Grassroots environmental heroes too often go unrecognized. Yet their efforts to protect the world’s natural resources are increasingly critical to the well-being of the planet we all share.

The winners include:

• Raoul du Toit, Zimbabwe, black rhino conservation
• Dmitry Lisitsyn, Russia, ecosystem protection from petroleum development
• Ursula Sladek, Germany, renewable power
• Prigi Arisandi, Indonesia, clean water & protection against industrial pollution
• Hilton Kelley, United States, environmental justice in the Gulf Coast
• Francisco Pineda, El Salvador, citizen organizing against gold mining

Be prepared to be inspired!

A lot of folks have been moved and inspired by Brown’s work, including Garr Reynolds, presentation guru, who wrote a response, relating the themes of Brown’s talk to our goals when giving presentations: “connection, engagement, authenticity, and passion.”

Eden Sawczenko used to recoil when other little girls held her hand and turned stiff when they hugged her. This year, the 4-year-old autistic girl began playing with a robot that teaches about emotions and physical contact – and now she hugs everyone.

And Eden’s progress is attributed to Kaspar, a robot designed by researchers at the University of Hertfordshire as part of the AuRoRa Project, whose goal is to study “if and how robots can become a ‘toy’ that might serve an educational or therapeutic role for children with autism.” Looks like they’re making progress!

The census, carried out over ten years, was an impressively massive effort involving:

A DECADE OF DISCOVERY
2,700 scientists
80+ nations
540 expeditions
US$ 650 million
2,600+ scientific publications
6,000+ potential new species
28 million distribution records and counting

Much of the census research is freely available in different forms on the site, including research articles published in PLoS ONE. The site is a treasure trove that yields new and fascinating information with each visit.

Many of you probably know about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or gyre, but you may not know that up to 11 plastic garbage gyres have been found in the world’s oceans. The folks at 5Gyres are committed to eliminating the five largest subtropical garbage patches. And Cohen argues that the only way to achieve this is to stop generating the tons and tons of single-use plastic that we consume each day. The solution starts with consumers; the solution starts with each of us.

What will you refuse today?

Jim sporting the OA t-shirt he won during last year’s Open Access Week.

• The current system puts students from smaller schools at a disadvantage: due to the staggering price of journal subscriptions, not even the largest, most well-funded institutions can provide their students with the complete scholarly record. Students at smaller or less well-funded colleges and universities must make do with their fraction of access their library can afford. Students at community colleges, who are a significant portion of students in higher education, suffer even more severely.
• Researching beyond the degree: many students, especially on the graduate level, pursue degrees in order to become qualified researchers. Whether they become professors, doctors, lawyers, or entrepreneurs, they will continuously rely on access to research in order to make an impact in their respective field. Yet, students’ access to journals expires along with their library card at graduation. If they take a job at another university, that institution may have a very different level of access than what they need, and if they take a job outside of the university setting, they will no longer have the library to provide them any access to journals.

These are just a few of the reasons; there are more worth considering. Take a few minutes today to learn why open access is important to you. Stop by the library, read the OA handouts, and enter our raffle to win gift certificates to Donna’s or Hannaford.

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

The best OA introduction is still Open Access 101 from SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). This great animated video (~3 minutes), explains the scholarly information landscape and why we need open access:

Be sure to stop by the Library between now and Friday to pick up information about Open Access, chat with your librarian, and enter our Open Access raffle. And stay tuned to RFoD for more information throughout the week.

The exemption on the cracking of CSS [content scrambling system] now extends to all college and university instructors, as well as students in film and media studies courses, and the permitted “educational uses” now include critical commentary and documentary production, as well as the exceptionally broad category of “non-commercial videos.”

This is good news for a number of our faculty who use digital media in their courses and for other projects, as before these exemptions it had been illegal to extract clips from DRM-protected media, even if they were for use in class and even though use in class would be legal otherwise.

Another Profhacker post by Jason Mittell goes into more detail about implications for teaching and research, including that faculty across all disciplines can now rip clips and do it for use beyond the classroom, such as conference presentations and publications.

If you agree that this is wicked good news, be sure to thank the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who were responsible for a lot of the legwork behind this fair use victory.