-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
The real political nerds
,----[ Quote ]
| Data matters. We use it to understand what
| has already happened in the world, and we
| use it to make decisions about what to do
| next. But in among the graphics and
| electoral cock-ups lies a terrible truth: a
| small army of amateur enthusiasts are doing
| a better job of collecting and
| disseminating basic political data than the
| state has managed.
|
| Chris Taggart blogs at CountCulture and was
| baffled to discover that there is no
| central or open record of the results from
| local elections in the UK. If you go to the
| Electoral Commissionâs website, they pass
| the buck to the BBC, where you can find
| seat numbers for each area, but no record
| of how many votes were cast for each
| candidate. Plymouth University holds an
| unofficial database of these results, and
| they pay people to type every single one of
| them in, painstakingly and by hand. After
| all that they charge for access, which is
| perfectly understandable. So for democracy,
| open analysis, and public record, it might
| as well not exist.
`----
http://www.badscience.net/2010/05/the-real-political-nerds/
Bill would require posting government docs, contracts online
,----[ Quote ]
| Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) has introduced a
| bill that aims to put all government
| documents onlineâor at least the public
| ones, anyway. As part of the "Public Online
| Information Act," the documents would be
| submitted to a free, searchable database,
| and an advisory committee would be
| established in order to oversee the
| process.
`----
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/bill-would-require-posting-government-docs-contracts-online.ars
The Global Development Of Free Access To Legal Information
,----[ Quote ]
| Since the mid1990s the Internet's Worldwide
| Web has provided the necessary technical
| platform to enable free access to
| computerised legal information. Prior to
| the web there were many online legal
| information systems and numerous legal
| information products distributed on CD-ROM,
| but there was no significant provision of
| free access to legal information anywhere
| in the world. Both government and private
| sector online legal publishers charged for
| access. The web provided the key element
| required for free public access - a low
| cost distribution mechanism. For publishers
| it was close to a 'no cost' distribution
| mechanism if they were not required to pay
| for outgoing bandwidth. The ease of use of
| graphical browsers from around 1994, and
| the web's use of hypertext as its principal
| access mechanism (at that time) meant that,
| the web provided a simple and relatively
| consistent means by which legal information
| could be both provided and accessed. This
| was an attractive alternative to the
| proprietary, expensive and training
| intensive search engines on which
| commercial online services largely relied.
| The development of free access Internet law
| services was based on these factors.
`----
http://ejlt.org//article/view/17/39
Enlightenment 2.0: Unleashing the Open Science Revolution
,----[ Quote ]
| Now look at reality. Without massive
| coordinated effort we shall surely fail to
| achieve a Free and Open Science and
| Technology Paradigm. The vision sketched
| here needs to come about within the next
| decade if humanity is to make any progress
| against our interrelated great challengesâ
| Energy, Climate, Health, Food Security, and
| Poverty. By 2020 there must be a
| distributed, global network of institutions
| participating in the governance of Science
| and Technology. I hope you share our
| excitement for this unique instant in
| history when it is finally possible for
| mankind, a species distinguished and
| defined by its capacity to use tools, to
| unleash the unlimited problem solving
| powers of the tool of tools, science.
`----
http://opensciencesummit.com/2010/05/07/enlightenment-2-0-unleashing-the-open-science-revolution/
Why Iâm Going to Publish the Mediactive Book with Lulu
,----[ Quote ]
| My former publisher was fine with Creative
| Commons, as proved by the fact that we did
| the first book that way. But as David told
| me at the outset of the new search, I was
| likely to limit the potential field because
| I had one non-negotiable requirement: The
| book will be published under a Creative
| Commons license. In this case, as with We
| the Media, the kind of Creative Commons
| license would say, essentially, that anyone
| could make copies of the work for non-
| commercial use, and if they created
| derivative works, also only for non-
| commercial purposes, those works would have
| to be made available a) with credit to me
| and b) under the same license.
`----
http://mediactive.com/2010/05/09/why-im-going-to-publish-the-mediactive-book-with-lulu/
Over 20% of the world's scholarly journals now open access! (Kudos to DOAJ)
,----[ Quote ]
| This is a conservative estimate. DOAJ is
| doing great work, but they are a small
| group, and kvetches from the open access
| community tend to center around the lag
| time it takes for new or converted journals
| to get through the DOAJ vetting process and
| be included in DOAJ.
`----
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2010/05/over-20-of-worlds-scholarly-journals.html
Paolo Mangiafico, on Open Access at Duke University
,----[ Quote ]
| Duke's strategic plan says that one of our
| key goals is to apply knowledge in the
| service of society. Currently, much of the
| knowledge produced by Duke faculty is
| published in venues with limited
| distribution and often very high
| subscription rates that preclude access by
| many who would benefit from reading it.
| Making the research freely available to
| anyone with Internet access helps to
| increase the potential number of readers,
| and opens up possibilities for more people
| to make use of and build on the research
| being done here.
`----
http://opensource.com/education/10/5/defaulting-open-open-access-duke-paolo-mangiafico
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
iEYEARECAAYFAkvrmicACgkQU4xAY3RXLo7FewCgqStLIg4xttb9qEH/K3ML7TUv
RUAAni1naoQRfUTPYLCAnjKt34tW64XI
=lIDt
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
|
|
