Category: Access

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Creative Commons: Open Definition 2.0

Access, Data

creative commons licenseOpen Definition 2.0 released

Today Open Knowledge and the Open Definition Advisory Council announced the release of version 2.0 of the Open Definition. The Definition “sets out principles that define openness in relation to data and content,” and is the baseline from which various public licenses are measured. Any content released under an Open Definition-conformant license means that anyone can “freely access, use, modify, and share that content, for any purpose, subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness.”

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Stephen E. Arnold: Uncurated Big Data via Data Access Proxy (DAP) and Data Tiling Service (DTS)

Access, Advanced Cyber/IO
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Brown Dog Chases Answer to Uncurated Data

Depending on one’s field, it may seem like every bit of information in existence is now just an Internet search away. However, as researchers well know, there is a wealth of potentially crucial information that is still difficult to access. In fact, GCN tells us that marketing firm IDC estimates up to 90 percent of “big data” falls into this category. GCN also turns our attention to a potential solution in, “Brown Dog Digs Into the Deep, Dark Web.”

Brown Dog is a project out of the National Center for Supercomputing Application [NCSA] at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2013, the team received a $10 million, five-year award from the National Science Foundation for the project. Already, they have developed two services that facilitate access to uncurated data collections. The write-up reports:

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Sepp Hasslberger: Rebuilding the Internet as a Commons — Local Mesh First

Access, Autonomous Internet, BTS (Base Transciever Station), Cloud, Design, Hardware, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Software, Spectrum
Sepp Hasslberger
Sepp Hasslberger

The internet needs to be re-built from the bottom up. Network locally first and only then connect to the world “out there”.  A local wireless network might be coming to your neighbourhood soon. 

The Rise of the Network Commons, Chapter 1 (draft)

Armin Medosch

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Robert Horn: Visualizing World’s Biggest Problems

Access, Data, Design, Innovation, Knowledge, Transparency
Robert Horn
Robert Horn

Robert Horn is a political scientist with a special interest in public policy, organizational strategy, and knowledge management. These days, he deals mostly with social messes. Social messes are more than complicated problems. I define them as tightly interconnected clusters of wicked problems and other messes. They are very complex; ambiguous; highly constrained; seen differently from different ideologies and worldviews; and contain many value conflicts. They usually contain major entanglements of economic, social, and political, cultural, and psychological factors.  Bob is a pioneer in dealing with messes through interactive visual analysis with task groups.

Below the Fold Are Links and Some Astonishing Visuals

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EFF: Students Re-Launch Open Access Button App for Free Access to Paywall Research

Access

eff logoStudents Re-Launch Open Access Button App to Find Free Access to Scientific and Scholarly Research

Millions of people use research everyday. From students, medical professionals, to curious hobbyists, we all benefit from being able to access, read, and cite reliable, tested information. But getting the research we need can be hard and costly when it's locked up behind expensive paywalls. Two university students, David Carroll and Joseph McArthur, were finally fed up with being denied access to online journals and articles that were necessary to continue their studies—so they decided to take matters into their own hands. The result was Open Access Button, a browser-based tool that records users’ collisions with paywalls and aids them in finding freely accessible copies of those research articles. The previous version had over 5,000 users and mapped nearly 10,000 encounters with paywalled research.

The new apps are available both for mobile phones and web browsers, and can be downloaded at openaccessbutton.org.

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Berto Jongman: Harvard to Journal Publishers – Piss Off! Open Access Here We Come…

04 Education, Access, Commerce, Corruption
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Harvard University says it can't afford journal publishers' prices

University wants scientists to make their research open access and resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls

Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls.

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