http://www.e-book.com.au/freebooks.htm
Free Books
http://users.erols.com/jonwill/freebooks.htm
Directory of Free Online Books
http://www.free-book.co.uk/
Open Access and the Developing World (Resources)
http://www.biomedcentral.com/developingcountries/resources/
The Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org/index.php
The Public Knowledge Project
http://pkp.sfu.ca/
Developing Canada's Intellectual Property Agenda
http://www.jeremydebeer.ca/images/stories/de_beer_and_geist.pdf
Proposed Multilateral Agreement Moving Forward (ACTA)
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0804/S00164.htm
Authors - Licence to publish
http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/authors/licence/
Privacy, Open Access, and the Law
COLLEGE PARK, MD - November 19, 2008 - The International Children's
Digital Library (ICDL) (http://www.childrenslibrary.org), which is thehttp://tinyurl.com/lc8njo ]
world's largest collection of children's literature available freely on
the Internet, today announced the release of the ICDL for iPhone
application.
Available free at Apple's iPhone App Store, the ICDL for iPhone
application allows users to take advantage of the advanced capabilities
of the iPhone and iPod Touch user interface to read a selection of books
from the ICDL's master collection, which today represents thousands of
children's stories from 60 countries. The children's books can be read
in their native language and in English.
The ICDL for iPhone application features ICDL's ClearText technology
which was designed to make it possible for users to read story text
clearly in the context of highly illustrated beautiful children's
picture books -- even on the small mobile screen. The ICDL for iPhone
application will be updated regularly as new books are made available.
Additional features of the ICDL iPhone application include:
Offline reading -- access the International Children's Library to read
on and offline
Online reading -- linkage to the full ICDL collection which has over
3,000 titles in 48 languages representing 60 countries
Simple navigation -- view books with engaging animations quickly
One or two page view -- takes advantage of iPhone's "auto-rotation"
feature
ClearText -- allowing exceptionally clear text in the context of highly
illustrated pages
The ICDL iPhone application syncs via Wi-Fi or the user's cellular
network and downloads the latest featured children's books directly to
the device, giving children and parents access to content offline and in
airplane mode. Compatible with any iPhone or iPod Touch with operating
system version 2.0, the application was designed by International
Children's Digital Library Foundation with support from Zumobi and the
University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab.
[snip]
Links To Full News Release And iPhone App Available At
[
!!! Thanks To Dana Rotman For The HeadsUp !!!
eNjoy!
/Gerry
The University of Adelaide Press website
<http://www.adelaide.edu.au/press> is now live and the first few
http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/
Best
Colin
Colin Steele
Emeritus Fellow
The Australian National University
titles are available for immediate download and for ordering
paperback copies.
The downloadable copies are in PDF format and are identical in
design to the book. While we are waiting for new titles, we are
still keen to re-publish any high quality books of enduring
interest by staff that are a) out of print and b) available in
electronic form for easy re-working.
I have placed a great deal of care in ensuring the design of the
covers and the website itself signals the high standard sought
for the content of these publications and future ones. I am
hoping to have online purchasing facilities in place in a month
or two. Because titles are externally refereed, book published
with the University of Adelaide Press will qualify for the HERDC
(formally DEST)."
>From their webpage " The internet has become an ever increasing
option for university publishing, and if books are made available
freely online, they can attract tens of thousands of readers.
With the option of its free electronic editions, the University
of Adelaide Press aims to attract the maximum level of
dissemination and exposure for the academic writings of our
academics, staff and alumni."
Secondly, further details have emerged from Bloomsbury Academic
as to their commercial Open Access model. The UK Guardian
reported on 12 May:
"New Bloomsbury science series to be available free online
Science, Ethics and Innovation titles pitched at 'proverbial
Guardian reader' will be free of charge on internet, with revenue
sought from hard copies
Sir John Sulston, Nobel prize winner and one of the architects of
the Human Genome Project, has teamed up with Bloomsbury to edit a
new series of books that will look at topics including the ethics
of genetics and the cyber enhancement of humans.
