المبادرات العربية في مجال الوصول الحر Arab Initiatives of Open Access
After the resounding success of our first ever Open Access Day in 2008, where we had 120 participating organizations from almost 30 countries, we are pleased to announce that this year’s events will be scheduled during the week of 19-23 October 2009 - read the Press Release.
Why a week rather than a day? When we asked for feedback from the folks taking part last year, they said that while they had enjoyed the “event-in-a-box” approach, many of them found that cramming everything into one day was tricky (especially given international time differences) and that spreading activities over a week to suit their individual needs would be easier....
Read the news on the following URL:
The mass digitization of books promises to bring tremendous value to consumers, libraries, scholars, and students. The Open Book Alliance will work to advance and protect this promise. And, by protecting it, we will assert that any mass book digitization and publishing effort be open and competitive. The process of achieving this promise must be undertaken in the open, grounded in sound public policy and mindful of the need to promote long-term benefits for consumers rather than isolated commercial interests.
The Open Book Alliance will counter Google, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors’ Guild’s scheme to monopolize the access, distribution and pricing of the largest digital database of books in the world. To this end, we will promote fair and flexible solutions aimed at achieving a more robust and open system.
PLoS Currents, as this project is called, will first focus on influenza research and might later expand to other topics. In order to keep the standard of the submissions high, PLoS will be able to use a number of new moderation tools in Knol to vet submissions and comments. Any submission that is accepted for publication will immediately appear on PLoS Currents and will also be publicly archived at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows anybody to share and remix these papers (with attribution).
Overall, we think this is a great project. Knol is a good, easy-to-use platform for these kinds of publications, and given that the articles are also archived on other servers, this project also doesn't rely on Google to keep Knol's servers running indefinitely.
PLoS, being a non-profit, is also the right organization to give this project a try. Commercial publishers are still wary of the Internet, and while the open access movement has been gathering some support over the last few years, a lot of research in most scientific fields will still be hidden behind paywalls for a long time.| By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley |
| Not everyone in the coalition wants the deal blocked, some want revisions |
Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google's attempt to create what could be the world's largest virtual library.
Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive.
They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works.
"Google is trying to monopolise the library system," the Internet Archive's founder Brewster Kahle told BBC News.
"If this deal goes ahead, they're making a real shot at being 'the' library and the only library." ...
'Open access'
Critics have claimed the settlement will transform the future of the book industry and of public access to the cultural heritage of mankind embodied in books.
| The Internet Archive scans around 1000 books a day at 10 cents a page |
"The techniques we have built up since the enlightenment of having open access, public support for libraries, lots of different organisational structures, lots of distributed ownership of books that can be exchanged, resold and repackaged in different ways - all of that is being thrown out in this particular approach," warned Mr Kahle.
The non-profit Internet Archive has long been a vocal opponent of this agreement. It is also in the business of scanning books and has digitised over half a million of them to date. All are available free.
As the 4 September deadline approaches, the number of groups and organisations voicing their opposition is growing. But with three of the world's best-known technology companies joining the chorus, the Open Book Alliance can expect to make headlines the world over.
Microsoft and Yahoo have confirmed their participation. However, Amazon has so far declined to comment because the alliance has not yet been formally launched.
"All of us in the coalition are oriented to foster a vision for a more competitive marketplace for books," said Peter Brantley, the Internet Archive's director of access.
"We feel that if approved, Google would earn a court-sanctioned monopoly and the exploitation of a comprehensive collection of books from the 20th Century."...
Read the full story on the following URL:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8200624.stm
Scholas is a service that enables academics to list their publications and share work quickly and easily via the web. This can be a list of existing publications including journal articles, books etc. As well as any other items, such as research notes, presentations, posters and data-sets.
Each publication created by the user has its own user-item page, which can be linked to using a short, unique URL e.g. http://schol.as/9I-3UJV82 (called a Scholas ID). The user-item page allows bibliographical information to be associated with the user-item, as well as facilitating discussion through a comments section.
Scholas also provides users with a Scholas ID for their profile page, which links to all the publications they have listed on the service. This enables the user to provide a single short and unique link to all the work they wish to share on Scholas.
itizationفي بداية هذا العام 2009 حققت جامعة الملك فهد للبترول والمعادن مستويات متقدمة على المستوى العالمي فيما يتعلق بتصنيف الويبومتريكس من خلال مستودع الجامعة الرقمي، فقد أحرزت الجامعة الترتيب 23 على المستوى العالم متخطية بذلك عمالقة في هذا المجال أمثال PubMed Central. أما الآن والنصف الثاني من هذا العام يحقق المستودع الرقمي لجامعة الملك فهد للبترول والمعادن قفزة تعتبر حقاً مارثونية، حيث استطاعت أن تحقق المركز الرابع عشر على المستوى العالمي ومن بين أعلى 400 مؤسسة دولية. وقد تنبأت بذلك في أكثر من موقع من خلال هذه المدونة ومن خلال الدراسة التي قدمتها بالتشارك مع الدكتور عبدالرحمن فراج في المؤتمر الخامس لجعية المكتبات والمعلومات السعودية في شهر أكتوبر من عام 2008 والتي كانت بعنوان "الجامعات السعودية ودورها في دعم الوصول الحر: دراسة استكشافية"، وهاهي الجامعة بحسن قيادتها ووعي أفرادها تقدم لنا نموذجاً حياً للمنافسة على المستوى العالمي.
