This blog has previously noted the details of the effective Chinese ban on Google Scholar. Now Newsweek reports that the Chinese Communist Party is urgently seeking to isolate China even further, and from next month they will…

… ban any foreign-invested company from publishing anything online in China [This move] will be a hard blow to companies like Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and the New York Times who have collectively invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build up the Chinese publishing industry and do reports in Chinese, for a Chinese audience.”

Presumably all large academic publishers and aggregators will also be affected by these moves, in the same way as the news media.

It seems to me it’s also a gangster-ish way for the Party to expropriate all foreign media holdings in China, since it effectively forces operators and investors to sell out to government-connected local businesses at (presumably) low prices…

The only way anyone is going to publish anything online in China next month is if the business is 100% owned by Chinese companies”

The Web servers and all online content will also need to be located inside China, licensed by the state, and any local content vendor will need to practice strict pre-publication self-censorship in accordance with the government’s strictures.

Open Syllabus Explorer (beta 0.4) is a new search tool for classroom syllabi. The OSE is in beta but is currently nudging 1 million items, and it references items from the last fifteen years or so. A searcher can filter the search by nation/field/institution and more.

The UK’s Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership has released high quality scans of 25,000 Early English (1473-1700) books into the public domain, and to the public. The site has crashed under the weight of traffic, as with many such releases, but hopefully it’ll be up again soon.

Interesting to see a proposed layout for the planned $2.5m “Wikimedia Knowledge Engine”. Looks to me to be some sort of curated search engine for finding out more about topical in-the-news concerns. But presumably with all the media’s link-bait, faux news and drive-by parroting filtered out by the Wikipolice. The results probably then mingled with trusted sources on the topic (encyclopaedia pages, trusted source data, ‘source-watch’ type pages, perhaps even an OA journal article if that’s what the news reporting originated with).

Maybe also a timeline function for mapping how a recent news topic emerged across the media? Although the Web has been waiting donkeys’ years for an elegantly dynamic and editable timeline creator — so don’t your breath on that one.

The Wikimedia Foundation describes it thus…

Knowledge Engine By Wikipedia will democratize the discovery of media, news and information — it will make the Internet’s most relevant information more accessible and openly curated, and it will create an open data engine that’s completely free of commercial interests. Our new site will be the Internet’s first transparent search engine, and the first one that carries the reputation of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation.”