The series will be the first from Bloomsbury's new venture,
Bloomsbury Academic, launched late last year as part of the
publisher's post-Harry Potter reinvention. Using Creative Commons
licences, the intention is for titles in the imprint to be
available for free online for non-commercial use, with revenue to
be generated from the hard copies that will be printed via
print-on-demand and short-run printing technologies.
Publisher Frances Pinter is talking to "very high-level
academics" across the disciplines to build up the list, which she
hopes to reach 200-odd titles a year by 2014, but Sulston and his
colleague John Harris, professor of bioethics at Manchester
University, are the first editors of a series she's signed up.
The books she hopes to publish are intended to appeal to the
"educated layman" as well as to academic circles and should "help
the academic world speak to people who should be listening to
what they have to say," she said today.
Sulston and Harris's series, Science, Ethics and Innovation, will
be aimed "at a very wide market", covering subjects from "the
interplay between science and society, to new technological and
scientific discoveries and how they impact on our understanding
of ourselves and our place in society", and the responsibility of
science to the wider world. Authors they will be looking to
commission will range from academics to policymakers, opinion
formers, those working in commercial scientific roles, "and maybe
even politicians". "They'll be non-technical books which will
appeal to any intelligent person," said Harris. "The proverbial
Guardian reader."
Sulston and Harris's own current research into topics including
genetic ethics and human enhancement is also likely to "find its
way" into the series, said Sulston. "Bloomsbury's is a new
business model and chimes absolutely with something I've been
involved with for years - open access to scientific data," he
said. "We immediately hit common ground with Frances Pinter and
felt if Bloomsbury was keen to go ahead, we were keen to be part
of it."...
The first and only book Bloomsbury Academic has published so far,
Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig's Remix: Making Art and
Commerce thrive in the Hybrid Economy, has been downloaded for
free in 105 countries, said Pinter, but has also been selling
well. "Not everyone has enough money to buy a physical book so
we're delighted we can get Lawrence's message to people who can't
afford the book," she said. "And we're delighted we can sell
books too."
Pinter estimates that Bloomsbury would have to sell around 200
copies of a highly technical monograph, priced at around 50
pounds, to make a profit, but a more commercial title with a
wider appeal and a lower price point would need to sell around
2,000 copies to be worthwhile. "We believe there are enough
people who are willing to purchase a hard copy that we will sell
enough physical books to meet our needs, to cover our costs and
make a modest profit," she said. "But we won't be able to judge
whether [the model is] financially viable for the next two
years." And with academics more and more frequently looking to
publish their work themselves online, Pinter is adamant that "if
publishers are not willing to experiment with models, academics
will bypass publishers".
Sulston, who jointly won a 2002 Nobel prize for discoveries
concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed
cell death, is the perfect launch editor for the series, she
believes. "I've followed what John has been doing and I just
think the world of him," she said. "He's very forward looking in
terms of what we can do with science - cyber enhancement, genetic
manipulation - and all of these things need very sophisticated
public debate."
Bloomsbury Academic website is at:
Open Access: Opportunities and Challenges – a Handbook
A Joint publication of the European Commission and the German Commission for UNESCO, 2008
The English version of the handbook, a joint publication with the European Commission’s Science in Society Programme, has just been published. The publication is available in print and electronic version. The handbook aims to provide information about the opportunities and challenges offered by Open Access, and to present a wide array of issues and positions under debate. The English version of the handbook is a translation of the handbook in German, published by the German Commission for UNESCO in 2007.
