Category: Open Access
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Bits of Freedom
As promised before, I would like to dig a little deeper into the meaning and complexities of the concept of free information, referring to the well known aphorism ‘information wants to be free’. No better way to start than by throwing in some good old definitions we can all find scattered on the web. So…
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Open Your Mind
In previous blog posts I mentioned the rise of video surfing and the development of the Internet from a text based medium to one based on remixed mediality, increasingly dominated by an image based culture. This YouTubification of the Internet is seen by some people as a bad development which can be detrimental to our…
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Highlights from APE 2009 – Day 1
The first day of the APE conference in Berlin, which, as mentioned before, focused on the impact of publishing in the digital age, started with a keynote by Georg Winkler from the European University Association (EUA), entitled Universities in the 21st century. Winkler started off by asking the question of what makes an university unique,…
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The Full Monty – For Free!
Two updates on things I wrote about in previous posts. First of all, The New York Times picked up the discussion on the use of You Tube as a search engine, or better yet, as the NYT calls it, as a reference tool. They wrote a very nice article (published in print on January…
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Highlights from APE 2009 – Preconference Day
From the 19th to the 21st of January I was in Berlin to visit this magnificent city and to go to the APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference. From their website: “APE Conferences encourage the debate about the future of scientific publications, information dissemination and access to scientific results. They offer an independent forum for ‘open…
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Nails and Books
Happy days for Creative Commons and NIN! Trent Reznor managed to make a huge profit selling his bands 2008 album Ghosts I-IV online, topping Amazon’s best selling list for 2008. Strange enough, the album was legally available for free at the same time (even on the same website). This nice article over at Ars Technica…
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Remix Manifesto
RiP: A remix manifesto, is the first Open Source documentary, in which film maker Brett Gaylor (founder of www.opensourcecinema.org) invites the public to remix his footage in his participatory media experiment. The documentary ‘explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall…
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Science Commons Video
Today Science Commons, a subdivision of the larger Creative Commons non-profit organization, launched a short video explaining what Science Commons stands for. Science Commons, headed by John Wilbanks, is a project that tries to improve scientific communication and research by making a plea to lower access barriers and to free locked-up research results. They want…
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The Universal Library
With the launch a few days ago of Europeana, the new European digital library which serves as a portal to the rich diversity of European cultural heritage (from archival materials to books, movies, photographs and much more), the ideal of the universal library seems to be gaining ground again (not withstanding the fact that Europeana…
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An ontology of free – or: is there such a thing as freedom of knowledge?
The last couple of days I have started thinking about what the concept of free knowledge exactly entails. I want to dedicate a few future posts to this subject, in order to explore the idea to its fullest and to give it a proper categorization (at least I will try to). This can be…
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Open Access and eBooks
One of the most heard objectives against eBooks (let alone against Open Access eBooks) is that nobody is going to read a whole book from a screen. Especially in the Humanities, where long stretched arguments are laid out over hundreds of pages, scholars and students will prefer a solid hard copy over reading from the…