Technology Blog

source: BMC draws attention to CIBER survey results

So some smart folks suggested we start passing out buttons for the CC fundraising campaign. We like smart folks (or at least some smart folks), and so we did. Go here to get a button. Please. Pretty please. Or whatever form of please will get you to go.

source: buttons galore

Kyle Jensen and Fiona Murray, Intellectual Property Landscape of the Human Genome, Science Magazine, October 14, 2005. The published version is accessible only to subscribers, but here’s an OA archived edition. (Thanks to John Wilbanks.) Excerpt:

Critics describe the growth in gene sequence patents as an intellectual property (IP) “land grab” over a finite number of human genes. They suggest that overly broad patents might block follow-on research. Alternatively, gene IP rights may become highly fragmented and cause an anticommons effect, imposing high costs on future innovators and underuse of genomic resources. Both situations, critics argue, would increase the costs of genetic diagnostics, slow the development of new medicines, stifle academic research, and discourage investment in downstream R&D. In contrast, the classic argument in support of gene patenting is that strong IP protection provides incentives crucial to downstream investment and the disclosure of inventions….Policy-makers are hampered by the lack of empirical data on the extent of gene patenting….Our results reveal that nearly 20% of human genes are explicitly claimed as U.S. IP. This represents 4382 of the 23,688 of genes in the NCBI’s gene database at the time of writing….Although large expanses of the genome are unpatented, some genes have up to 20 patents asserting rights to various gene uses and manifestations including diagnostic uses, single nucleotide polymorphisms, cell lines, and constructs containing the gene….Our analysis suggests a number of avenues for further research: It would be valuable to examine whether current practice in patent examination has allowed multiple conflicting patents on the same gene. In addition, genes with multiple patents and IP owners provide a valuable context in which to explore the variety of arrangements used to facilitate or block access to gene-based research and the impact of these arrangements on future innovators.

source: 20% of human genes are patented

Anna Norman, Cost of scientific journals ’staggering’, The Daily (newspaper of the University of Washington at Seattle), October 31, 2005. Excerpt:

Every quarter, students wonder how to pay for expensive textbooks. The rising costs of scientific and scholarly journals is creating the same problem for the UW libraries, said Timothy Jewell, head of Collection Management Services, which manages research databases and scholarly journals….”The prices of [the journals] are just staggering,” said UW President Mark Emmert. “If you went down a list of some of these major journals, you would see series with four issues a year for over $8,000.”…Jewell cited publisher consolidation as the primary reason for soaring prices.

“A lot of the smaller publishers have been bought out by large, multinational corporations,” he said. “The largest scientific, technical and health journal publisher, Elsevier, has been overtaking publishers for the last 10 years or so.”

With fewer companies dominating the market, journal prices have risen exponentially Despite an estimated 7 to 8 percent increase each year aimed at journal costs, the libraries’ budget isn’t keeping up with escalating expenses, Jewell said.

“In years that we can’t find the necessary funding to pay, we have to cancel our subscriptions to stay in budget,” he said….Although the library staff has increased funding, there is no end to cancellations in sight, said Mel DeSart, head of the Engineering Library.

“I’ve only been here for five and a half years, and I’ve already been through two cancellations,” he said. “They are substantial cuts - we’ve cut thousands of titles over the last ten years.”…Without major changes in the academic publishing market, Jewell said he isn’t sure where the libraries will be a few years from now.

source: More on the pricing crisis

source: Balancing OA with some traditional knowledge “protections”

source: Open commons for archaeology

Heather Morrison, SSHCR Consultation on Open Access: Response, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, October 30, 2005. Excerpt:

In brief, my response is a recommendation that SSHRC policy be to require open access to the results of SSHRC funded research, as defined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative, basically immediate, free, and unrestricted online availability. Specifically, my recommendation is to require deposit in an institutional repository, and to make open access a requirement for SSHRC subsidy funding for publishers.

(PS: Comments for the SSHRC consultation on OA are due today.)

source: Comment for the SSHRC consultation on OA

The October issue of Ariadne is now online. Here are the OA-related articles.

• Amber Thomas and Andrew Rothery, Online Repositories for Learning Materials: The User Perspective
• Martin Feijen and Annemiek van der Kuil, A Recipe for Cream of Science: Special Content Recruitment for Dutch Institutional Repositories
• Morag Greig and William Nixon, DAEDALUS: Delivering the Glasgow ePrints Service
• Esther Hoorn, Repositories, Copyright and Creative Commons for Scholarly Communication
• Michael Boock, Improving DSpace@OSU with a Usability Study of the ET/D Submission Process

source: October issue of Ariadne

Reluctant to follow Massachusetts and adopt OpenDocument Format for your work or institution? Read Bob Sutor’s Debunking Myths on Open Document Formats. Sutor is IBM’s Vice President of Standards and Open Source.

source: Debunking myths about ODF

The Find-a-Human database is a public collection of touch-tone recipes that get you through big companies’ voice-jail systems and through to a live operator. Add your own!

