OPEN REFLECTIONS

Category: Open Access

  • Digital Scholarship

    Christine Borgman is one of my scholarly heroines; when it comes to her fine nose for current developments in e-scholarship and digital information retrieval and her thorough and concise way of communicating (alas, she is a specialist in scholarly communication) these issues via monographs, articles and lectures, she definitely belongs to my scholarly all-star gallery.…

  • Adieu Copyright – A debate

    Last Wednesday one of Holland’s most famous and disputed anti-copyright defendants, Joost Smiers, presented his new book (or essay) co-written with partner-in-crime Marieke van Schijndel, at cultural hot-spot De Balie (a former courthouse in Amsterdam). Surrounding the presentation a debate evening was organized based on the utopian notion of ‘imagining a world without copyright’. The…

  • Print will survive

    Charming initiative by Dave Eggers (via De papieren man and Gawker): he send an email to everyone feeling at loss about the possible demise of print and all-round literacy. After an evening organized by the Authors Guild, Eggers promised to brighten up the pessimists. The New Yorker published a few lines from his speech:  “To…

  • If you love literature, help keep it alive!

    Via Tranversalinflections and Loewak I heard about the possible decline and fall of Salt Publishing, the poetry, short story and literary criticism publisher set up by Australian poet John Kinsella (who also launched Salt Magazine) in the 90’s. The financial crisis hit them hard, and they were on the edge off going overboard. In a…

  • RiP, Maecenas and Event

    Brett Gaylor, the director of the Open Source documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto, is experimenting with the ‘Maecenas model’ (by others dubbed the ‘pay–as-you-like’ or Radiohead/NIN model) while launching his documentary online as a free download. I have written about RiP before here and since then the (CC licensed) feature length film has only gained…

  • Remix online for free

    Lawrence Lessig has announced the release of the free Creative Commons licensed download version of his book Remix from Bloomsbury Academic on his blog.   Bloomsbury Academic is a new imprint from Bloomsbury (yep, the one from Harry Potter), led by renowned publisher Frances Pinter. I have written about Pinter and the Bloomsbury model before…

  • Krisis re-emerges from the ashes

    I never burned books. Not as a ritual after graduation; not as a Dadaistic attempt to enstage some kind of surreal happening; not as a way to cleanse my soul from feelings of materialistic belongings. No. Books are holy to me. I would probably not even be able to burn a book (though I could…

  • The Universal Library Revisited

    For those of us who are incessantly scanning the Internet in search of quality material concerning scholarly research and cultural analysis, I am glad to ease your frenzy by drawing your attention to some new online resources that have been launched recently.   First of all, YouTube started an educational channel: YouTube EDU. The campus…

  • Highlights from APM – Day 2

    The second day of the Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean region (APM) conference started with a session (entitled Strength in numbers) on cooperation between and the (future) role of university presses.   The first speaker was Roman Schmidt (Sens Public, editor-in-chief of crossXwords), who, in his very inspiring lecture entitled Request for comments: discussing the…

  • Highlights from APM – Day 1

      Last week, on the 19th and 20th of March, the first Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean Region (APM) conference was held, an offshoot of the APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference, which was held for the fourth time last January in Berlin. Both conferences want to transgress the traditional sectoral boundaries that exist in…

  • 2009: Open Access Year

    2009: Open Access Year

    2009 has been declared Open Access year. Thus reports SURF, the collaborative organization for higher education institutions and research institutes in the Netherlands, aimed at breakthrough innovations in ICT. The involved parties are the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Dutch higher education sector…

  • In praise of Eleutheria

    ‘Beauty is pregnant with potentiality’ – Bracha Ettinger   Again, delving deeper into the rabbit hole, let’s try to entangle the concepts in the web of free knowledge definitions. In the previous post we mainly discussed the difference between free information and free knowledge. But we were not quite finished. We were still basically stuck…