Open Access Books


 

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

 

 

These are:

 

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:

 

http://sdu.ictp.it/openaccess/book.html

 

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.

 

 

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/o/oai/oai?verb=Identify

 

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.

 

 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/umoaitoolkit/

 

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/