Find-A-Human — IVR Cheat Sheet

Via BoingBoing

This post was written by David Teten (admin), source: Find-A-Human: How to Circumvent Voice-Jail

mamamusings turned three years old on October 23rd. Thanks to Jim McGee (who shares the date, but not the year) for reminding me!

Has it really only been three years? How is that possible?

Starting a blog has been the most influential professional act I’ve ever taken. Because of my blog I’m here at Microsoft, enjoying a dream sabbatical. I’m giving keynotes at conferences like Internet Librarian. I’ve built a professional network that literally spans the globe. I’ve built a network of new friends, also spanning the globe. I’ve been able to leverage this online presence into so many real-world opportunities and connections that I’m embarrassed to list them all here.

Thank you so much to all of you who’ve read this blog, commented on it, linked to it, challenged me on it. You’ve helped to change my life, and my gratitude is boundless.

(And with that, I’m hereby declaring a brief moratorium on meta-blogging posts. When your “on blogging” category is the largest one in your archives, you’re probably doing way too much navel-gazing.)

source: i missed my blogiversary this year…

An explosion and fire at the University of Southampton have shut down email and web services. If you have sent email to Stevan Harnad, Tim Brody, Les Carr, Steve Hitchcock, other OA activists at Southampton, or the American Scientist OA Forum, don’t expect an immediate reply. For the same reason, the Eprints web site is temporarily offline, along with related pages like the Self-Archiving FAQ, the Self-Archiving Policy Registry, and the Hitchcock bibliography on the OA advantage for citation impact. The BOAI Forum, which I moderate, is also hosted at Southampton and temporarily offline.

Stevan Harnad writes (from a friend’s account), “I hope files are not lost, but the worst case scenario could be the loss of the Hypermail version of the AmSci Archive (plus 20 years worth of back email files of my own). No lives were lost, but one of the world’s most important optoelectronics labs has been.”

Good luck to all our friends at Southampton in recovering from this disaster.

source: Southampton people and OA resources temporarily offline

source: Six licenses for OA learning materials

Josefina Coloma and Eva Harris, Open-Access Science: A Necessity for Global Public Health, PLoS Pathogens, October 2005. Excerpt:

The world of scientific research and scholarly publishing is undergoing a profound transformation in large part due to the rapid development of information and communication technologies. The Internet and the advent of faster networking capabilities now allow virtually unlimited access to information, remote data gathering, real-time integration of data into databases and models, and online purchasing of research supplies. At the same time, it has opened new possibilities for researchers to communicate with colleagues and with the society in general. However, although some investigators in the developing world are keeping pace with this new reality, the majority are largely excluded from this transformation because of their limited access to scientific information. Particularly relevant to the area of pathogen research, the vast majority of infectious diseases in humans, animals, and plants occurs in the developing world, and efficient communication between local scientists in developing countries and the global community will facilitate advances in knowledge and control of these pathogens. Here we discuss open access and socially responsible philosophies in relation to scientific training, publishing, and intellectual property, and give examples of how we can help keep the developing world fully informed about these new models….In the developing world, scientists face a greater challenge to remain informed about the progress in their fields of research. Although they are disproportionately affected by infectious diseases, they are excluded from the relevant information that might help them cure, control, and manage the effects of these diseases….The first principle we should all support is that publicly funded research should be made publicly available through the most appropriate open-access channel. Funding agencies and reviewers need to give researchers credit, not penalize them, for efforts to publish in new open-access media. Even with strict peer review, new electronic journals will not immediately attain the same impact status as traditional print journals, but they will have a greater reach and a larger global influence. In fact, it has been shown that online accessibility increases the citation rate and, thus, the impact of a journal by 157%. This new online publishing venue might be the only way that scientists in the developing world conducting highly relevant research can make their data available to the world. It might also be the only means for them to obtain the most recent and relevant information for their research….We believe the whole spectrum of scientific endeavor should be as open access as possible, from training in laboratory and epidemiological techniques, proposal writing, and manuscript-writing skills to open-access publishing and socially responsible intellectual property policies. In this way, a new door of opportunity can be opened so that the fruits of our scientific breakthroughs are disseminated worldwide and benefit global public health.

