This Thesis examines the current impact of digital technology upon certain aspects of the publishing industry, especially the e-book industry. It reviews the key developments in globally digital publishing and sums up several publishing models of digital contents.
Héloïse un site sur les politiques des éditeurs…
Héloïse : un site sur les politiques des éditeurs scientifiques en matière de libre accès aux articles de revues :
“Afin de mieux communiquer auprès des chercheurs sur les autorisations en matière de dépôt, a été mise en place la plateforme d’information Héloïse à l’adresse : http://heloise.ccsd.cnrs.fr/. Elle résulte d’un partenariat entre le CCSD (Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), une unité du CNRS dédiée à la réalisation d’archives ouvertes, le SPCS (Syndicat de la Presse Culturelle et Scientifique) et le SNE (Syndicat National de l’Edition). Elle fait suite à plusieurs années de réflexion menée par le groupe de travail sur le libre accès du GFII (Groupement Français de l’Industrie de l’Information).
Cette plateforme est la réponse aux attentes des auteurs en matière de transparence des règles fixées par les éditeurs français en matière de dépôt des articles de revues. En effet, d’autres plateformes existent dans le monde anglo-saxon (SHERPA-RoMEO) ou hispanophone (Dulcinea), mais ne permettent pas de renseigner les informations de manière aussi fine et fiable, d’autant qu’elles ne sont pas forcément alimentées par les éditeurs eux-mêmes.
Nous invitons vivement les éditeurs à s’inscrire et à enregistrer leurs politiques sur Héloïse et à en informer leurs comités de rédaction.”
URL : http://www.sne.fr/img/pdf/Dossiers/Droits_dauteur/Presentationheloise.pdf
Inter institutional scientific collaboration an approach from social…
Inter-institutional scientific collaboration: an approach from social network :
“This paper presents a tool that can be used to characterize, analyze and interpret the patterns of collaboration among institutions by means of the visual display of scientific information. These graphic representations allow for a combined analysis of a given institution in the system of relations (network), and of the particular attributes of that institution (indicators). The tool affords the possibility of regenerating the network to make any number of aggregates appear or disappear, thus allowing one to focus on institutional sectors, geographic regions, etc. It also allows for analysis of sectorial interaction, institutional backing of research, and the influence of geographic proximity, linguistic affinity, or regional politics. This is indeed a versatile analytical tool, and it is bound to prove its potential for evaluating patterns of collaborative research, development and innovation.”
URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10760/16704
Open Access and Scholarly Publishing Opportunities and Challenges…
Open Access and Scholarly Publishing: Opportunities and Challenges to Nigerian Researchers :
“The study examined the extent of researchers’ appreciation of open access scholarly publishing. It discussed the opportunities and the benefits of open access to scholars worldwide. Challenges of OA were discussed and solutions suggested. Four research questions were raised. The population of this study was 140 lecturers from the University of Benin, Nigeria. The study revealed that the respondents had cited open access journals articles and that the major benefit derived from using open access journals is that it provides free online access to the literature necessary for research.”
URL : http://www.white-clouds.com/iclc/cliej/cl33IO.pdf
The New Ambiguity of ‘Open Government’
“Open government” used to carry a hard political edge: it referred to politically sensitive disclosures of government information. The phrase was first used in the 1950s, in the debates leading up to passage of the Freedom of Information Act. But over the last few years, that traditional meaning has blurred, and has shifted toward technology.
Open technologies involve sharing data over the Internet, and all kinds of governments can use them, for all kinds of reasons. Recent public policies have stretched the label “open government” to reach any public sector use of these technologies.
Thus, “open government data” might refer to data that makes the government as a whole more open (that is, more transparent), but might equally well refer to politically neutral public sector disclosures that are easy to reuse, but that may have nothing to do with public accountability.
Today a regime can call itself “open” if it builds the right kind of web site — even if it does not become more accountable or transparent. This shift in vocabulary makes it harder for policymakers and activists to articulate clear priorities and make cogent demands.
This essay proposes a more useful way for participants on all sides to frame the debate: We separate the politics of open government from the technologies of open data. Technology can make public information more adaptable, empowering third parties to contribute in exciting new ways across many aspects of civic life.
But technological enhancements will not resolve debates about the best priorities for civic life, and enhancements to government services are no substitute for public accountability.”
Positioning the OER Business Model for Open Education…
Positioning the OER Business Model for Open Education :
“The enabling power of technology, especially information technology and social software, prompts a radical shift in economic and social interactions in societies around the globe. Existing traditional school based, formalized learning formats are unable to accommodate specific new learning needs. Hence, customized to the respective purposes of personal wellbeing, inclusion or requirements for professional performance, lifelong continuous learning is no longer a choice but a necessity. At the 2011 Davos World Economic Forum it was already stated that the lack of adequately educated people not only limits personal fulfilment but will also hinder prosperity and economic growth in the near future. Since the learning needs and learning possibilities today differ fundamentally from the 20th century the question is how to unlock the learning potential of people in a situation where mainstream education still heavily relies on traditional institutionalized closed formats.
Since more than a decade the Open Educational Resources (abbreviated as OER) movement provides new ideas on how to generate and share educational resources for educational use (within and outside formal institutional, open education) by large audiences for a variety of learning purposes. The vision of developing and sharing OER resources for Open Education (OpenED/OE) is interesting in this context for its great potential to substantially help solving existing educational problems. Open education based on sharing (OER) open resources for education enables people across continents and organizations to transform their talents into professional competences and grow by removing existing (economic) barriers and invent new strategies to open up education. To date though the OER/OpenED vision materializes primarily in activities organized as dedicated sponsored projects.
Crucial for a sustainable future of this appealing approach and the capability to bridge existing “education gaps” is our capacity to translate the OER/OpenED vision and existing commitment into appropriate, sustainable business models for OER/OpenED.
Sustainability is a key requirement for the OER business model. Education in the 21st century has the character of life long education, so the question is not so much whether a specific OER project can be funded adequately but whether we can create an underlying business model foundation able to serve as a flight deck from which necessary OER based learning activities can be launched, as part of completely open educational offerings or embedded in hybrid educational constellations, across organizations and countries.
After sketching the scene in the introduction we move to paragraph 2 where we describe how the application of the OER paradigm radically changes not only learning itself but from a business perspective also the interactions and relationships between learners, “teachers”, creators and users of educational resources as well as relations between educational institutions, designers and service providers of both formal and non-formal learning offerings. In paragraph 3 we draw conclusions from these changing relationships, which leads to a new perspective on sustainable business models for, OER based, (open) education. Next in paragraph 4 we describe our ideas on the essential components of the proposed business model to become a viable sustainable living reality. Based on heuristics from research on learning networks, open innovation and collaboration we describe methods to frame OER/OpenED activities to lay the groundwork for sustainable learning ecologies. We end with concluding remarks and suggestions for future work.”
URL : http://www.eurodl.org/?article=483
Improving The Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship
The dissemination of knowledge derived from research and scholarship has a fundamental impact on the ways in which society develops and progresses, and at the same time it feeds back to improve subsequent research and scholarship.
Here, as in so many other areas of human activity, the internet is changing the way things work; two decades of emergent and increasingly pervasive information technology have demonstrated the potential for far more effective scholarly communication. But the use of this technology remains limited.
Force11 is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing.
This document highlights the findings of the Force11 workshop on the Future of Research Communication held at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, in August 2011: it summarizes a number of key problems facing scholarly publishing today, and presents a vision that addresses these problems, proposing concrete steps that key stakeholders can take to improve the state of scholarly publishing.