Monday, February 2, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

Education oa slides jan 2014

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 05:16 AM PST

"Publishing in an open access repository gives your research global reach. Wide dissemination of your work can mean more citations and more impact. Getting your scholarly work published is as easy as uploading a paper to a website. Find out how Scholarship@Western can benefit you and how it can help you meet the requirements of funding agencies for open access."

OA in an oasis: The growth of open access in the MENA

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 05:13 AM PST

Use the link to access the presentation.  

4. Will commercial publishers accept the OA paradigm?

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 05:11 AM PST

Use the link to access the presentation.

Dominic Tate - Open Access Good Practice

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 05:09 AM PST

Use the link to access the presentation. 

TDMx: A novel web-based open-access support tool for optimising antimicrobial dosing regimens in clinical routine - International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 05:07 AM PST

Use the link to access pay-per-view options for the article published in the International Journal of antimicrobial Agents. "During the last decade, our knowledge of pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) relationships of antimicrobial agents and their pharmacokinetic (PK) alterations in specific patient groups such as the critically ill has advanced intensely. At the same time, the need to exploit this knowledge in everyday routine has also grown in order to optimise clinical outcomes and to suppress the spread of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria. Many clinical centres have adopted alternative dosing strategies of, for example, β-lactam antibiotics, such as extended or continuous infusion."

On open-access books and “double dipping”

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 05:03 AM PST

" ... Elsevier, a large scientific publisher, is the go-to hate figure for the Open Access Movement. It is a massive, for-profit entity with, many would claim, a chequered history as regards open access. For now, Elsevier has a strongly worded policy with respect to double dipping: 'Elsevier's policy is not to charge subscribers for open access articles and when calculating subscription prices only to take into account subscription articles – we do not double dip'. There are signs, though, at least in my view, that Elsevier is attempting to get rid of the concept so that it can charge whatsoever it likes. For instance, Alicia Wise, in a recent Research Fortnight interview said: 'I'm not exactly clear what that term [double dipping] means in conversation any more'. As the interviewer continues: 'According to Wise, there is no connection between subscriptions and APCs: they are 'decoupled'. She says the money coming in through a journal subscription is used to pay for a particular number of articles, and that open-access articles in hybrid journals are additional to that'. In other words, APCs are a way in which Elsevier can just grow, rather than transition. What is perhaps interesting, though, is that double dipping, as a general concept, relies on the notion of a cost-per-article, or cost-per-book, that a publisher would ideally like to recoup. In a subscription environment, publishers take a risk with content, particularly in the book sphere. They cannot predict, in advance, how well many volumes will sell and attempt to spread risk across their list. The same is not true, clearly, of an open-access environment with any kind of author- or institution- pays model. The risk is evaporated because the service is sold upfront. The criteria for the client to pay is that their work is accepted through a system of peer review, meaning that the funds can practically be guaranteed from academic institutions where researchers produce high-quality work. This is where things get interesting. Models like Knowledge Unlatched proposed, in conjunction with participating publishers, a "title fee" per book that was to be covered up front. Book Processing Charge-models, like those run by Palgrave at a price of £11k/$17,500, likewise work on a title fee to be paid in advance. Palgrave states that: "The level of the publication charge, which in many cases we envisage being met by funders, has been calculated by looking at all costs involved in our publishing process, from editorial to production, marketing, dissemination, and supporting discoverability. It reflects the fact that content published via Palgrave Open will be subject to the same rigorous professional process as all other Palgrave Macmillan publications. We appreciate that not all academics are able to meet such costs, but our purpose in launching Palgrave Open is to provide an option to those that are interested in publishing through this route." This is interesting for books because one of the most commonly cited ways in which it is believed that book publishers can thrive in an OA environment is by selling print copies alongside the OA version (there is an enduring desire for print — see also the Hybrid Publishing article on books and double dipping). However, if book publishers are basing their prices on the return they want, then any print sales are pure profit and they totally eradicate risk. I don't know whether book processing charge levels are being calculated on a risk-share basis. Are these based on covering the costs with no print sales, or is a mid-point between how much they want to make per book? It strikes me as probable, at the prices that are listed by many larger commercial publishers, though, that there isn't a huge amount of give and take here. In other words, it looks to me as though this mode is publishers offloading their risk function onto libraries ..."

