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I was reading one of the week 12 additional resources, PKP School: Becoming a Reviewer http://pkpschool.sfu.ca/becoming-a-reviewer/ and came across the term Predatory Open Access Publishing. I guess no matter what, someone is going to try to make a buck. There is also a site that others have posted here, http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ that is where Beall's list is housed. Beall's list is a list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers - a good place to check if you are thinking of writing or reviewing for a journal, if it's on the list do more digging and research on the journal itself before committing to anything. The journal names all sound pretty impressive so you can't tell by name alone.

This is a thesis from a professor who occasionally teaches a Scholarly Communication course at UBC iSchool. It deals with complicated questions of economics of scholarly publishing. If you are looking for sources for research, there is a lot in here for you. Worth skimming through and reading any chapters of interest. "Freedom for Scholarship in the Internet Age examines distortion in the current scholarly communication system and alternatives, focusing on the potential of open access. High profits for a select few scholarly journal publishers in the area of science, technology, and medicine contrast with other portions of the scholarly publishing system such as university presses that are struggling to survive."

this is an article from a few years ago that does a great job of telling the story of a major hack at Diigo--very interesting to see this as a narrative rather than just the headline, lets you understand the story more personally. I thought it was an interesting reflection considering the discussion of risks of a public course, public online life/profile. "Diigo, a social bookmarking and annotation site, is finally back online 50 hours after the domain was first hijacked. It's an incredible story that involves crisis management, blackmail, investigative research, payoffs, a clever thief, and points to potential problems with the domain name registry system that could affect anyone with a website."

Reading now...

eLife is a unique collaboration between funders and practitioners of research to communicate influential discoveries in the life and biomedical sciences in the most effective way. eLife began following a workshop at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2010, where attending scientists concluded that there was a need for a model of academic publishing that better suited the needs of their community. In eLife a team of highly regarded, experienced and actively practicing scientists ensures fair, swift and transparent editorial decisions followed by rapid online publication. The editorial team are editorially independent of the funders. They rely on their scientific expertise and active research experience to identify the best papers, make scientifically based judgements and exercise leadership in steering these papers through peer review. The entire content of the journal is freely available for all to read and reproduce for unrestricted use.

Very interesting project. I spent some time exploring some of the papers. They do seem to be opening up the peer review process slightly be publishing a "decision letter" and "author response" with each paper. I also appreciate the seeming attempt to include data publication in the publication of the paper. Though it does seem to me that some of the papers don't have enough data accompanying them, so I wonder what their data publication policy is.

The change has come more slowly to books than it came to music or to business correspondence, but by now it feels inevitable. The digital era is upon us. The Twilights and Freedoms of 2025 will be consumed primarily as e-books. In many ways, this is good news. Books will...

when I take a book in my hands, I always start with smelling paper (old or new), can we do the same thing with technology?

I do like physical book in my hand, but I find e-books more convenient either when I am writing my research paper or I want to read certain book right away. I heard that more and more universities are supporting e-book system, and getting rid of physical textbooks due to costs and other reasons. A lot more e-books will become useful in the future. I think paper books will exist, but it will be rare in the future.

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.

This list is a helpful tool for authors who are publishing their work in Open Access Journals. It is also helpful for librarians who are acting as advisors for Open Access publishing. Beall's List: Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers. This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. It is recommended recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards.

The long list of predatory publishers and journals by Beall is quite daunting. Is this another indication of how cynical a person has to be in every aspect of life - even scholary pursuit? Thankfully there's a record to alert stakeholders of potentially unscrupulous publishers and unvalidated journals.

As I was working on my final project I found myself only able to name 1 OA Journal: PLOS. I wanted to know if there were any other big players in the game, much like the top commercial journals. As a result, google came up with the above site, which works like an index or directory for OA Journals. It's good to see in light of the difficulties that closed access journals have been causing in countries that are digitally divided from affluent ones. Hopefully with the growth of open access titles we will see the digital divide and information gap close. Happy browsing! And please post any other open access titles you have come across! Lets popularize them in our network! One more: http://doaj.org/

"The Information Literacy Competency Standards for Journalism Students and Professionals aim to adapt and apply the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards to journalism. Information literacy isdefined as the ability to recognize when information is needed and the ability to locate, evaluate, effectively use and ethically apply the needed information.

