Building and maintaining a global communications network is a tremendous accomplishment. Unfortunately, our internet is broken in relation to the laws and norms of today. The Institute for the Future's Second Curve Internet Series explores vulnerabilities and solutions for an internet that is better suited for our current condition.

University open access publisher turns 10!

The video describes how scholarly articles that are available under an open license can be reused on Wikimedia projects, and how readers can be made aware of that reusability.

Alex writes, "It features censorship, hangings, dissent and criticism, a whole bunch of state and church control, angry queens, sad Stationers, and, of course, our terrible culprit: the printing press." Copy-me is the world's first ever animated web series about copyright, copying and open culture.

Some really relevant quotes!

Published on Dec 30, 2012 Short programme, produced in the year 2000, on the emergence of a technology called Napster, the file sharing software application that revolutionised music distribution world-wide.

Lu Xiao, a researcher in collaborative and social computing, carried out a study of academic perceptions of Wikipedia and open access publishing. Survey results showed that researchers’ lack of experiences with Wikipedia and/or open access journals negatively affected their perceptions of the open access publishing model. Compared to tenur...

Beware of impostors: Research has shown that 'citizen journalism' is no replacement for the real thing. Photo: Michael Fitzjames "Citizen journalism is an oxymoron," says Rakhal Ebeli, managing director of Melbourne-based news bureau Newsmodo. "I mean, how can someone who is not a journalist be a journalist?" I am adding this not that I am in agreement but its an example of negativity towards this area.

Two weeks ago, News Corp Australia's Miranda Devine published Wendy Bacon and comrades lay into Sharri Markson on Twitter in defence of The Australian's media section editor Sharri Markson, who had been criticised for a column she wrote about the dangers of mixing activism and journalism.

"They challenge the way we think about intellectual property. But proclaiming these potential benefits among a community of believers is not enough: much more evidence is needed about the ways OER are used and on how they are impacting on teaching and learning."

This guide is intended to be a practical tool to help busy researchers, and the librarians who support them, make the transition to OA. The focus herein is on freely available online resources that will assist in making research publications OA; the closely associated, and rapidly growing, area of research data is beyond the scope of this column.

Highlighting of copyright issues suffered here in Australia.

The research environment in the global South faces many pressing challenges given resource inequality. Technical and financial issues aside, Laura Czerniewicz asserts it is the values and practices shaped by the Northern research agenda which contribute just as much to the imbalance.