Open Access to Research: Understanding policy, preparing for the future 2015, Seminar & Summit Manchester,United Kingdom

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 04:44 AM PST

"The Open Access to Research: Understanding policy, preparing for the future, organized by the Westminster Briefing will take place on 20th May 2015 at the Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester, UK. The conference will cover areas like Cost: examining the expenditure of making research open to all & the funding available for this Strategy: how should HEIs respond to funders' different and changing OA expectations ..."

Open Humanities Awards: Early Modern European Peace Treaties Online final update

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 04:42 AM PST

"This is the final in a series of posts from Dr Michael Piotrowski, one the recipients of the DM2E Open Humanities Awards – Open track. Europäische Friedensverträge der Vormoderne online ("Early Modern European Peace Treaties Online") is a comprehensive collection of about 1,800 bilateral and multilateral European peace treaties from the period of 1450 to 1789, published as an open access resource by the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG). The goal of the project funded by the DM2E-funded Open Humanities Award is to publish the treaties metadata as Linked Open Data, and to evaluate the use of nanopublications as a representation format for humanities data ..."

It’s time to buy those god-awful textbooks! | The Carillon

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 04:39 AM PST

"One of the most depressing moments of my undergraduate career was when I first set foot inside the university bookstore. I can vividly remember my jaw dropping the first time that I saw the price listings for all my textbooks ...  According to Statistics Canada's CANSIM database, since 2002 the cost of books (excluding textbooks) for Canadian consumers have dropped by 7.3%. This can be attributed to a multitude of factors such as the significant increase in the parity of the Canadian dollar to the American dollar ($1.5704 USD/CDN in 2002 versus $0.9995 USD/CDN in 2012), increased competition with online retailers and discount wholesalers, and the emergence of E-Books. While the cost for books has decreased during this time span, the cost of textbooks has increased by 28.4%.  The market for textbooks is inherently weird when compared to the traditional market for books and most other goods. The instructors that decide what textbooks are used for a course are not the same individuals that are paying for them. This can become problematic when instructors do not take into consideration the financial ramifications of their choices, because it does not adversely affect them. A study done by the Connecticut Board of Governors for Higher Education found that only 42% of instructors were aware of the costs of the textbooks that they selected for their course. While there are many instructors that take cost into consideration, they have no real incentive to pick the most affordable textbook that results in less pressure for publishers to keep prices low.  The group that typically gets the most backlash for the cost of textbooks are university bookstores. The University of Regina Bookstore sells its textbooks at a 22% markup. According to the University of Regina's Comprehensive Budget Plan for 2013/14, it expects to make a surplus of $238,000 and a profit margin of 4.18% from revenues of $5,936,000 and expenses of $5,698,000. While university bookstores do make revenues for their respective institutions, they are not as high as most would intuitively think. The more appropriate group to criticize for the rising costs of textbooks would be the textbook publishers ... "

What is Open Access? Video chat with Dr. Martin Eve

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 04:36 AM PST

"Open Access is not just an issue that plagues scientists and clinical practitioners. Allowing access to scholarly publications and academic work is also widely debated in the humanities as well. We found this out as we sat down and discussed Open Access with Dr. Martin Eve (@martin_eve) ..."

21st Century Research: Interdisciplinary Scholarship & The Third Sector | KMbeing

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 04:29 AM PST

" ... Community is not just community-based researchers or practitioners. Community is also about what is often called the third sector – the sphere of social activity undertaken by voluntary organizations and public citizens that are not-for-profit and non-governmental. By including the third sector in the interdisciplinary border crossings without boundaries is a more inclusive and extensive way of being a boundary-spanner. Being a boundary-spanner begins right at the beginning of any research career as graduate students embark on a future in research – as I wrote about in an earlier blog post. Graduate students have an excellent opportunity to initiate such connections by considering how their own research can have impact within the third sector, or even how they can become involved in the volunteer-sector while doing their own research. And many are already volunteering with recent statistics about volunteering in Canada showing 15-24 year olds representing the highest percentage of volunteers at 58%, and 35-44 year olds at a close second at 54%. The idea of being a boundary-spanner is also what lead me to develop the Myers Model of Knowledge Mobilization ..."

