1. There are some great open data initiatives around the world and two common themes are the need for a strong community of technologically literate data re-users, and the sustained effort needed within governments to change how they create, manage and publish data in the long term.
2. Spreadsheets are code and we can adopt some software engineering practices to make much better use of them. There are a number of powerful tools and approaches to data handing being pioneered by the scientific community and those working in other fields can adopt and emulate many of them.
3. Open data fundamentally needs open source software. App reuse often doesn't happen because contexts are too different. Reusable software components can reduce the development overhead for creating locally customized civic software applications and a pool of high quality civic software components is a valuable public good worth contributing to.
Reading time: 15mins
I see that Google are the sponsors of the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival but despite having little knowledge about Google's role and interest in the Open Knowledge , I also feel they are the culprit when it comes to data manipulative for their own profit motives.
A local group of the open knowledge foundation
1. Push for Open Science and Research practices in Indian research institutions. .
2. More involvement of citizens in the spirit of Open Knowledge Involvement of the masses in order to work towards making ourselves a better managed nation. Constitutional instruments like the Public Interest Litigation (PIL), the Right To Information (RTI), etc., lose their relevance without complete transparency in the dissemination of government as well as non-government data. Building a mass-based system of knowledge-banks can help us a lot in achieving our goal. We can assist the governments for making more information public, wherever necessary.
3. Push for education. Involving the masses can to a great extent result in a quicker transformation of the present scene (for example, we can have citizens making study material open and free and also involve them more in the dispersion of education). We aim to arrange for vocational profession-based education for the adult population.
From June 2014, lecture at the Open Data Institute, UK. Professor Carr explains how the open web we know is just one of many attempts over the last century to build a planet-wide network of information. Why was this one successful? And will it continue to be so? Professor Leslie Carr is a Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton where he researches the impact of network technologies on our lives and economy, and in particular on the research and knowledge industries. Slides for this talk can be found here - http://www.scribd.com/doc/230569908/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-Open-data-open-web-Just-a-passing-fad-with-Professor-Leslie-Carr (recommended)
From the slides, I thought this was interesting: "......The loss of ignorance, by all agreeing to share information The loss of privacy , by all agreeing to share a public space "
also: "......The development of society as a whole (nuanced and structured and refined) is inextricably related to the technology of information provision, consumption and dissemination (e.g. writing, reading, printing, education). Different parts of society have different objectives and hence incompatible Web requirements, e.g. openness, security, transparency, privacy."
"This raises the interesting and important question of whether publication in an OA journal represents the end of a process or the beginning of a different one. The difference is marketing, a term that is often misunderstood in scholarly circles. Marketing means creating demand for something. Traditional publishers do this with their brands and (for books) their authors. For OA publishers the challenge is to continue to keep pushing a particular paper after it has appeared online. There are many ways to do this, of which simply making the content openly available is one (allowing an article to get indexed by search engines and pointed to by bloggers and others). But to continue to keep the article in the eyes of its prospective readers, new means of attracting attention have to be developed. "
"Responding to rapid and steep increases in the cost of scientific journals, a growing number of scholars and librarians have advocated "open access" (OA) to the scientific literature. OA publishing models are having a significant impact on the dissemination of scientific information. Despite the success of these initiatives, their impact on researchers in the developing world is uncertain. This article analyses major OA approaches adopted in the industrialized world (so-called Green OA, Gold OA, and OA mandates, as well as non-OA information philanthropy) as they relate to the consumption and production of research in the developing world. The article concludes that while the consumption of scientific literature by developing world researchers is likely to be significantly enhanced through such programs, promoting the production of research in the developing world requires additional measures. These could include the introduction of better South-focused journal indexing systems that identify high-quality journals published in the developing world, coupled with the adjustment of academic norms to reward publication in such journals. Financial models must also be developed to decrease the reliance by institutions in the developing world on information philanthropy and to level the playing field between OA journals in industrialized and developing countries."