Download the Book:
http://www.unesco.de/fileadmin/medien/Dokumente/Kommunikation/Handbook_Open_Access_English.pdf
OR, http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/open-access-handbook_en.pdf
More Details about the book: http://www.unesco.de/openaccess-en.html
- Indian digitization initiatives of centuries old manuscripts "Science Dissemination using Open Access"**
These are:
- Kalasampada: Digital Library Resource for Indian Cultural Heritage (DL-RICH)[http://www.ignca.nic.in/dgt_0001.htm]
- National Databank on Indian Art and Culture [http://www.ignca.nic.in/ndb_0001.htm]
- Kritisampada : National Database of Manuscripts by National Mission for Manuscripts ; http://www.namami.org/our%20programes.htm
- Muktabodha online library of Selected Sanskrit Religious and Philosophical Texts [http://www.muktabodhalib.org/digital_library.htm]
- Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library (KBOPL)Collections http://kblibrary.bih.nic.in/onlinecat.htm
- The Shaiva Manuscripts of Pondicherry ; http://muktalib.org/access_page.htm
- The Institute of Asian Studies Preservation and documentation of Tamil palm-leaf manuscripts [http://www.xlweb.com/heritage/asian/palmleaf.htm]
You can also get more detailed information on the South Asian initiatives in the following book:
"Open Access to Knowledge and Information: Scholarly Literature and Digital Library Initiatives – The South Asian Scenario"
This Book describes successful digital library and open access initiatives in the South Asia region that are available in the forms of digital archives, open courseware, open access journals, metadata harvesting services, national-level open access repositories and institutional repositories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Anup Kumar Das
New Delhi, India
http://www.anup-jnu.blogspot.com
The ICTP Science Dissemination Unit (SDU) is pleased to announce
the release of the new free book:
"Science Dissemination using Open Access".
It can be downloaded for free, or seen on-line at the website:
The book is a compendium of selected literature on Open Access, both
on the technical and organizational levels, and was written in an
effort to guide the scientific community on the requirements of Open
Access, and the plethora of low-cost solutions available. The book
also aims to encourage decision makers in academia and research
centers to adopt institutional and regional Open Access Journals
and Archives to make their own scientific results public and fully
searchable on the Internet. Discussions on open publishing via
Academic Webcasting are also included.
The book is an effort by ICTP-SDU (Italy) in collaboration with CERN
(Switzerland) enabled by the support of INASP (UK).
By releasing this work under a Creative Commons license, the Editors hope to
disseminate it as widely as possible, bringing this information into the
hands of people who need it most.
Our sincere thanks go to the many contributors/authors of the
Open Access literature selected for the book. We have given
proper attribution to the author(s) of each section and/or
chapter included in this work. In particular we would like to
acknowledge the contributions of Philip Bourne (PLoS), Leslie
Carr (ePrints.org), Richard D. Jones (HP Labs), Ismael
Pen-a-Lope'z (Univ. Oberta de Cataluya), Kevin Stranac (OJS,
Public Knowledge Project), Peter Suber (Earlham College) Imma
Subirats (FAO), Jens Vigen (CERN) and everyone else who has made
this project possible.
Cordially yours,
E. Canessa, M. Zennaro
The University of Michigan Library is pleased to announce that records from
our MBooks collection are available for OAI harvesting. The MBooks
collection consists of materials digitized by Google in partnership with the
University of Michigan.
Only records for MBooks available in the public domain are exposed. We have
split these into sets containing public domain items according to U.S.
copyright law, and public domain items worldwide. There are currently over
100,000 records available for harvesting. We anticipate having 1 million
records available when the entire U-M collection has been digitized by
Google.
In conjunction, we have released our open-source OAI toolkit on SourceForge.
This toolkit contains both harvester and data provider, both written in
Perl.
For questions about the project, please contact dlps-help@umich.edu.
Haven't checked these out yet. Hence no annotation.
http://print.google.com
http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=free_download
FHSST (Free High School Science Texts) is a project that aims to provide free science and mathematics textbooks for Grades 10 to 12 science learners in South Africa.
http://www.fhsst.org/
The goal is to create a free library of 1,000 electronic textbooks for students in the developing world
The library will cover the range of topics typically encountered in the first two years of a university's undergraduate programs
The global academic community and global corporations will be engaged in creating and sponsoring this library
http://globaltext.org/
HSRC Press is South Africa's open access publisher committed to the dissemination of high quality social science research based publications, in print and electronic form. The Press publishes the research output of the Human Science Research Council and externally authored works. A formal peer-review process guarantees the highest academic quality and the Press has a very active local and international marketing programme, in addition to collaborating with foreign publishers on specific titles
http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/
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