The Buffalo Bill Center of the West uses CONTENTdm to provide online access to its vast historic archives

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 04:26 AM PST

"The Buffalo Bill Center of the West is located near Yellowstone National Park in Cody, Wyoming. Its purpose is to share the story of the authentic American West, and it is comprised of five different museums. The center's McCracken Research Library has a vast collection of historic items, including unique manuscripts, letters, photographs, audio and video materials and more. Using OCLC's CONTENTdm® Digital Collection Management Software, the library has embarked on a digital initiative to provide online access to many of these unique materials. Online visitors to the center can search a suite of photographic collections and digital documents, conduct research and submit orders for reproductions all at library.centerofthewest.org. Among their unique collections is the William F. Cody collection, which includes a selection of letters, published material, objects and photographs surrounding the life of William F. 'Buffalo Bill' Cody. This collection follows Buffalo Bill from his start as a young frontiersman to his career as a showman and entrepreneur. The characters, artifacts and legends in this collection bring to life the spirit of the American West. The library also has a George Armstrong Custer collection that contains various documents concerning the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The two most prominent items are reports from General Alfred H. Terry to General George Crook, which are the first official mentions of the defeat of Custer at the Little Bighorn battlefield. Library staff at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West continue to digitize their rich collection of historic items from the American West. These projects are made possible by ongoing grant funds, and they help to increase public access and use of these unique materials."

The Internet Archive hopes to boost its collections through funding from the Knight News Challenge » Nieman Journalism Lab

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 03:58 AM PST

"The staff at the Internet Archive is fond of Raiders of the Lost Ark, thanks in no small part to the film's famous final scene. A lowly worker wheeling a crate — which just happens to contain the powerful and face-melting ark of the covenant — through an seemingly endless warehouse that contains the all the wonders of the world. It's a fitting analogy for the Internet Archive, Wendy Hanamura, director of partnerships for the archive tells me. They've spent almost 20 years building an expansive repository of web pages, books, TV, and software. And now, they want to turn the doors open and make it easier for everyone to get involved. 'In some ways, we're opening up that vast warehouse and saying here are the tools to bring together really meaningful collections and expose them to the world,' said Hanamura. The Internet Archive is one of 22 projects receiving funding from Knight Foundation through the Knight News Challenge, which is awarding $3 million towards projects the provide new tools and ideas for making libraries more accessible. The Internet Archive will get $600,000 to develop new technology to give users more control over how materials are uploaded, categorized, and curated in the archive. [Disclosure: Knight is a funder of Nieman Lab, though not through the News Challenge.] Right now, the archive holds around 20 petabytes of data, including 500,000 pieces of software, more than 2 million books, 3 million hours of TV, and 430 billion web pages. In a single day, they digitize more than 1,000 books. They capture TV 24 hours a day. In a week, they save more than 1 billion URLs. As of 2013, only 8 percent of the archive was uploaded by users, some 53,000 people who have accounts with the archive. In order to continue the work of creating 'universal access to all knowledge,' as is the archive's mission, they want to get as many people working on the project as possible. 'To be one of the digital libraries of the future, we're talking at a scope so far beyond a traditional library you could never have enough reference librarians to do the curatorial work,' Hanamura said. It's important and daunting work, whether it's making sure the Wayback Machine is fully updated on a regular basis or preserving our ability to play Oregon Trail. As Jill Lepore pointed out in a recent profile in The New Yorker, the Internet Archive is doing the crucial work of keeping the web from disappearing ..."

Home : npj Science of Learning

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 03:52 AM PST

"npj Science of Learning is a new open access journal, published in partnership between Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and The University of Queensland. As with all titles within the Nature Partner Journals series, npj Science of Learning adheres to a modified set of Nature editorial standards and will publish high-quality open research ..."

UQ and Nature launch new open access journal - UQ News - The University of Queensland, Australia

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 03:16 AM PST

"Nature Publishing Group has partnered with The University of Queensland to publish npj Science of Learning, a new open access research journal that will explore the neurobiology of learning in experimental and educational environments. UQ researcher Professor Pankaj Sah of the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of the new journal. Professor Sah's work centres on understanding the amygdala, an area of the brain involved in emotional processing, and he is Deputy Director (Research) at QBI, and Director of the Australian Research Council's Science of Learning Research Centre (SLRC) ..."

Higher Education News | Hedda - Higher Education Development Association

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 02:53 AM PST

"UNESCO and SciELO have published an anniversary publication to follow up the 15th anniversary of SciELO. SciELO (The Scientific Electronic Library Online) had its origins in Brazil at around 1997 and has since been expanded to 16 additional countries, most in Latin America, the Caribbean, but also including Portugal, South Africa and Spain. In their model, authors do not need to pay or pay very little, being subsidized by public funds. Open access expert Jean-Claude Guédon argued in an article in Nature that with respect to open access this was 'one of the more exciting projects not only from emergent countries, but also in the whole world'. The significance of SciELO in raising the profile was noted already in 2002 in a Nature article.  In 2013, SciELO citation index was also integrated to Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge citation index, and SciELO director commented at the launch taht at the launch that this integration was a milestone in making research from these emerging economies more widely accessible and recognized. The main aim of the anniversary publication is to provide detailed information about the SciELO model as a 'best practice' case for possible implementation in other regions ..."

