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The massive expansion of higher education across all continents is one of the defining features of our century. This volume examines two dimensions of this: those of access and equity. Building on the country studies undertaken by this group of Fulbright New Century Scholars, the book offers a unique focus in its commitment to bring together an analysis of the theoretical literature on equity; a focus on the methodological problems of measuring access and equity from a comparative perspective; a comparative analysis of trends and policy developments set in a global framework; and a comparative analysis of targeted initiatives which are currently in place in different societies. The need to develop a comparative research programme addressing the question of measuring equity is noted

Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data are open, the documentation is open. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write a widget--it's all welcome. Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation.

Very good and will be helpful to all

Welcome to Open Library! Looking for accessible books in the DAISY format? View our accessible book subject page, or search for accessible books.

Discusses the risks of being tracked through our Internet activity and location tracking devices. Risks include financial fraud, stalking, manipulation by advertisers, tracking our whereabouts, devaluation of privacy as a fundamental right. Read as the opposing viewpoint to Why Online Tracking Isn't Bad - The Great Privacy Debate - WSJ.

In my opinion we should do some extra careful mostly when it comes to financial matter, we should not just type in the confidential information even if it is most respected site, because bad hackers are every when, we do not know if they are just lurking around waiting for us.

Interesting article! I think it´s important to sort out what privacy really means in different Internet contexts. There are many theories and interpretations. Private users, sellers and marketers are examples of groups who have many different agendas and interests. Privacy and how it is used on Internet, must be studied from both local and global perspectives as I see it. What type of information does not the private user know that other actors use for selling and marketing and online services. How can a clearer cooperation be done to not cross the lines for online privacy?

Cape Town, 10 December 2013 - This is a presentation to the combined 3rd Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest and Open A.I.R. Conference on Innovation and IP in Africa, www.openair.org.za/capetown2013.

Realizing the value of sharing in digital world the open licenses.

Very useful information. it's going to be of key importance that people know about copyright now that we're all moving into an era of massive creativity being shared globally. Understanding copyright needs to be part of digital literacy.

Exploring Digital Identity: Beyond the Private Public Paradox. A great article that explores how new media is transforming culture and how we identify ourselves online. The article uses a metaphor called digiSelves to describe how we are also creating a new identity too.

Indeed, maintaining the distance between the private self and public persona may be more difficult as we enter the virtual global village. As we continue to use the media, the proposition that we may become invested in the public persona possibly at odds with our private self seems to be a reasonable assertion. School shootings tend to support this.

People have a digital identity to surf on the Internet and get access to different kinds of information. Yes, there are a lot of good resources online for people to know and to learn. However, during the process, people's privacy also takes the risk of being viewed by others. On the other hand, everyone also has a chance to see others' privacy. So, is it good or bad to have such a digital identity. I think it is good and people acquire much more benefits than the risk they take.

La brecha digital entre naciones ricas y pobres tiende a incrementarse no obstante el augurio de equidad imaginado a partir de la masificación de las TIC's. Máxime cuando el idioma predominante en la producción e intercambio de información sigue siendo el inglés, o bien el control de los proyecto...

Compares the cost of articles from society and non-profit publishers to those of the major commercial publishers.

Its crazy. The numbers (of profit and control) for the publishing companies is astronomical!

Universities have received a poor deal from the system of private, subscription-based access to knowledge production since the port WW2 commercialization of the scientific publishing industry. It is absurd that the university or research funder supplies the content (the research), pays for the authoring (the time of the researcher writing the article), and provides and pays for the time of peer reviewers and academic editors. In addition, it often pays page charges or formatting charges to publishers. It then cedes copyright and finally buys back its own research at prices that have escalated at four times the rate of inflation in the past decade and a half! Considering most of this research is conducted using public funds, it becomes a moral argument when public resources are used once again to purchase access to the outputs of this research. The commercial model of disseminating research does not obey the rules of supply and demand. A relatively small number of 'core' journals occupy monopoly positions, in that university libraries have to subscribe to access their content, whatever the cost, because these journals have been established as 'must-have' resources. While the practice of 'bundling' offers the advantage of bulk pricing, it reduces room for choice, as bundles consume large chunks of library budgets, making it difficult to subscribe to smaller, individual titles. In addition, the inflexibility of indexing systems makes it difficult for new journals to establish themselves; thus compromising the potential for smaller niche subjects and newer interdisciplinary areas. Thankfully the global inequalities engendered by the commercialization of scholarly publishing are being challenged by open access.

I presented this paper to a conference in South Africa in 2005, and it was described as "too radical" by the top leaders in libraries in South Africa who attended. :) So am rather happy that my vague perceptions and musings about the emerging trends have been vindicated today. "This paper will focus on another aspect that is integrally linked to the ability to access literature and information - that of cost and economics. Both the broader macroeconomic context and the more focused microeconomic (South African) environment will be referred to. We will examine the assumption that the economic development of a nation is linked to the ability to access information and test whether this is a valid assumption. From there, we will take a brief look at the issue of the cost of books, specifically in South Africa. The advent of the electronic revolution and the many paradigm shifts that the Internet and electronic media have initiated and the effects on the publishing industry, will be outlined. We will explore the "information as commodity" paradigm and briefly look at the related Copyright and Intellectual Property developments before weaving these seemingly disparate threads together to form a picture of innovative solutions that have arisen in response to the information access crisis in South Africa. These solutions have arisen from the popular notion that information should be freely available for societal good, rather than commodified. Finally, we will ponder the effect that these solutions may have on the traditional book publishing industry in South Africa."

