Interview with BioOne's Mark Kurtz by Richard Poynder.

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Historically, peer-reviewed journals were published by scientific societies on a non-profit basis. Today scholarly publishing is dominated by a handful of large commercial publishers focused on maximising their profits. This has left small society publishers struggling to survive and libraries unable to afford all the journals they need. Unable to compete with commercial publishers, many societies have given up and sold or outsourced their publishing activities to them - a decision that inevitably leads to a rise in the price of their journals. Some, however, have sought survival by banding together and creating online collections of their combined journal portfolios. This is the objective of the Learned Journals Collection; and it is the aim of BioOne, which currently provides online access to 167 titles from 126 different non-profit bioscience publishers.

[See also: Open Access Scholarly Publishing - The Enclosure of the Academic Commons ]

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Jean-Francois Noubel: A Practical Guide to Collective Intelligence.

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Abstract

The main stakes for humanity are not hunger, poverty, sustainability, peace, healthcare, education, economy, natural resources… but our capability to build new social organizations that are able to solve them. Our main stake is Collective Intelligence.

This is a key issue in the corporate world as well. Today most large companies come up against insurmountable difficulties when dealing with the complexity, the holistic view and systemic thinking, the unexpectedness of the markets, the conflicts of interest between profitability and sustainability, secrecy and openness, values and value, individual and collective levels, knowledge fertilizing and competition.

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Alice Atkinson-Bonasio: No Such Thing as Free?

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INTRODUCTION: LAND OF THE FREE

If goods and services become more valuable as they become more plentiful, and if they become cheaper as they become valuable, then the natural extension of this logic says that the most valuable things of all should be those that are ubiquitous and free. Ubiquity drives increasing returns in the network economy, the question becomes, what is the most cost-effective way to achieve ubiquity? And the answer is: give things away. Make them free. (Kelly, 1998;57)

For IP poor countries, traditionally disadvantaged in the bargains of international trade agreements, diplomatic pressures and lobbies from powerful multinationals, it is much easier to embrace the idea that Kelly outlines above. The concept of free, especially free information, comes naturally to such countries, resonating with what Boyle describes as a "push in the direction of free availability and transmission." (1996;174)

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