Re-Congratulations King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals ePrints Repository has achieved an advanced position in Ranking Web of World Repositories in Webometrics' Ranking. The university digital repository has gained rank 14th internationally among 400 repositories.
The web should be as free and unconstrained as a blank piece of paper, its creator has said.
Speaking at a BBC event to mark the 20th anniversary of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee said the internet should not be controlled, censored or intercepted by government or companies.
He asked the audience to consider someone looking up sensitive information - such as cancer symptoms or what it's like to come out as homosexual. If a government or company is monitoring every click, people won't feel comfortable using the web to find help with such matters, degrading the usefulness offered by the online world, he claimed.
"The internet should be like a white piece of paper," he said.
When you buy paper, "it does not come with the fundamental constraint on it that you can only write truth," he said, adding that you "can't get drawing paper where it's impossible to draw a nude figure."
Anonymous
That said, Berners-Lee doesn't think web users should always be anonymous. He said anonymity is important in some cases - such as when people were struggling against their government - but added that much of what was said online didn't require such protection. He said we need to "realise that the whistle blower syndrome is an emergency, it's an exception."
With that, he said web users must realise that everything they read online isn't necessarily true.
"Just because you can read everything out there, you shouldn't read everything out there," he said, adding that the future of newspapers could be online, helping us filter the mass of information floating around the web.
Mobile web
Looking to the future, Berners-Lee said mobile web use was growing - but it wasn't just for corporate travellers.
"What's exciting about this is not just that your executive who carries these things [smartphones] and jets around the place will be able to browse the web while waiting in a waiting room without a laptop," he said. "It is that in developing countries, of course, people have phones where they don't have computers."
As more and more people in developing countries get online via mobile devices, we must make sure content works for them as well, Berners-Lee added.
"Don't just target things in HD and three dimension and whatever the next thing is," he said.
"As the early adopter, we also have to make sure that we target things in low resolution, low bandwidth," he added, claiming other parts of the world will change the face of the web, creating the "web they need."
Get data online
Berners-Lee used the talk to continue his call to move government and academic data online.
He was recently picked by the government to do just that. "That's because some people in the British government got it, that putting data on the web is important," he said.
"Of course, there's a big pull from people who want to see that government data... it's not really the government's data, it's actually all our data."
Microsoft has launched its latest salvo at Google with a free web-based version of its dominant Office software.
Office 2010 will include lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote when it ships next year.
The new web offering will compete with Google's free online Docs suite launched three years ago.
Last week Google took aim at Windows with news of a free operating system while in June Microsoft introduced a new search engine called Bing.
"We believe the web has a lot to offer in terms of connectivity," Microsoft's group product manager for Office told the BBC.
"We have over a half a billion customers world-wide and what we hear from them is that they really want the power of the web without compromise. They want collaboration without compromise.
"And what they tell us today is that going to the web often means they sacrifice fidelity, functionality and the quality of the content they care about. We knew that if and when we were ever going to bring applications into a web environment, we needed to do the hard work first because we hold such a high bar," said Mr Bryant.
Microsoft said that 400 million customers who are Windows Live consumers will have access to the Office web applications at no cost.
At a conference for business partners in New Orleans, Microsoft announced an early release of web-apps to thousands of testers later this year.
At the end of the year the company expects to release a proper public beta for the software and ship a final version off to PC makers in the first half of 2010.
'Conversion'
Analysts have mostly given the thumbs up to Microsoft for moving some of its applications to the web, even if it might cost them dearly.
The Wall Street Journal has estimated that offering free online software could "put at risk as much at $4bn (£2.46bn) in revenue".
One analyst told the paper that despite such losses, it could be a canny move.
"Making sure people are still using Microsoft products is more important" in the short term than risking revenue, explained Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.
"They need to keep people using Office," he said.
"Microsoft is finally making the conversion through the web-based world. First, we saw that through Bing. Now we are seeing that through Office, " said Jeffries & Co analyst Katherine Egbert.
"The software giant has woken up, " wrote Emil Protalinksi of online blog Arcs Technica.
"It is promising to know that such a traditional software company is responding to the 'threat of the cloud' to its core business by embracing it."
Investors appeared to like Microsoft's move and boosted shares by almost 3.8% higher to close at $23.23 (£14.33).
Rivalry
Microsoft's announcement is being seen as the latest move in a tit-for-tat rivalry between two tech giants as it and Google increasingly make efforts to encroach on one another's turf.
When Google announced its Chrome operating system last week, the blogosphere watched and waited for Microsoft to react.
Mr Bryant stuck to the company line when he spoke to BBC News.
"I haven't seen the product. I think it's not a trivial engineering investment to go and build an operating system," he said. "Of course it is interesting and there is a lot of talk but until we see the product, it's hard to say what kind of impact it will have.
"We can't afford to get wrapped up in hype or buzz or noise because really our customers depend on us every single day."
Microsoft's business software division, which includes Office, made $9.3 bn (£5.74bn) in profit from $14.3 bn(£8.82bn) in sales during the first three-quarters of its 2009 fiscal year.