Should Open Access And Open Data Come With Open Ethics?; Forbes, July 20, 2017

Kalev Leetaru, Forbes; Should Open Access And Open Data Come With Open Ethics?

"In the end, the academic community must decide if “openness” and “transparency” apply only to the final outputs of our scholarly institutions, with individual researchers, many from fields without histories of ethical prereview, are exclusively empowered to decide what constitutes ethical and moral conduct and just how much privacy should be permitted in our digital society, or if we should add “open ethics” to our focus on open access and open data and open universities up to public discourse on just what the future of “big data” research should look like."

With Canada’s Entry, Treaty for the Blind Will Come Into Force; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 6/30/16

Parker Higgins, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); With Canada’s Entry, Treaty for the Blind Will Come Into Force:

"A groundbreaking international agreement to address the “book famine” for blind and print-disabled people is now set to go into force after passing another key milestone today. The agreement requires countries to allow the reproduction and distribution of accessible ebooks by limiting the scope of copyright restrictions.

The Marrakesh agreement takes aim at the global shortage of ebooks available in suitable formats for the print disabled, which in some regions is as low as 1% of published books. At the time of its completion, only 57 of the 184 member countries of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) had copyright exceptions for this purpose, and inconsistencies between them made sharing books between countries nearly impossible."