Over 2000 academics have signed an online declaration against using the academic publisher Elsevier.

Summly is an interesting phone app that passed me by in the Christmas rush. It claims to use advanced algorithms to usefully summarise Web texts. Apparently it works best with journalistic press articles, although is still easily confused by dates. The 16 year-old British inventor reportedly has backing from Hong Kong billionaire investor Li Ka Shing.

Oxford’s Dynamic Collections is a forthcoming WordPress plugin that seems to still be in private beta, but which sounds interesting. Basically, it harvests OER [Open Educational Resource] records into WordPress from across a range or sources, but filters them by keyword(s). The results, presumably with a bit of hand tweaking, are quickly-built subject lists of such resources.

My guess would be that one could probably do something similar with repository record feeds: use Excel to sort simple CSV records by the presence of keyword(s), then export only the relevant records as CSV, then load these into Omeka.

A recent survey by Civic Ventures concluded that six million of the USA’s 1960s baby boomers seriously intend, upon retirement, to use their experience to develop new non-profit organisations. And these may not look like the creaky old non-profits that we’ve known until now. They’re likely to be seriously Internet-enabled, and reasonably well funded from private sources. So, here’s a question. Some of the effort will be local (saving stray kitty cats, developing local theatres, creating new woodlands, etc) but how could some of it be directed toward open-access scholarly content? Could structured national programmes be developed to stimulate and guide useful scholarly initiatives by retirees, perhaps based on alumni associations and running alongside things like tax breaks and the promotion of legacies left to help fund open access journals and archive digitisation? And how about your local university gives free library and journals access to any retiree who starts a suitable non-profit, and then invites them all to a free annual TED-like networking event just for them?

Nice one. Mobile phone firm Orange has struck a deal with Wikipedia to make the encyclopaedia available free of data charges to 70 million users across the Middle East and Africa. Various national launches of the service will happen during 2012. The deal is non-exclusive, so Wikipedia can sign similar deals with other phone service providers.