Berkman Buzz: January 6, 2012

The journal Research in Learning Technology has switched its approach from closed to open access as of New Year’s 2012. Congratulations to the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and its Central Executive Committee for this farsighted move.

This isn’t the first journal to make the switch. The Open Access Directory lists about 130 of them. In my own research field, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) converted its flagship journal Computational Linguistics to OA as of 2009, and has just announced a new open-access journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Each such transition is a reminder of the trajectory that journal publishing ought to head.

"It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it." — Alan Kay
Hugo Van Vuuren (@hugovanvuuren)

On January 1st, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonthan put into place a reform that he and key ministers have been discussing for years: he ended a 20-year old subsidy that kept Nigeria’s petrol prices the lowest on the continent.... By Tuesday, the 3rd, protesters in Lagos were blocking access to petrol stations and shutting down stretches of motorways by building and burning barricades. On the 4th, protesters in Kano shut down petrol stations and threatened to burn down a newspaper they believed was supporting the removal of the subsidy.

By now, it is a given that many journalists have a regular presence on social networking services. The value of social media for gathering information, developing the journalist’s public persona, and promoting the journalist’s work is well-recognized. And although many news outlets have established guidelines and policies regarding behavior on social media, most outlets still permit journalists substantial discretion as to the tone and content of their tweets and posts.

Special concerns arise, however, when you use social media to promote articles that have been vetted by your attorneys. To understand these concerns, it helps to understand more about what media lawyers are looking for when we perform prepublication review of an article.

Feinstein+13 bill to reverse #NDAA; only prevents secret interpretations of authorizations. http://bit.ly/v4kHDF It's a start.
Yochai Benkler (@ybenkler)

We recently held a small technical working meeting in Cambridge that brought together a group of talented colleagues from libraries and non-profits with excellent technical minds working on commercial products to collectively brainstorm a rough outline for a generative DPLA platform. Coming out of this productive meeting, we are pleased to say that the initial development phase of the common core platform (between now and April 2012) will be led by an interim development team drawn from existing Harvard Library and Berkman Center staff, in regular consultation with the Steering Committee and Technical Aspects workstream.

Since Mohamed Bouazizi, a young Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire in the small city of Sidi Bouzid on December 2010, a wave of unprecedented popular protests is sweeping the Arab world. The region has seen unprecedented events that no one could ever imagine witnessing in a lifetime. Three Arab dictators have been toppled, some others forced to engage in reforms, while in other places the confrontation is proving to be painful and bloody.

In any case, 2011 is likely to remain engraved in the history of the Arab world as the year when people started raising against their oppressive regimes. As we bid farewell to 2011 and look ahead to 2012, we asked our authors to share with you pictures that in their eyes have marked the past year in their respective countries. The following selection represents their choices.