Revision of the Open Data Handbook 2015 - be a part of it | European Public Sector Information Platform

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 02:46 AM PST

"The Open Knowledge Foundation, in partnership with the Open Data Institute and the World Bank, has announced that there will be a revision of their famous Open Data Handbook released during 2015.  The Open Data Handbook has been an important resource for the open knowledge community since 2011. The handbook introduces and discusses legal, social and technical aspects of open data. It has been used by a wide range of stakeholders, from open data beginners to data wizards, from government officials to journalists and civil society activists. The handbook examines a number of key questions that are relevant to all: what is 'open', why to 'open-up' data, and the how to 'open' data?  The current version of the handbook has been translated into 18 languages, but must now be updated according to the new trends. The new version of the Open Data Handbook will focus mainly on one main type of open data: open government data, but a number of the sections can also be applied to other types of open data.  The launch of the new handbook is a community effort, so there are a number of ways that people can get involved. Anyone can submit stories or comments on the 'alpha' version they are planning to launch in February. For more details, check the entry on the OKF's blog."

Who should we trust? - Scholarly Communications @ Duke

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 02:38 AM PST

"A recent discussion on an e-mail list, about university open access policies, raised the issue of trust.  The participants correctly noted how important it is that there be some level of trust between faculty, administrators and the library (which is usually charged with managing an open access repository once a policy is in place) in order for an open access policy to be adopted and successfully implemented.  Inevitably, the comments brought out the irony that faculty authors often seem very suspicious about administrator motives when debating an OA policy — fearing that someone is trying to 'steal their stuff' — yet are perfectly willing to give that 'stuff,' in its entirety and for no remuneration, to commercial publishers.  And they do this even though it is obvious that commercial publishers do not share the fundamental values of academia about research and access. When one looks a little deeper, it is easy to see, I think, that academic authors do not really trust the commercial publishers either; we hear lots of wry comments about how absurd the current system is, followed by a shoulder-shrug expressing resignation.  It is absurd, but it is what we have got.  "Trust" is probably the wrong word for what authors feel as they give away their work. Perhaps it really is just resignation in the face of how things have been done for hundreds of years.  There was a fine column published recently in the Educause review that encapsulates this scholarly stagnation ..."

As we understand others: RUB researchers in a new Open Access Collection

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 02:33 AM PST

{from Google's English] "It 39 leading philosophers were selected to contribute a main item to the latest development of the philosophy of mind. The collection allows you to access students and researchers around the world free on English-language texts on the subject. It is available at http://www.open-mind.net ..."

President Obama Announces National ‘Precision Medicine Initiative’ | Science News | Autism Speaks

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 02:30 AM PST

"Today, President Obama announced his 'Precision Medicine Initiative,' with a budget request of $215 million for research that will include genomic analysis of one million Americans. The goal, he said, is to transform modern medicine with methods that can tailor therapies to the underlying biology of each patient's needs. 'The promise of precision medicine is to deliver the right treatment at the right time to the right people,' he said. 'Advances in technology mean that these breakthroughs could be just the beginning.' 'Today's announcement is a bold statement and a reflection of the significant development being made in this area of science,' says Autism Speaks President Liz Feld ..."

Continuing the Open Data discussion

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 02:26 AM PST

"GODAN (The Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition initiative) aims to demonstrate the value of open data in agriculture and convince more governments to encourage its availability. During the meeting, a timeline of the history so far was presented together with deliverables ..."

Over 20 research institutions now using altmetrics platform to help track and report on the broader impact of their research - Press Release - Altmetric

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 02:20 AM PST

"Altmetric LLP announce today that over 20 world-leading research institutions have now adopted the Altmetric for Institutions analytics platform to monitor and report on the engagement and attention surrounding their research outputs. First launched in June 2014, the platform aggregates mentions of an institutions' output from a number of non-traditional sources including public policy documents, mainstream and social media, post-publication peer-review and online reference managers ... Representatives from the University of Manchester, ETH Zurich and the University of South Australia, who are also rolling out the platform to their faculty, agree ... The platform is also providing valuable insight for non-academic research institutes ..."