source: OA for developing countries and public health

source: OA on short list of essentials for health, education, and peace

source: The eIFL meeting in Vilnius

Tee Shiao Eek, Redefining the medical journal, Malaysian Star, October 30, 2005. Excerpt:

What if we could turn medical journals into essential tools of knowledge, without discriminating those who could not afford access?…In some ways, they couldn’t be less alike, the medical physicist and the radiologist. But Prof Ng Kwan Hoong and Assoc Prof Dr Basri J. J. Abdullah are definitely on the same wavelength when it comes to starting revolutions. Their brainchild, the Biomedical Imaging and Intervention Journal, is poised to challenge the traditional norms of academic journal publishing by breaking down the invisible barriers of access, as well as creating a new experience in journal-reading. A multidisciplinary, open access, fully online journal, the BIIJ caters to all disciplines involved in medical imaging. It is freely accessible by anyone with a computer, an Internet connection, and an interest in the field of medical imaging….“Traditionally, print journals are very expensive. A one-year subscription, for six issues a year, can go up to US$10,000 (RM37,700),” says medical physicist Prof Ng, one of the two honorary editors of the journal along with Dr Basri. When subscription fees are so prohibitive that not even universities and libraries are able to afford it, a lot of academicians and professionals in the field are left out in the cold. “What’s happening now is that if you don’t have the money, you can’t subscribe to these journals and you don’t have access to such information,” says Dr Basri, a consultant radiologist. “Knowledge is supposed to be free for all,” Prof Ng asserts. Is he being idealistic? Or merely reinforcing the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which arose from a meeting convened in December 2001 as an international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the Internet? It is more likely to be the latter, which has been the driving force behind this project….BIIJ goes one step beyond the usual PDF version and takes full advantage of the Internet’s multimedia capabilities, such as audio, video, animation, and simulation. “In an article, we could have lots of images or movies. For example, in an article about ultrasound in obstetrics, we can see a video of the baby moving,” Prof Ng describes. Static photographs and diagrams are becoming passé, particularly in the field of imaging, where “we are moving more into 3-D, real-time (images) – not just taking an x-ray – because that’s where the diagnostic information is,” he adds. To further exploit the potential of multimedia, BIIJ also has a Resources section that contains recorded presentations from meetings, as well as teaching materials.

An unsigned story in the same issue of the Malaysian Star gives more background on the BOAI. Excerpt:

The initiative defines “open access” [to research literature] as “its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” The initiative has been signed by 3,863 individuals and 326 organisations, and a growing number of individuals and organisations from around the world who represent researchers, universities, laboratories, libraries, foundations, journals, publishers, learned societies, and kindred open-access initiatives. Other initiatives supporting the open access movement include the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, the UN World Summit on the Information Society Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding. Thanks to these initiatives, there is now a growing number of open access journals in all academic disciplines, from astronomy to zoology [PS: as well as a growing number of OA repositories]. Search for these journals at the Directory of Open Access Journals.

source: New OA multi-media journal in biomedical imaging

source: Lessig defends Google Library

Chris O’Brien, He fights for open access to the world’s digital library, Mercury News, October 30, 2005. Excerpt:

Walking along the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge 25 years ago, an undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology foresaw the impact that computer networks would have one day and decided there were two great causes he could devote his life to: encrypting digital information to protect privacy or building an online version of the Great Library of Alexandria. Brewster Kahle picked the library. “I’ve never had a new idea since then,” Kahle said. “And it’s been a great career path.” Since then, every company or project started by the man who created the Internet Archive has been a step on the road to realizing the grand theme that drives his life: “universal access to all knowledge.”…”Is the library of the future going to be open?” Kahle said. “Or will it be controlled by a couple of big corporate players?”…Amazon.com bought Alexa in 1999 for $300 million, split between Kahle and a couple of other founders and investors. The money has left Kahle time to focus on the archive and things like the Open Content Alliance and its race with Google. On that front, one of Kahle’s colleagues, O’Reilly, wonders about the intentions of partners like Yahoo and Microsoft: Are they really sincere? Or are they just trying to derail search-engine rival Google? “I’m worried that [the OCA] is being positioned as, ‘We’re not Google,’” O’Reilly said. And while O’Reilly supports both OCA and Google, he recently argued in a New York Times opinion piece that publishers and authors should embrace Google’s approach, despite the controversy over copyright. O’Reilly believes Google’s approach doesn’t violate copyrights because it will only display a snippet of the book in the search results, and will also include a far greater number of books. Kahle disagrees. He believes Google should only include books with permission from the copyright holder. And Kahle believes it’s important to remain philosophically pure to set a precedent for future open content debates. And, he believes that if his group succeeds, it will put pressure on Google to modify its program. “I’m very hopeful,” Kahle said. “When I talk to [Google co-founder] Larry Page, I tell him if you just move five degrees to the left, we have one project.
“If we get the balance right, we all win.”

