I dropped the “NC” from my Creative Commons License

In the sharing of ideas, what Rundle, Nowviskie, and I really want—and, I’ll warrant, what most scholars really want—is simply proper attribution.

Attacking academic values

Nature Publishing Group — is telling all authors at Duke that they must obtain a waiver of the policy before their accepted articles can be published.

Today at Elseviergate; more potholes and “bumps” on the “shared journey”; please help us find paywalled OpenAccess Elsevier

It’s easy (if tedious) to find paywalled Open Access articles in Elsevier journals. You go to Robert Kiley’s excellent spreadsheet (curated by Michelle Brook and others) , find publisher = Elsevier , search for the title and go to the journal pages. Here I show how

Elsevier Still Charging For Open Access Copies, Two Years After It Was Told Of The Problem

For some reason, Elsevier seems to take delight in being hated by the academic world. Its support for the awful Research Works Act back in 2012 led to a massive boycott of the company by researchers. More recently, it has cracked down on academics posting PDFs of their own research. Now Peter Murray-Rust, one of the leading campaigners for open access, has caught Elsevier at it again.

Open-source textbooks have merit

Several students complain every year – for good reason – about the exorbitant prices charged for textbooks. If there were any way to reduce this unbelievable cost to students, it should be implemented immediately.

Editorial: To combat costs, some universities are moving to open-source textbooks

College students are no strangers to shelling out hundreds of dollars for textbooks every semester. Even thrifty students find that used books will cost them greatly if they’re lucky enough to be able to get them. Students who are required to have “UConn editions” or “new editions” of books often see their bank accounts dwindle at the beginning of the semester. Often many students forgo purchasing textbooks or prowl around for an illicit online edition.

College Textbooks May Become Free at the University of Maryland

New strategy would drop college textbook costs to zero

USM holds pilot in which students use free 'open-source' textbooks put together by their professors

Open source hardware takes flight

University course teaches computer-human interaction with open hardware and OSS

ROS - the open source Robotic Operating System

Brian Gerkey wanted a common robotic control language. Taking inspiration from the LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Python) open source tools in the 1990s Brian worked to develop ROS, the Robot Operating System. ROS is an open source kit of tools, libraries and programming conventions for programming robots.

Ten open source hard ware projects to allegedly save the Earth

*Open Source is always promising to build a “whole new economy.” There’s a rather well-established open-source economy nowadays that’s neither whole nor new. Why keep saying this? It’s like promising Zen enlightenment without knowing that you still have to chop wood and carry water.

*The genuinely new development in Open Source is an open resistance to open-source by established power players. What’s especially new and different is the bitter, politicized, statehouse and working-class resistance to commercial Big Sharing efforts such as Uber and AirBnB. Distributing access to knowledge isn’t gonna be the problem any more — politics is gonna be the problem.

Testing and tinkering with the Arduino Starter Pack

Book of fun and easy electronics projects

"When you go to a store and buy an electronic gizmo, does it ever occur to you that you could make one yourself? Or even that it would be FUN to make one yourself?" This is how John Baichtal's Arduino for Beginners: Essential Skills Every Maker Needs begins, and that same curiosity and ingenuity flows through the entire book.

Leveraging Open Source for Your UI at EE Live!

TinyCircuits for big projects with small open hardware needs

Facebook loses its open-source-hardware chief to the startup life

Facebook’s open-source-hardware champion, Frank Frankovsky, has left the building.

In a personal Facebook post, Frankovsky, who headed up the ambitious Open Compute Project and ran Facebook’s own hardware design, announced that he’s leaving to start his own company.