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Before Open lit Access bookworms were putting their lives at risk (on wonky ladders) to get the latest research; The bookworm by Carl Spitzweg

Everybody who has ever published anything on the Internet – or has been quoted there – seems to be going crazy about copyright and intellectual property rights these days. This seems understandable given the lack of control an author has over their material once it’s ‘out there’. The copyright discussion raises all kinds of issues about the material value of ideas and ways of trading them. Are Google books allowed to digitise books without their authors’ permission? Do online press reviews, such as the German Perlentaucher, have to pay newspapers for the extracts they use? And are bloggers allowed to reproduce lengthy quotes from other people’s works on their websites? And what about alternative publishing models for material that traditionally has electronic cigarettes been hard to come by, such as academic research?

The rise of Open Access publication is a relatively recent development in the bad credit auto loans academic community. It is based on the principle of making up-to-date research freely available to everyone interested without any subscription fees for journals or technical impediments. There are two alternative ways of going about it: either via specific Open Access journals, or via an author’s website no no hair removal or Open Access repositories that take articles previously published elsewhere.

Open Access has much to recommend itself and should be welcomed by academic researchers, scholars and scientists all over the world. It’s particularly useful to academics in developing countries who are often cut off from up-to-date research for lack of resources, and for independent researchers without access to the research infrastructure of a university. It also helps distribute research results faster and therefore creates higher impacts.

Consequently, Christoph Drösser recently argued in the German weekly Die Zeit that scientists and scholars often do not consider open access to their texts a copyright infringement. On the contrary, many researchers would feel constricted by the lack of paleo freely accessible material: “Scientists put every effort into their research being published in one of the (top-of-the-line) Bugatti journals whose annual subscription rates can cost their own libraries five-digit euro sums,” he writes. “The researchers never see the bill for these journals, however, and bachelorette party supplies their currency is not the euro but the journal’s ‘impact factor’ – reflecting how often articles published here are quoted elsewhere. The number of publications in such scientific flagships can be decisive for a researcher’s career, Wire Shelves and for this they are ready to give up their copyrights. They only start getting huffy when they can no longer access an article from their computer at work because their library can no longer afford the subscription.”

So Open Access, it seems, is academic heaven. It is part of the ultimate democratisation ppi reclaim of knowledge. Open Access (arguably) is for academics what Wikipedia is for their first-year students: a quick, reliable and free source of information that saves you the arduous trip to the library and allows you to access up-to-date research from your computer anywhere, or is it?

Drösser might have been k2 incense too optimistic about academics’ selfless attitude towards furthering knowledge distribution and less aware of their selfish gene. Bugattis might be expensive, showy and environmentally totally unsound, but lots of people still want to have one. They don’t want a small Seat Ibiza, a VW Polo, or a Honda Civic HDMI switch Hybrid. Research by Munich’s LMU university in Germany and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in the US has shown that while most researchers welcome the fast and easy reputation management access to information Open Access offers, few in turn are willing to offer their material for online publication.

This ‘double standard’, as Florian Mann, Benedikt von Walter, Thomas Hess and Rolf T. Wigand call it, arises from the pressure of research evaluations that form the basis for the distribution of academic funding. For the dishing out of research money still depends on what the assessors consider the “reputation” of academic journals, even though the criteria that make the reputation of a journal can be quite obscure and were most likely established by the same buy backlinks cliques of senior academics whose self-perpetuating elites have long excluded working-class students and minorities from the higher echelons of the academic classes.

However this may be, as long as academics are afraid to jeopardise their careers by publishing online and in ‘low-life’ journals the idea of Open Access won’t take off. So I suggest – and you won’t hear me say that often: do it like the Germans. Offer a scrapping premium for dirty old Bugattis and let people buy small, environmentally friendly Joann Fabrics coupons Volkswagens instead. Long live the free exchange of ideas! VWs for everyone!   Gaby Mahlberg

But academics are beginning to realise that there is more mileage from the VWs than from the Bugattis in terms of recognition of fast cash loans their work as ringtones for iphone usage statistics are now starting to demonstrate. And there are now 4035 OA journals to publish in – some with the highest of standards – and millions of OA refereed published articles now available from the >1300 institutional repositories. Moreover, 76 prestigious organisations (Harvard, MIT, Wellcome Trust, all Uk Research Councils . . .) require their funded publications to be maade OA. So, yes, long live the free exchange of ideas!

