Monthly Archives: September 2008

Open Access under threat for the NIH?

Ars Technica reports on the passage of HR6845 into the House of Representatives. Titled “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act”, this bill could well damage the efforts of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US make publicly funded research work open access. The only people who “benefit” from this in the short term […]

Digitizing events – Google and partners digitize newspapers

Google are working with various publishing partners to digitize newspapers from, it appears, Canada and North America. As Punit Soni, the product manager for the programme, writes: “This effort is just the beginning. As we work with more and more publishers, we’ll move closer towards our goal of making those billions of pages of newsprint […]

Why Eric Ringmar is wrong…

I’ve been sitting on this for a bit and mulling it. BoingBoing ran an article to Professor Eric Ringmar who is using tools to “open” documents up which were private or held behind closed walls, ‘cleans’ the document by removing licenses and posts the new version on public sites. Whilst the ambition to open data […]

A brief history of free software

Just heard about this piece by Aaron Swartz on the history of free software and its tenets which is clear and entertaining. Definitely one for the book marks.