Breaking new ground for the open-access movement, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of global health research, plans to require that the researchers it funds publish only in immediate open-access journals. The policy doesn't kick in until January 2017; until then, grantees can publish in subscription-based journals as long as their paper is freely available within 12 months.

I did a quick search in the Web of Science database to see home many papers have received funding from the Gates Foundation. Since 2000, more than six thousand research papers have received funding from the Bill & Malinda Gates Foundation; more that one thousand per year since 2011. Most of these papers are in the infectious diseases, immunology, and public health area. In the big scheme of scientific publications, this is just a small number. But with their well-known name, this is a good sign.

An example of how one person establish his "filter" for accepting/rejecting invitations in this networked world.

A good supplement to Module 10's core reading on ACRL's standards for information literacy for higher education, this 5-pager is a short article for middle and high school librarians and parents.

Rheingold puts his thoughts, videos,course syllabi on the skills to be network smart on this site. Here is his introduction: The future of digital culture-yours, mine, and ours-depends on how well we learn to use the media that have infiltrated, amplified, distracted, enriched, and complicated our lives. How you employ a search engine, stream video from your phonecam, or update your Facebook status matters to you and everyone, because the ways people use new media in the first years of an emerging communication regime can influence the way those media end up being used and misused for decades to come. Instead of confining my exploration to whether or not Google is making us stupid, Facebook is commoditizing our privacy, or Twitter is chopping our attention into microslices (all good questions), I've been asking myself and others how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and above all mindfully. This book is about what I've learned.

This is a long report (105 pages). It discusses the role of openness in science, mandate for change, and it gives recommendations to the roles that government, institutions and individuals can take on.

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.

OAIster is a good beginning place for finding open access articles, images, videos. The URL listed here is open to all on the Internet. For libraries that use OCLC WorldCat, OAIster contents (records) are automatically included.

A brief article for an overview of MOOCs. Since the 1990s massive open online courses (MOOCs) have offered web-based learning on a large scale and with open access. The leading MOOC providers in 2014 - Udemy, Coursera and edX - vary in detail but share the goal of facilitating learning for unlimited audiences at no cost or minimal charge, overcoming socioeconomic hurdles and opening education to all.

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.

Open data at work! Sanjay Pradhan was thrilled when, at age six, a cart full of sweets was wheeled to his family's doorstep in Bihar, India. The gift, however, was intended as a bribe for his father, who was responsible for building roads in India's poorest state.

Putting different sets of data "on top of each other" to gain insights or knowledge -- this can only happen when more data sets are open for all to use. 2010, "We have only just started!"

This article sets the scene for the special issue on research data and publishing. Research data - that material commonly accepted by the scholarly community as required evidence for hypotheses and insights, for verification and/or reproducibility of experiments - has become an increasingly critical issue for publishers given recent developments in funders' mandates, technological advances, policymakers' interests, and so forth. This is from a special issue of Learned Publishing, vol 27, September 2014. This special issue is open access.

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.

While attending another work-related webinar, I heard about this web site and thought about this class. On the surface, this site looks like a portal to many, many other image and video repositories about the history and geography of the United States. Many are contributed by local public libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies. What caught my attention and connect to this course is that all the metadata of the repositories are open access, so that developers can take advantages of the metadata and create additional apps. In this sense, this site becomes a platform. The contents from the various repositories have different degrees of rights and restrictions for reuse, some are under CC, some are protected by copyright, but the metadata is all open!