April 6th, 2009

„Na How to Lose Weight Fast endlich, die Twitter-Wall ist an!“ ruft der junge Mann und läuft die Stufen im Halbdunkel des Berliner Friedrichstadtpalasts hinunter. Auf der Videowand the diet solution diet der Bühne des großen Saals laufen farbige Kästchen mit Twitter-Tweets in kleiner Schrift von oben nach unten, die mit #rp09 gehashtagged und über einen speziellen Channel sichtbar gemacht werden. Sehr zur Freude der zahlreich anwesenden Blogger, Netzaktivisten und Techies, die sich zur dritten re:publica, der Konferenz für Social Media und digitale Gesellschaft zusammengefunden haben. Das Motto: Shift acne scars happens. Passend dazu heißt das Panel, zu dem Spreeblick-Gründer und re:publica-Mitveranstalter Johnny Haeusler geladen hat: „Medienwelt im Wandel“. Doch noch ahnen weder die Podiumsmitglieder noch Moderator Haeusler, dass die Wall, Property Malaysia die jetzt kurz vor Diskussionsbeginn noch als nettes Gimmick im Raum steht, die Veranstaltung gleich gehörig durcheinander wirbeln wird.

Noch ist es ruhig auf dem Podium, im Hintergrund leuchten die Bricks der Twitter-Wall… Foto: Daniel Seiffert

Haeusler ist verständlicherweise zunächst mal nur froh darüber, dass endlich das WLAN funktioniert, das den ganzen Vormittag auf Deutschlands größten Blogger-Konferenz ausfiel – irgendwie so wie Bundesliga-Fußball ohne Ball, oder Formel 1 ohne Benzin – und erklärt die technischen Details. Ein Raunen geht durch den Saal. Erstmal Twittern! RBB-Programmbereichsleiter Helmut Lehnert, der bei Radio Fritz in den 90er Jahren sundance spa covers immerhin als einer der ersten eine Online-Sparte aufbaute, kann sich nur schwer für den neuen Trend zum Twittern begeistern. Die Meldung über einen Flugzeugnotlandung auf den Hudson River in Echtzeit zu erfahren, sei kein Wert an sich. Und wie durch ein Wunder ist die Twitter-Wall auch erstmal von der Bildfläche verschwunden – abgeschaltet.

Dezember 10th, 2008

Jonas Mekas, one of the most important experimental film-makers of the home loans 20th century, a Lithuanian who emigrated to the United States in the 1950ies, likes youtube. Because it works in the same way in which he has worked all his life. Conserving “glimpses of beauty”. Of course, this is a very optimistic view about youtube. But thanks to youtube, we can see some parts of Mekas’ 365 days diary film project, for which he filmed something each day, showing the waves at the Mediterranean in Southern France, but also quoting the Kabbalah: evil is non-movement. This wisdom is like a fire-starter for change, for trying new things, for chiropractic marketing not being afraid of making mistakes. Because mistakes are movement and movement is better than stand-still. Jonas Mekas likes to see the simplicity, honesty and depth of life that surrounds and enters his own life, he is an every-day-priest. Let’s change our minds – if Obama doesn’t, at least we can! Carpet Cleaning London Nikola Richter
The mood among antiques traders on London’s Portobello Road market is low. People simply don’t buy antique furniture any more. And there’s a number of reasons why. “It’s the currency, it’s the internet, it’s the economic climate, it’s the dollar,” says Judy Fox, who owns an antiques Medigap Plans shop on Portobello Road. Most of all, people’s taste has changed. “People now go for the minimalist styles,” she complains. They buy the cheaper, plain modern flat-pack furniture. “Especially young people don’t want antique furniture any more,” Fox says. “Adverse auction sale publicity,” of what has been dubbed “dismal brown furniture,” doesn’t catalogues help the falling prices, according to the Antique Dealer & Collectors Guide website

Even people with old family heirlooms don’t restore them any more. “They just try Crossfit Denver to sell them off,” says Michael Barham, who owns the shop next door to Fox’s. However, he thinks it’s a shame, as many of the old pieces are of good workmanship. “The quality of all these things is amazing,” he says as he points at a late 19th-century desk. “This desk costs around 200 pounds (397 dollars). If car insurance you had that newly made in website hosting the same quality, it would couette bambou cost you 1,800 blu cigs coupon pounds (3570 dollars).”Barham’s shop specialises mainly in post-1900 to pre-Second World War items. So many pieces sell in the lower hundreds. Only Victorian furniture is still more expensive, he says.

Yet, even those who are still interested in antiques, no longer buy as much as they used to. Although thousands of tourists work their way through the arcades and around the little stalls of the world’s largest antiques market in London’s colourful Notting Hill area, only few Denver Divorce Attorney of them are here to spend large amounts of money. They come in and look around, and then they leave again, Fox says. Instead, collectors now buy a lot from specialist internet sites, who offer everything from delivery to restoration services online, and they have a broad range. Internet auction sites, such as eBay, have also contributed to the decline of antiques shops, Barham thinks, although the prices some items of furniture fetch online seem out of proportion with their real value. Vietnamese translation “People pay spectacular prices for things that aren’t worth it,” he says. “Many people who buy on eBay really don’t know what they’re doing,” he adds.

