Etwas verspätet bin ich über diese Meldung bei Wikinews gestoszen: “Ein Teilverkauf der Stadtwerke Leipzig an Gaz de France (GdF) ist am Votum der Leipziger Bürger gescheitert. […]” Ein weiteres Beispiel dafür, dass viele Menschen die fortschreitende Privatisierung von städtischen Gütern bzw Dienstleistern ablehnen. Wie zuvor erwähnt, stellen bürgerschaftlich organisierte Betriebe (lies: Genossenschaften) eine interessante Alternative dar.

Until further notice i have disabled trackback and pingback funtionality. I just don’t have the patience of going through long lists of spam these days. Once i find the time for a general maintenance update of the blog software, trackback will return. Thanks for your understanding.

Somewhat in a similar vein as the last post: danah boyd calls for a boycott of closed (i.e., not open) access journals and venues to make academia a venue for free exchange of ideas and knowledge open to anybody. She seems kind of disgusted by publishers profitting from scientists’ work while locking down their contributions in repositories that are only accessible to those who have the privilege (i.e., money or position) to do so. Instead, scholars should turn to Open Access publishers that do away with those vomitous access restrictions while still providing the peer-reviewed process.

Peter Suber points to some more options for scholars beyond comepletely boycotting closed-access publishers. One of the major one is self-archiving online – which many publishers actually allow. Putting papers on one’s own personal or research group Website is usually accepted. There are also OA repositories that facilitate the self-archiving process. Through services like CiteSeer or Google Scholar it is then possible to make these contributions available in an OA fashion without actually submitting them to an OA venue. Good thinking. Take a look or two into Peter’s short and longer primers on Open Access to learn more around OA principles and practices.

By the way, i have ranted and chanted about Open Access before.

D’Arcy Norman makes an interesting observation how institutions take on exceptional efforts to keep content such as class slides and video recordings shut away from the public because the slides would violate some copyrights and not necessarily to keep ideas for themselves. I support him in pointing out that avoiding copyrighted material would open up so much content. Putting Creative Commons like licensing in place would prevent those cycles of closures.

On my old email address (word at anarchitect dot org) i get a lot of spam these days. So i thought i discontinue it, as i don’t use it that often anymore anyway. I added this auto-reply so that my contacts that don’t have my new address are directed to the right location and nasty spammers would not just parse it from the auto-reply message:

I have suspended using this Email address.
Please, go to my contact page to get in touch with me.
Thanks for your understanding!

…………………………………………………..

I habe dieses Emailadresse eingestellt. Um mit mir in
Kontakt zu tretten, benutze bitte dieses Formular.
Vielen Dank für dein Verständnis!

…………………………………………………..

Terminé usar esa e-mail. Por favor, visite esta pagina
para poner en contacto conmigo.
Gracias por tu comprensión.

Only problem is that spammers use existing sender addresses they found on the Web. Hence, my auto-responder would automatically increase spam-caused traffic and annoyances for those whose email address was hijacked. Therefor i will just discontinue the mailbox silently and hope that people that want to reach me would remember my name and search for it and would somehow come to this page.

And by the way: this is, of course, proof of my capitulation to the state of email these days. It seems as if email is broken, yet, it still works well enough considering its importance and relevance in professional and personal communication. May somebody have mercy and fix it?