For any Seattle-ites reading this today, where’s a good place to watch the Space Needle fireworks from tonight? Preferably someplace where the traffic won’t be awful coming back home (up at the northern tip of Lake Washington).
source: Another OA milestone
source: Text of CURES Act now online
Legal Affairs has a fantastic collection of essays about various cyberspace related legal issues by some of my favorite writers about the subject. Zittrain’s piece outlines the beginning of his soon to be completed book. It shall be called Z-theory. Goldsmith and Wu give a short precis of their soon to be released book, Who Controls the Internet. And Julian Dibbell has an extremely funny story about sleuthing the tax consequences from the virtual economy.
Strongly recommended reading.
source: The state of cyberlaw, 2005
Query Chem lets you combine chemical structure and text searches by finding the names of structures similar to your query structure and combining them with user-specified search terms which are all then sent to Google. Query Chem’s search results are prioritized by their relevance to your chemical structure and your optional search terms combined. Query Chem has many of the features of Scifinder Scholar since it also links to Google Scholar (with the added bonus that it’s free). Its greatest strength is that it’s not limited to a single database, but instead it captures the structure-property relationships embedded in the text of journals, commercial web sites, public databases, and any other HTML document indexed by Google.
The OA Journal of Postgraduate Medicine has reached the milestone of 100,000 downloads in a single month. It had 112,218 in November. From the announcement:
These downloads are from the journal’s primary website, apart from this website, the full text of the journal is also available from [the] Bioline International, OAI-complaint repository at the University of Toronto and from a number of secondary aggregating agencies such as Thomson Gale, EBSCO Publishing and ProQuest. Thus, the actual downloads per month are much higher.
Open access sources, DOAJ, PubMed and Wikipedia were amongst the top five referrers (except search engines) for the journal’s website. Over 270 institutions utilize the LinkOut facilities from PubMed to access the journal.
source: One OA journal, more than 100,000 downloads in a single month
Scott Jaschik, Radical Change for Tenure, Inside Higher Ed, December 30, 2005. Excerpt:
Three years ago, all members of the Modern Language Association received a letter from Stephen Greenblatt, then the group’s president, warning of a crisis facing language and literature departments. Junior faculty members were unable to publish the books that they needed to win tenure and cuts in library and university press budgets left open the possibility that higher education “stands to lose, or at least severely to damage, a generation of young scholars.”
He called for academic departments to rethink the way they considered publication as a tenure requirement, and his letter set off considerable debate.Thursday night, a special panel of the MLA [Modern Language Association] offered the first glimpse at its plan to overhaul tenure — and in many ways the plans go well beyond the reforms Greenblatt proposed. As he suggested, the panel wants departments — including those at top research universities — to explicitly change their expectations such that there are “multiple pathways” to demonstrating research excellence, ending the expectation of publishing a monograph. But the panel does not appear likely to stop there. It plans to propose that departments negotiate “memorandums of understanding” with new hires about what factors will go into their tenure reviews. It wants departments to end a bias that favors print over online publications….The panel, which has been meeting privately, surveying departments, and interviewing administrators about their receptivity to changes, has still not released a final report and probably will not do so for months. There may be changes along the way. But panel members last night indicated that key recommendations had been agreed upon, and that they were ready to start sharing them….Donald E. Hall, who holds the Jackson Chair in English at West Virginia University, was the panel member who focused on alternatives to the monograph as a tenure requirement. Hall said that in the committee’s discussions with provosts and deans, one concern was whether administrators would permit such a change. Hall said that the uniform reaction was that “the fetishization of the monograph” was a product of departments and that if they made a case for change, administrators would not object….A candidate’s chances for tenure “should never depend on the vagaries of the scholarly publishing market,” Hall said. Sean Latham, associate professor of English and director of the Modernist Journals Project at the University of Tulsa, said that departments need to recognize that scholarship — good, bad and everything in between — is being produced online and needs to be evaluated without any media-based bias.