U-M partners to make 25,000 early English books open to the public | University of Michigan News

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 02:15 AM PST

"The texts of the first printed editions of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton as well as lesser-known titles from the early modern era can now be freely read by anyone with an Internet connection. The University of Michigan Library, the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries and ProQuest have made public more than 25,000 manually transcribed texts from the first 200 years of the printed book (1473–1700). These texts, including more than 5,600 from U-M, represent a significant portion of the estimated total output of English-language work published during the first two centuries of printing in England. The release (via Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication) marks the completion of the first phase in the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP). An anticipated 40,000 additional texts are planned for release into the public domain by the end of the decade. What's Available? ..."

@ the Library: Knowledge Unlatched (Open Access e-books) - 12,763 downloads in 6 months

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 02:11 AM PST

"A full report on the Knowledge Unlatched pilot project has recently been published in the Cultural Science Journal.   This report - Knowledge Unlatched: A Global Library Consortium Model for Funding Open Access Scholarly Books' - details the genesis and development of the pilot, as well as providing data on use of the Pilot Collection during its first six months online. Knowledge Unlatched is a collaborative, crowd-funded, model pilot which aims to enable Open Access for scholarly books in the arts and humanities.  Many libraries around the world share a single Title Fee payment to publishers (the cost of publishing a book), in return for a book being made available ('unlatched') via Open Access e-book platforms, such as OAPEN and HathiTrust. Over 300 international libraries have now signed up.  The Library signed up as an early participant.   28 new Humanities and Social Sciences books from important scholarly publishers are included in the pilot, and are listed in SAULCAT. Over the six months, there were 12,763 downloads from 138 countries - demonstrating the global demand for creative new approaches to supporting Open Access for scholarly e-books ..."

Open Library of Humanities (OLH) | Collaborative Librarianship News

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 02:03 AM PST

"LYRASIS is excited to announce a new partnership with the Mellon-funded Open Library of Humanities (OLH), an open access program designed to provide peer-review, publishing, and hosting services for scholarly articles in the humanities. You may have seen the press release that was issued yesterday. The program is funded by annual contributions from libraries to support the creation of open access articles in the OLH mega-journal. As more libraries participate, more articles will be published. OLH will also work with current subscription humanities journals to help them transform their business model into an open access environment. These journals will then become part of the OLH family of journals. Please review the OLH Prospectus for more information. Although not related in any way, OLH is designed to provide for the humanities the type of resource that the Public Library of Science (PLOS) provides for the scientific disciplines. Scientific researchers often have grant funding to support article processing charges (APCs). Humanities scholars typically do not have grant funds to use for this purpose, so an alternative model for open access in the humanities is required. Requested annual contribution levels are as follows ..."

iPhylo: Annotating GBIF, from datasets to nanopublications

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 01:59 AM PST

"Below I sketch what I believe is a straightforward way GBIF could tackle the issue of annotating and cleaning its data. It continues a series of posts Annotating GBIF: some thoughts, Rethinking annotating biodiversity data, and More on annotating biodiversity data: beyond sticky notes and wikis on this topic. Let's simplify things a little and state that GBIF at present is essentially an aggregation of Darwin Core Archive files. These are for the most part simply CSV tables (spreadsheets) with some associated administrivia (AKA metadata). GBIF consumes Darwin Core Archives, does some post-processing to clean things up a little, then indexes the contents on key fields such as catalogue number, taxon name, and geographic coordinates. What I'm proposing is that we make use of this infrastructure, in that any annotation is itself a Darwin Core Archive file that GBIF ingests. I envisage three typical use cases: A user downloads some GBIF data, cleans it for their purposes (e.g., by updating taxonomic names, adding some georeferencing, etc.) then uploads the edited data to GBIF as a Darwin Core Archive. This edited file gets a DOI (unless the user has go one already, say by storing the data in a digital archive like Zenodo). A user takes some GBIF data and enhances it by adding links to, for example, sequences in GenBank for which the GBIF occurrences are voucher specimens, or references which cite those occurrences. The enhanced data set is uploaded to GBIF as a Darwin Core Archive and, as above, gets a DOI. A user edits an individual GBIf record, say using an interface like this. The result is stored as a Darwin Core Archive with a single row (corresponding to the edit occurrence), and gets a DOI (this is a nanopublication, of which more later) ..."