8 elements of digital literacy This video has merit despite the some of the distractions which divert the viewers' attention from the valuable content. Belshaw's introduction of his topic and objectives are clearly identified when he's in the street, he then walks into a building (at an accelerated time speed), sits down to describes the difference between the traditional mode of literacy found in print and books to that of digital media e.g. smart phones. This works well until he's suddenly in a railway station and later back in the street with all the commotion linked to these settings. This makes it very difficult to hear what is being said. However, his re-cap of at the end is helpful. Although reading and writing is necessary in both traditional and digital milieus, this is in figurative sense with the digital setting. There are numerous definitions for digital literacy (DL), but he describes digital literacy as being "a social linguist construct" rather than an intellectual concept. He describes an intersection between information and digital literacy. DL is divided into 8 elements: Cultural, Cognitive, Constructive, Communicative, Confident, Creative, Critical and Civic. The order of importance of the elements is dependent on the context in which the DL is found. There is no one correct choice as geography and networks have an impact.

I followed a trail about Wikipedia that led me to their funding model. This is an interesting rebuttal to their strategy of asking users for donations atop the page (sort of a PBS/NPR model for those in the US). Interesting to think about how advertising or marketing might play into the Wikipedia model, and how it might change the dynamic of the conversation.

Thanks for the post! I also thought it was interesting to read the arguments for and against an ad-driven business model at the link below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Funding_Wikipedia_through_advertisements A limited advertising model actually makes a lot of sense to me. I think the real obstacle to changing business models is how passionately and adamantly Jimmy Wales has rejected even the future possibility. Strong wording sound heroic, but not allowing some flexibility could greatly limited Wikipedia's positive impact.

This weeks module 6 is about Open Science and Open Data. Within the course provided videos and readings do not provide much on Open Data. This article dives into why Open Data is relevant in Open Science. Citation: Molloy JC (2011) The Open Knowledge Foundation: Open Data Means Better Science. PLoS Biol 9(12): e1001195. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001195 Published: December 6, 2011 Copyright: © 2011 Jennifer C. Molloy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Open data leads to better science, but a community effort is needed in order to overcoming the barriers to widespread publication and availability of open scientific data.

This is an interesting article in the Guardian reporting on Harvard's move against rising prices of journal publications. It calls for Faculty to make their research freely available.

Well worth reading. It also mentioned a model of how publication of the article could be paid for: "Open access comes in various guises, but one model requires authors to pay to have their articles published and made freely available to anyone." In the academic world, research /grant monies would allow authors to build the cost of publishing into their research/grant applications.

Very interesting article. Especially because it relates to Harvard who (alongside with Stanford) is an opinion leader among universities. Other universities watch Harvard (and Stanford) and it is highly likely that these two universities are able to influence the trend.

In this article, Barker believes that technology has somehow become harmful to communicate in person among teenagers. Teens prefer to write to each other such as pick up their phones to ping each other, communicating by texting though instant messaging and social networking sites like Facebook, Twtter rather than talking to each other in person. Thus this has given out a general that is technology has become a problem in communication since cell phone has become widely used in society. Therefore, within the development in cell phone technology, smartphone was invented, which a mobile phone is built on a mobile computing platform that not only a communication tool to make phone call or text message but also allows people to go on internet or play game for their pastime. Hence this with the development for technology, people spends more time on their smartphones rather than having interaction between people which has become an issue in our life. By reading this article, it leads my thought to online education. Being honest, I enjoy the in person discussion rather than online written discussion however digital platform has provided a convenient way for people to share their ideas. However this article did raised a good question, technology makes everything easier for people but does it somehow hurt the communication among people?

An excellent example of how large institutions or online groups can place these restrictions to create filters.

This is tough for me to see, because I really do strongly dislike click-bait to point of having written articles about it, but my desire to see a censorshipless internet is stronger. Reading this article really toyed with my head.

2 Oct 2014 - Canada - Intellectual Property - The Internet Of Things And Canadian Copyright Law - Bennett Jones LLP - Many of you have read about the dispute over copyright ownership of the monkey-selfie, where a primate took a digital photo that went viral.

In this article, Newman states that smartphones are prominent on campus nowadays. According to the survey that he has mentioned in the article, there are 59% of Tam students own smartphones; and 61% of them think that smartphones do waste their time even though there are 81% of them think that smartphones have made their life easier. Thus is, although most of the smartphone users believe that smartphones do bring them lots of convenience in life, most of them also agrees that smartphone are wasting their time in life especially in users always spend too much time on the smartphone apps and some of them think that smartphones have put a hindrance to human communication as it mentions in the article that "smartphones put a wall between people and the emotions they have". I feel like using smartphone is kinda of a trend in university right now. People can use their phone to search, download and read articles through the phone. Finding a balance with yourself and technoloy is important, however finding a balance for the publisher and technology is also important as knowledge has been quite open access to people on the internet right now.

This is a really great read for bloggers, freelancers and creative professionals alike. The article outlines a comprehensive criteria for engaging online content providing tips and tricks for publishing purposeful, personal and promotional content.