Comment. There are two OA connections here. First, skyrocketing journal prices in the sciences have caused most research libraries to cut into their book budgets, which has greatly reduced the demand for monographs, which has greatly reduced the number of new book manuscripts accepted by university presses. If spreading OA can help libraries rebuild their book budgets, then humanities departments will be freer to return to the monograph standard for tenure. Second, the old bias in favor of print publication was a major disincentive to publish in OA journals, and one not justified by any considerations of quality or impact. Deemphasizing monographs and print publications for tenure are both long-overdue recognitions of reality. Kudos to the MLA.
Citations to papers in Vol.7 No.1 of Information Research: Eleven papers published, with 40 citations according to Google Scholar (Ave. 3.6). Three papers had no citations….The list of journals suggest that the availability of papers in an open access e-journal not only increases the probability of citation as Steve Lawrence has shown, but perhaps also widens the range of journals that papers are likely to be cited in. A number of the journals listed could not be described as information science or information management journals by any stretch of the imagination. I haven’t done an analysis of the locations of the non-journal documents, but they range widely internationally from New Zealand and Brazil to Switzerland and the USA, and I suspect that the geographic span of citing sources is wider than one might expect with closed access journals. This looks like an interesting project for a student paper - anyone like to take it on?
source: OA increases breadth of citation impact, not just citation counts
In a December 2005 editorial appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) “How Google is changing medicine”, I introduced the idea of a central web portal to access the best medical information worldwide. Centralizing medical information currently scattered across the Internet would make it easily searchable….However, other than thinking that Google Medicine would ultimately cost a truckload of money to create (and yet produce huge dividends at the same time), I wrote the BMJ editorial with no further concrete or specific suggestions in mind. So when a number of physicians e-mailed me from around the world excited by the idea of Google Medicine, I started to think: what would Google Medicine contain? What issues might it attempt to address? How would it need to improve on what Google already does? Here are some further thoughts about Google Medicine as I envision it….From the outset, let me say that I have no interest in Google Inc, financial or otherwise, and no interest in seeing it gain more market share. I am only interested in access….[N]umerous studies show a linkage between access to information and good patient care but few have shown how search tools like Google have a positive impact on patient care. Note to self: apply to PhD programs in library science for a sabbatical on this subject….Google has benefited from the National Library of Medicine by allowing it to crawl PubMed. The irony is that some librarians have asked if Google will eventually replace PubMed, the lynchpin of medical searching….Google’s computer power and open access to the medical literature is a potential winning combination. At the very least, institutional repositories must facilitate archiving and indexing by major search tools. The bulk of research created in open access journals may not make it into MEDLINE and EMBASE or second-tier tools such as the International Pharmaceutical Abstracts. So, Google will need to index this material and ensure content from almost 600 institutions (see OAIster in the United States) is easily searchable….An historic opportunity exists for the open access movement and search engines to work together to achieve true open access. As many librarians will tell you, academia’s reliance on traditional publishing models has created a crisis for us, with crippling subscription costs being the result. We need to wrest control back for our users and establish more open models of scholarly publishing. But we also need to think about how this content is accessed and whether it will be findable….[Peter Suber said] “the more knowledge matters, the more open access to that knowledge matters.” I say this is the quote of the year.
source: OA + Google searching = the cure for what ails medicine
A major effort to digitize millions of books and other documents at libraries is beginning across Canada. Canadian research libraries have formed a digitization alliance called Alouette Canada to get their books online. The process involves scanning the millions of books available in Canadian libraries so they can be read by internet users. Parts of the virtual library should be available beginning next year — and it’ll be free to use. Tim Mark, executive director of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, says Alouette is taking on a large project that will extend over several years. “The initial estimate is three to four million titles so the scope is huge,” he says. “I think it’s fair to say that librarians and research libraries in particular have seen the vision and the possibility and the potential for universal access to all knowledge.” University of Toronto chief librarian Carol Moore will head a group of 27 major Canadian academic research libraries that have joined the Alouette Canada project….Alouette will step up the digitizing process. Even rare documents will be available. Among them are fragile works from the 16th century, Banting and Best’s papers about their discovery of insulin and, from Memorial University, important documents related to the history of Newfoundland. The Canadian group is working with a big international effort to digitize books, the Open Content Alliance, based in San Francisco. Canada’s libraries will be co-operating with international libraries, such as the U.S. Library of Congress and the British Library, which already have large digitized collections….Publishers and authors groups fear that books still under copyright protection will be put online. In Canada, the focus is on works in the public domain, so the copyright controversy is not an issue.