News 2015 - ProQuest Moves 12 Million Pages of History From Archive Box to Search Box in 2014

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 01:56 AM PST

"ProQuest continues to lead worldwide digitization of content that improves research outcomes. In 2014, the company digitized approximately 12 million pages of historical documents, moving them from archive box to search box. The company's expert digitization and curation of vast and varied information is supported with advanced technologies. Now, these rare, previously inaccessible and unconnected documents can be discovered, explored and used by researchers in new and meaningful ways. Via collaborations with libraries, museums and other non-profits, ProQuest digitized content as diverse as French books printed before 1500, declassified documents predating and surrounding the Snowden leaks, and academic video collections. In total, it's the equivalent of a physical stack of documents reaching 5,000 feet -- four times the height of the Empire State Building. Highlights include ..."

Open Economics and what to do | Leading Utopia

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 01:53 AM PST

"A while back I found out about this work group at Open Knowledge. It is a very interesting organization that serves free knowledge ... Open Knowledge has been trying to make data accessible for everyone. Knowledge creates power. It is a great motto. Their foundation is divided by different work groups that have contributed in different ways to the cause. Being mostly academically trained in management/economics, I felt particularly interested in the Open Economics (furthermore as OE) work group. It was a shame that the group was practically dormant, since people had move on to other things in their lives. However, I believe OE can contribute to the cause in many important aspects. So far, the group has created different sets of databases like MetaMetrik, a database that contemplates numerous econometric results. In a more non-technical research, the group has developed a global database[1] that lists all failed banks since there are records of it.  Last, but not least, another well-known project is YourTopia, that basically allows you to run tests according to your criteria, in regard to human development. Even though these seem like small unimportant stuff, this creates a breakthrough in regard to free/accessible knowledge.  This is where I want to work on ..."

Millions spent on consultants for access to information | Ottawa Citizen

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 01:31 AM PST

"The federal government has spent approximately $57 million on outside consultants over the past nine years to help decide which government records Canadians are allowed to obtain. About 60 per cent of that spending, to handle what are called 'access to information' requests, have occurred during the last four years of Conservative rule. The spending is above and beyond that allocated to full-time staff who handle such requests in each department. The spending figures are contained in an order paper question from NDP MP Charlie Angus, although the data are not complete: Some agencies and Crown corporations, such as the CBC and the Public Service Commission, didn't provide numbers in the response, instead directing recipients to the annual reports each files on access to information spending. Under the access to information regime, Canadians can request federal government records and information – which their taxes pay for – although the law allows some information to be withheld, such as data that could compromise national security or breach someone's privacy ... According to the data in the documents, Health Canada and Public Works and Government Services Canada were the two top spenders since 2006, combining to spend just over $18.5 million on outside consultants to handle information requests. Consultants charge between $20 and $225 per hour to review public requests for records and determine what content can be released ..."

Freenet: The forgotten cryptopunk paradise | Zwillingssterns Weltenwald

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 01:18 AM PST

"A long time ago in a chatroom far away, select groups of crypto-anarchists gathered to discuss the death of privacy since the NSA could spy on all communications with ease. Among those who proposed technical solutions was a student going by the name sanity, and he published the widely regarded first paper on Freenet: A decentralized anonymous datastore which was meant to be a cryptopunk paradise: true censorship resistance, no central authority and long lifetime only for information which people were actually interested in. Many years passed, two towers fell, the empire expanded its hunt for rebels all over the globe, and now, as the empire's grip has become so horrid that even the most loyal servants of the emperors turn against them and expose their dark secrets to the masses, Freenet is still moving forward. Lost to the eye of the public, it shaped and reshaped itself - all the while maintaining its focus to provide true freedom of the press in the internet ..."

The Grand Plan to Give Everyone a Free Year of Online College | WIRED

Posted: 02 Feb 2015 12:55 AM PST

"One of the boldest proposals of President Obama's recent State of the Union address was his $60 billion plan to make community college free. And, yes, it's also one of the most controversial.  This month, Klinsky and the non-profit he founded, Modern States Education Alliance, announced the launch of a new initiative called Freshman Year for Free, which aims to make a full range of freshman-level college courses available to anyone for free online. Unlike most so-called massively open online courses or MOOCs, which have sprouted up over the last few years, these courses will directly prepare students for accredited exams like the Advanced Placement test and the College Level Examination Program (or CLEP) exam. That way, after completing the courses, the students can get real college credit—potentially, even a full year's worth ..."
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