Modern media technologies paved the way to the open access movement. Instead of the traditional academic subscription and publishing model, which allowed few big publishers to charge excessive publishing fees, the open access model raises the hope for a fair system, where scientific content is...

The paper applies economic theories to give an overview of the emerging phenomenon of digital personal assistants (DPAs). A DPA is an intelligent automated system that interacts with the user through a dialogue in natural language, and meanwhile applying third-party services to obtain...

Large publishing companies have been dominating scientific publishing for long, which leads to high subscription fees and inhibited access to scientific knowledge. At digital era, the opportunity of an unrestricted access appears feasible, because the cost of publishing should be low. It is no...