The book is part of the effort that the ICTP Science Dissemination Unit is doing to promote Open Access as a driver for development (including the Using Open Access Models for Science Dissemination seminar), being a means to enable knowledge diffusion within, towards and from developing countries, by leveraging the potential that open access specially brings to science both at the institutional and individual levels.

The book’s concept is to be a practical tool to steward the open access paradigm with real examples and by also providing actual solutions to most common problems. Hence, it is divided in two parts:

• Part 1, with selected literature about the main concepts and some best practices and reflections on the opportunities that open access can bring to science and scholars in developing countries,
• Part 2, with a list and how-to explanations on how to install and implant open access procedures and software.

I want to thank Enrico Canessa and Marco Zennaro for giving me the opportunity to contribute to the book with a paper of mine. Here entitled Web 2.0 and Open Access, it is an adaptation of my former article The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access for development published in Knowledge for Management Journal.

The book, following the line of previous joined efforts between the ICTP and Rob Flickenger (see below), is fully accessible online under a Creative Commons license.

More information

• Science Dissemination using Open Access, official website
• Canessa, E. & Zennaro, M. (Eds.) (2008). Science Dissemination using Open Access. A compendium of selected literature on Open Access. Trieste: ICTP.
• Flickenger, R. (Ed.) (2006). How To Accelerate Your Internet. Morrisville: INASP/ICTP
• Flickenger, R., Aichele, C. E., Fonda, C., Forster, J., Howard, I., Krag, T. & Zennaro, M. (2006). Wireless Networking in the Developing World. Morrisville: Limehouse Book Sprint Team
• Peña-López, I. (2008). “Web 2.0 and Open Access”. In Canessa, E. & Zennaro, M. (Eds.), Science Dissemination using Open Access. A compendium of selected literature on Open Access, Chapter 11, 97-112. Trieste: ICTP

Map/Diagram

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Readings

The whole set of names is quite eerie — for a social scientist like me — but once read you realize this is a very interesting workshop on scientific diffusion in developing countries, being ICT4D a deepest commitment of the organizers.

As you can see in the programme, I’ll be teaching three seminars, namely:

• Conferences 2.0: Scientists and Web 2.0, where I’ll speak about the change of paradigm in scholarly communication, mainly inspired by my Conferences 2.0 article in July
• Web 2.0 and the Digital Divide, where I will try to summarize everything I learned and thought about while in the Web2forDev Conference in Rome last September
• The Personal Research Portal, where we’ll try to put into practice — even if just slightly — my reflections published in my article The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access for development

I have to sincerely thank Marco Zennaro for insisting that the Conferences 2.0: Scientists and Web 2.0 speech became the keynote/opening session speech, which really, really, really honors me so much. As I’ve been asked to provide a summary to publicize the speech, I wonder whether this session will be open to anyone. Hence, here comes the outline:

Conferences 2.0: Scientists and Web 2.0

Information and Communication Technologies, the Internet, and most especially, the so called Web 2.0 have radically changed – at least potentially – the way scholarly diffusion is or can be made.

On one hand, the traditional constrains of space, time, publishing costs, etc. have almost completely disappeared or have entered huge economies of scale. Diffusion is – or, again, could be considered – easier and cheaper than ever.

On the other hand, and partly due to the former aspects, we are beginning to see an increasing demand for more accountability and transparency of research and researchers, resulting in both a claim for a deeper and wider popularization of science and a call for better and denser research networks.

The seminar “Conferences 2.0: Scientists and Web 2.0” will be split into three parts.

First part, Web 2.0, will point out the main characteristics of the Web 2.0 – a part that can be overridden depending on the knowledge on the issue by the attendees.

Second part, What’s a Conference 2.0, will to summarize how things have changed in the field of scholarly diffusion in the last years or, more specifically, since the advent of the Internet, the web browser and Web 2.0 applications.

Las part, the bulk of the seminar, will draw the “perfect” conference – and/or scientific diffusion strategy – by revisiting some good practices and some interesting applications existing around.

Anyhow, the focus and the stress will be put in both the change of paradigm in scholarly communication and the creation of a showcase of real practices and tools that are setting up this new path.