But one of the worst problems for shop owners, such as Fox and Barham, is the strength of the pound against the dollar, as many of their traditional customers have been wealthy US citizens looking to take home something special from their European travels. “The US market is still relatively conservative,” Barham says. Customers from the US like things that are old. But they can’t afford them any more. “There’s a complete lack of them [US customers] now,” Fox says, while a young US couple with a child is looking at an oak letter box from the 1870s worth some 3,000 pounds. But they leave without making a purchase. “The dollar is too weak,” Fox says, and the trottinette freestyle economic situation in the United States spills over into Britain. “I would [buy something] if the dollar-rate was cheap car insurance any different. But it’s just too expensive for me here,” says Mary Ruschmeier, a teacher from Florida, who currently lives in Germany, as she leaves the shop empty-handed. “So far Cell Phone Accessories I’ve only bought a little medal for a student of mine for 2 pounds, that’s about 4 dollars. That’s all,” Ruschmeier says.

Nevertheless, Americans still like tradition. “We like old things in the States,” says Joe from Pennsylvania, who now lives in the British Cotswolds and prefers not to give his surname. “If you have something from the 17th century, that’s really special. And if we have something that our mother has passed down to us, then we’re really proud,” he says. Ruschmeier agrees. “Yes, if we bring something back from the 17th century, that’s great. It’s ‘wow’, because we don’t have those things,” she says. But for today, they might have bought enough, Joe says, adding, “We’re just here to get off Leicester Square, where all the other American tourists are.” Gaby Mahlberg
Freitag-Herausgeber Jakob Augstein verteidigt indes sein neues Konzept des Community-Journalismus, das bloggende Leser als Autoren der Zeitung einbindet, preist dies als „gehaltvolleres Bloggen“ und mutmaßt: „Vielleicht fällt die Zeitung irgendwann mal weg.“ Er bricht zudem eine Lanze für den professionellen investigativen Journalismus, der nötig sei, um Politik und Macht zu kontrollieren, die wahre Meinung ja komme aus der Zeitung und nicht aus dem Netz. Stimmt, der Freitag ist ja mit zweitem Namen auch „das Meinungsmedium“. Leuten mit Macht sei die Blogosphäre egal, nölt Augstein und überhaupt: Das Netz sei diesbezüglich eigentlich noch ziemlich irrelevant.
Das Publikum ist nun heiß gelaufen und tippt mit links Kurzmitteilungen ins Iphone und mit rechts Tweets ins Netbook. Hinter dem schon sichtlich genervten RBB-Mann Lehnert, der sich in seinem Twitter-Diss zu Beginn bestätigt sieht und die Wall als unfair abkanzelt, fährt sogleich ein „Heul doch“ hinter seinem Rücken herab. Die Wall sei eben kein „back channel“, sondern ein „in your back channel“, wie einer in dem Fall treffend und oldschool per SMS bemerkt. Nachdem auch Moderator Johnny Haeusler realisiert hat, dass diskutieren, dem Publikum zuhören und Wall-Lesen nicht gleichzeitig funktionieren kann, regt er an, dass man das nächste Mal die Wall vielleicht mit einem großen Monitor vor dem Podium sichtbar machen sollte. Genau, und in Zukunft sollten wir die Tweets dann auch per Wii-Control an die Wand werfen können – oder gleich in die Gesichter der Diskutierenden – ganz ohne hashtags und Channel. Shift happens eben!  Andreas Bock
He is hailed as a Saviour: Barack Obama, the new president of the United States of America. The European press greets him as „Messiah“ or as „our Hussein“, the man who will hcg diet drops bring peace and hope and prosperity to all – Americans. Maybe also to the world. The cover stretch marks pictures show him as a solitary hero walking up the stairs of the Capitol, with a clear vision, a warm smile and concentration facing Future, the Things Yet to Come. Everybody seems to trust him already, although he has not yet done much, instead of speaking and motivating the young and old, white and black, rich and poor – but this he does very well indeed. And these achievments are admirable already, in these instable times. Plastic Bins Obama shots rather remind of movie heros like Will Smith in „I am legend“ or Keanu Reeves in „Matrix“ than of a politician with two wars to end (Iraq and Afghanistan), a financial crisis to solve and climate issues to tackle. But look at him: He is positive and reflexive, so that you do not need to worry. He is a model for each of us. Here comes the man who will save the world from harm. He might not know all the details of the plan yet – this is part of the suspense. But be assured that he denver injury attorney has capacities and abilities that have made him the Chosen. You physical therapy Seattle only need to believe in a happy end. And don’t forget to get some popcorn – it’s good for the economy. Shush now, the free ipad movie starts… Nikola Richter