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Clay Shirky's look at the current Amazon/Publisher wars: "The legacy system is mainly characterized by a refusal to deal in small-batch authorship, a model that made sense when the unit price of a book was any number above zero, but makes no sense today. If ten million people think something is dreck, and fifty people like it, those fifty should get what they want."

Amazon-Hachette war & Orwell: http://www.idealog.com/blog/amazon-channels-orwell-latest-blast/

Does Amazon kill a revenue channel for open access monographs? https://www.martineve.com/2014/09/03/does-amazon-kill-a-revenue-channel-for-open-access-monographs/

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) launchd a new portal last week, providing technical terminology from patents in ten languages. This is an interesting way to help share knowledge and connect scientists who speak different languages. It has a really cool Concept Map Search function too!

Tens of thousands of people in Hungary have taken part in a peaceful march against the government's plans to tax the internet - the second demonstration in three days.

An interesting overview of the challenges that the open education faced in the last 10 years. The "Last mile" part emphasizes the role of a teacher in guiding students to the right resources available online.

How an open course can work. "We don't want the students to remember the formulas. We want to change the way they look at the world."

I liked how Ted explains the way students access to Open Courses and how right he is when he says that if there are no due dates, even if the topic is very interesting, there are always other things to do first, therefore, you end up not doing it. I am also with him in not doing moocs to long that can get you bored and end up losing all your attention.

very informative!

FREE CULTURE is available for free under a Creative Commons license. You may redistribute, copy, or otherwise reuse/remix this book provided that you do so for non-commercial purposes and credit Professor Lessig. " America needs a national conversation about the way in which so-called 'intellectual property rights' have come to dominate the rights of scholars, researchers, and everyday citizens. A copyright cartel, bidding for absolute control over digital worlds, music, and movies, now has a veto over technological innovation and has halted most contributions to the public domain from which so many have benefited. The patent system has spun out of control, giving enormous power to entrenched interests, and even trademarks are being misused. Lawrence Lessig's latest book is essential reading for anyone who want to join this conversation. He explains how technology and the law are robbing us of the public domain; but for all his educated pessimism, Professor Lessig offers some solutions, too, because he recognizes that technology can be the catalyst for freedom. If you care about the future of innovation, read this book." -- Dan Gillmor, author of MAKING THE NEWS, an upcoming book on the collision of media and technology

Hi Kim, Thanks for sharing this great work by Lawrence Lessig published ten years ago.

While not exactly on topic, and newspapers are not generally considered Scholarly publishers, they do engage with the public, and frequently act as a liaison between journals/researchers and the public. In the past ten years or so, people have gotten used to accessing, for free, newspapers and television reports as a way to inform themselves. While this is good for the individual, it is not so good for the publisher. Many traditional news outlets have been struggling to find a way to generate revenue in a way that neither smacks of consumerism, nor excludes the average citizen from participating. IN the UK, the liberal-leaning newspaper The Guardian has begun selling 'memberships', and hosting events ranging from lectures to classes on things as diverse as photography and creative writing.

We rely on your support to further our mission to understand birds and other wildlife, to involve the public in scientific discovery, and to use our knowledge to protect our planet. Each day, bird watchers report tens of thousands of bird observations to citizen-science projects at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, contributing to the world's most dynamic and powerful source of information on birds.

Birding has been at the forefront of citizen science projects. In South Africa there are similar projects to the ones Cornell is doing. they are being run through the Avian Demographic Unit at UCT and strongly supported by Birdlife South Africa. Birdwatching is one of the areas where an ornithologist is often on an equal footing with amateurs, and sometimes behind professional guides, when it comes to field identification. It is therefore a suitable field in which citizen science can play an important role.

The guidelines provides a conceptual template to guide the creation of information literacy (IL) programs in academic and school libraries as well as public libraries. It is meant for the educators, librarians and information facilitators at the international level to help them to frame the IL efforts. In fact it is also of value to anyone who may need to start an IL program and would like a general conceptual framework. The document is divided into ten chapters that comprise the organizational spectrum of information literacy work, including a definition of concepts, a proposal for information literacy standards, a section on obtaining institutional commitment, the management of the learning process, including personnel development, educational theories, among other basic topics on how to implement the program, plus a list of key IL terms with their definitions, and a bibliography for further reading.

Thank you very much for sharing this document that even if not updated is still valid in its fundamental ideas and framework