Chris O’Brien interviews Brewster Kahle in the same issue of Mercury News. Excerpt (quoting Kahle):

A I was always fascinated by the myth of the Great Library of Alexandria. It was the center of learning in Egypt until it burned down. The opportunity to build that again is a career-straightening maneuver. You set it out there, and check your progress against that each year. Universal access to all knowledge. I’ve adopted that as a goal, as a mission. The way information moved around when we were growing up was open. You visited a library, and everything was available. Now we’re going through a digital information revolution. People are turning to the Internet as the library of the future. All the technological pieces — the networks, the machines, the software — are finally in place for this to happen. My whole career has been about what’s happening right now. But now the question is: Do you want to be in an open system? Or do you want that information to be controlled by just a couple of corporations?…[Where has OA failed?] [L]ook at what has happened with still images. A company called Corbis, owned by Bill Gates, went to public libraries to digitize public domain images. They met with some resistance. But there was no public alternative. So now you have to go to Corbis and pay them, to get access to get digital copies of these images. If that happens to books and music, we’ll lose more than just still images. If the intellectual discoveries go down that same path, it’s just not in the tradition of our democracy….[Where has OA triumphed?] [T]he Human Genome Project. If you recall, the federal government set out to map the human genome. But a private company, Celera Genomics, came along and said they were going to digitize the human genome but you’d have to pay to license it. The public sphere, the National Institutes of Health, pulled together a distributed project to challenge Celera and decode the genome even faster. The public sphere rose to the occasion. Eventually, there was a very uncomfortable joint announcement with NIH and Celera where they agreed to jointly make the results available. In the end, the public won out. You can download it to your laptop. It’s our literature. We own it.

source: More on Brewster Kahle and the OCA

I’m posting this as much for myself as for anyone reading the blog. Lately I keep coming across things that really force me to stop and think, and then they slip away and out of my attention radius. When they’re here in the blog, they’re less “out of sight, out of mind.”

Collin Brooke posted a nice piece tonight on “Blogging Practices, and I found his criticisms of academia to be right on target:

I’m constantly struck by how little we seem to understand or even talk about what it takes to publish, what publishing our work accomplishes (and in some cases, how little it can accomplish), what the real costs and rewards for our work are, etc. As I was preparing that talk a couple of weeks ago, it seemed like the height of obviousness to me to describe humanities scholarship as Long Tail work, and yet, I see indications all around me that we don’t want to think of our work in that way: our aversion to collaboration, our inability to aggregate, our obsession with celebrity, etc. Hell, I have to fight every day to keep those things at bay—I love to imagine being paid lots of money to keynote conferences, to have my work read and discussed far and wide, to be semi-famous. But that’s a Head reward system that disguises the more modest (but potentially longer lasting) rewards at the Tail end of things.

So, I’m in a strange place as an academic. I was recently paid money (“lots” is a relative term, I suppose) to keynote a conference. Unlike many academics, I have little aversion to collaboration or aggregation. But I am a tenured associate professor with a lab of my own, and I often feel like a stranger in a strange land no matter where I am.

Early on in my blogging, I wrote about aspects of synchronicity and collaboration in blogging, as well as my frustration with the fact that I seemed unable to produce original thoughts—that my skill was in synthesis rather than creation.

As time has passed (and I’ve gotten tenure, and some modicum of readership—though that’s been dropping lately with my relative paucity of posts), I’ve started to be able to forgive myself for my lack of traditional scholarly output, and to be able to value my role as more of a human aggregator.

I wish academia did a better job of valuing the kinds of skills I’ve got—sifting and sorting, connecting the dots and seeing the big picture, intuiting and forecasting. It’s not that traditional research isn’t valuable—it’s just that it’s not the only way to put education and knowledge to work. RIT is better than most schools in recognizing a diversity of scholarship approaches (basing its recent scholarship policy on Boyer’s reasonably broad definitions. But they’re the exception rather than the rule.

To the extent that I’m part of the “head,” the best thing I think I can do with that visibility is connect up more people in the tail. I don’t want to get stuck in an incestuous echo chamber of digerati blogs and conferences—which is perhaps why I took such pleasure in being at Internet Librarian, where I was learning every bit as much as I was teaching.

(Collin tagged his post with academy2.0, which made me smile.)

source: collin brooke on blogging practices