Thank you all, very much, it is quite a new experience for me to have the paper well received. :)

Thank you for sharing this. I really appreciated the non-North American context. I grew up in the States, and am working on my Master's degree in Canada, so it's really easy to get caught up in always looking at these issues from the North American point of view. Seeing papers like this really help to confirm how global these issues are, and cement their importance in my mind.

An article by an anonymous author on the Knowledge Commons Brasil. The article attempts to show how the Global North dominates the internet. Internet users as well as content (exemplified by geo-located entities) tend to cluster in the rich industrial countries of the so called "developed" wordl. This critique resembles the lament of the so called Media Imperialism spearheaded by the McBriede Report to Unesco (http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0004/000400/040066eb.pdf) "Many Voices, One World)". It should be noted that here more detailed studies suggested that news agencies reflect the interests of their audiences. So it would be interesting what the distribution of geo-tagged entities in the Igbo version of Wikipedia is like. Does it mirror a bias towards West Africa (Igbo being one of the principal languages of Nigeria)?

InTechOpen is a leading global publisher of Journals and Books within the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine. We are the preferred choice of over 60,000 authors worldwide. Hello everybody, Editorial Intech is a good example of Creative Commons Publication Site: www.intechopen.com They are focused on the scientific world with a great variety of topics including engineering, mathematics, linguistics, software, radio mobile communications, etc. In this sense, let me one of my recent publications there: "A unifying statistical model for atmospheric optical communications", focused on the generation of a new statistical model that unifies in a single closed form expression many of other probability density functions employed in the literature to model the turbulent atmosphere as an optical channel of communications. http://cdn.intechweb.org/pdfs/20889.pdf Best regards, Dr. Antonio Jurado-Navas University of Málaga (Spain)

Thank you, Ibraghimova.

I have now only realized that this site is an Open Knowledge site, and I had used it over a year ago to cite some research for a paper on renewable energies. You might be interested in this site for sharing scientific data: http://www.researchgate.net/

Aunque un tema de equidad es el diseño e implementación de iniciativas de OA que den voz a los participantes del "Sur", nosotros que habitamos el "Sur" deberemos mantenernos al tanto de los desarrollos y posibilidades originadas en el norte

En México el acceso al conocimiento, sea acceso libre o pagado, depende en gran medida del uso de la lengua inglesa. Los planes de estudio de las licenciaturas suelen incluir el aprendizaje del idioma inglés, lo que demuestra su orientación global en este sentido. Propongo dejar de ver el idioma como una forma neocolonial de dominio, y enfocarlo como una herramienta de empoderamiento.

Different news in different states

La tendencia global, según lo he aprendido en este MOOC, es la participación de personas con un grado académico en los MOOCs. Aunque en principio se quiere expandir el acceso al conocimiento entre un público mayor, ¿por qué no dirigir los MOOCs decididamente hacia el público universitario y académico?

This article gives opinion that university is playing an important role that will not be replaced by the open educational opinion, which I also agreed. Instead of considering OER as a threat to university, the article argues that "OER can help institutions provide higher education to rapidly increasing numbers of students and lifelong learners".

Thank you for sharing the article Ming Tang. I think you make a great point about OER and the university working together as opposed to a "war of the roses" type scenario where a married couple refuses to work together. As the article mentioned the university is the one that gives the diploma and is the one that deals with accreditation inspections, etc. OER to me would make a nice complement on the arms of any university. Another good article along the same lines can be found at http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/impact-globalization-and-future-university.

Thank you Melduncan2!

The Knowledge Unlatched model depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single Title Fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons licence via OAPEN and HathiTrust as a fully downloadable PDF.

Great concept! This goes to show that Open Knowledge does not equate to free and giveaway. I love the blend of effectively using a crowd-funding model through libraries to ensure appropriate fees are paid to cover costs and compensate authors and publishers to enable open access under a CC license across a global library network. It would be interesting to see the follow up to this. I would think this approach would be useful for school libraries in a district or region to use this approach and effectively share the resources.

Interesting take on what will happen to the future of libraries and how information will be published and sold. It's important to realize that nothing comes free and that we should promote a business model that benefits content-producers as well as consumers.

Alison Hicks uses the example of foreign languages to explore the integration of critical information literacy into the curriculum of various disciplines. The paper provides an example of a librarian who integrated critical information literacy into curriculum and proposes that this approach could be effective in global learning initiatives.

one solution to help inequality problem?

Good crowd-funding project that tries to help solve the digital divide problem by providing infrastructure to those who lack the money to purchase a computer. In addition to providing the physical infrastructure of the computer to allow those without one to catch up to society, perhaps another solution to conquer the digital divide is to educate those who have just received computers how to use the internet to look for information, consume, produce and distribute the information.

Honestly I think public libraries need WAY more computers.