Post Tagged with: "open access"

Swartz’s Death Places Spotlight on More Open Access To Information

The Internet community has been reeling for the past week as it grapples with the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a prominent digital rights activist who left a remarkable legacy for a 26-year old. Swartz’s contributions are used by millions of people every day as he played a key role in developing the specifications for RSS (which makes it easy to syndicate online content), Creative Commons licences (which makes is easy to make creative works freely available), and the popular website Reddit.

My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that while much of the immediate focus has centered on mental health issues, draconian computer crime laws, and the bewildering prosecution of Swartz for downloading millions of academic articles – a U.S. prosecutor was seeking as much as 35 years in jail despite the fact that Swartz did not benefit from the downloads and the source of the articles did not want to pursue legal action – the more notable legacy was his effort to make information more openly and freely available.

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January 22, 2013 9 comments Columns

Swartz’s Death Places Spotlight on More Open Access To Information

Appeared in the Toronto Star on January 20, 2013 as Internet Activist Death Places Spotlight on More Open Access to Information The Internet community has been reeling for the past week as it grapples with the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a prominent digital rights activist who left a remarkable legacy […]

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January 22, 2013 Comments are Disabled Columns Archive

New CIHR Open Access Policy Takes Effect

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research have launched a new open access policy that took effect on January 1st.  The new policy requires CIHR funded researchers to make their peer-reviewed publications freely available within 12 months of publication. Moreover, researchers are now required to deposit certain data immediately upon publication […]

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January 2, 2013 9 comments News

BC Government Launches Open Textbook Initiative

The BC government has become the first Canadian province to launch an open textbook initiative, committing to 40 new online, open textbooks for 40 popular post-secondary courses. The open texts can be freely accessed and modified and could be in use for the 2013-14 academic year.

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October 17, 2012 1 comment News

The Dramatic Growth of Open Access

Heather Morrison posts an update of her ongoing series on the dramatic growth of open access, pointing to the development of open access infrastructure (institutional repositories), a massive increase in the number of journals offering free access, and the million movies now available at the Internet Archive.

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October 10, 2012 1 comment News