We’re almost there, but the coolest (and something I had missed) is this Flickr match: $10k from Flickr and a challenge to the community to match it.
Congoo is a forthcoming search engine that will give registered users free online access to selected toll-access publications. Users will download a 200 KB browser plug-in, register with Congoo, run searches, and find some fee-based content in the hit list. When they click on an item from a willing publisher, Congoo will pass the user’s registration info on to the publisher, and the publisher will give the user free access to full text, at least temporarily. Users get free online access to texts that aren’t ordinarily free, and one-time registration for all publishers that eventually participate. But what’s in it for publishers? Some of their content is more visible to users (the amount, the pieces, and apparently the duration always under publisher control) and they get the contact info for users interested enough to click through. Congoo should launch in January. For more details see the Congoo page for publishers or Anthony Gonsalves’ story in yesterday’s InformationWeek
Comment. It’s not OA, but it’s an interesting new model. I like the theory that greater visibility and impact benefit publishers, not just authors, and might lead them to remove access barriers. I like the way Congoo creates an incentive for publishers to convert enhanced visibility and impact into revenue without returning to access barriers. How many publishers will like it? How many users will be attracted to a search engine that requires downloading a plug-in and can only offer a continually varying random shot at access? Will users find themselves spammed with publisher solicitations to subscribe? We’ll find out. I suspect Congoo will face a chicken-and-egg problem: Publishers may wait until it’s clear that many users are using it, and users may wait until it’s clear that many publishers are participating.
source: Congoo will offer free online access to selected priced articles
Marilynn Marchione, Drug firms make more study results public, Associated Press, December 28, 2005. Excerpt:
Drug companies are making public more information about medical studies they are conducting, but some still withhold key details, a new analysis of a federal registry finds.Merck & Co., stung by allegations that it hid information on Vioxx’s dangers, gets somewhat better marks in the new analysis than it did in an earlier one. However, Pfizer Inc., GlaxoSmithKline PLC and Novartis are lagging, according to the report in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.
In May, the journal’s editor-in-chief accused Merck, Pfizer and Glaxo of making a mockery of efforts to increase the transparency of such experiments, called clinical trials.
The new report shows some progress, said its chief author, Dr. Deborah Zarin of the National Library of Medicine, which runs the registry.
“We’re getting a lot of trials being registered,” including many that American drug companies are doing in foreign countries, she said.
The registry was created in 2000 as part of an overhaul of Food and Drug Administration monitoring. It requires certain types of studies to be listed, such as late-stage experiments involving life-threatening illnesses like cancer.
But it didn’t get wide participation from industry or many voluntary listings until September 2004, when editors of leading medical journals said they would no longer publish results of any studies that were not first listed in a public registry….In an editorial, journal editor-in-chief Dr. Jeffrey Drazen and Dr. Alastair J.J. Wood, a Vanderbilt University drug expert who has served on many FDA advisory panels, call for complete compliance with the registry, saying it “makes moral sense.”
“When patients put themselves at risk to participate in clinical trials, they do so with the tacit understanding that their risk is part of the public record, not merely the secret record of the sponsor,” they wrote.
They also urged scientists and patients to refuse to participate unless studies are fully registered.
In this paper, Michael Heller introduced the concept of the “anticommons” — a resource subject to many different “property-like” claims, thus leading to its underutilization. The context was post-Soviet Russia. That context made it sound remote. But the idea was soon domesticated in this paper by Heller and Eisenberg appearing in Science. And then the concept got its most important play in a paper by Nobel Prize winning (and conservative) economist James Buchanan and Yong Yoon, titled Symmetric Tragedies.
That’s all fantastically good theory. Here, however, is the anticommons in practice. There are many more examples like this. I’ll make it a practice of collecting them. Maybe enough examples will get the thick-political types to recognize (as the very much not thick Buchanan recognizes) that the issue of IP reform is not about whether you favor property or not, but whether THE PARTICULAR FORM OF PROPERTY the government has crafted operates efficiently.
(Thanks for the pointer, Tom!)
The US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has released guidelines on how government agencies should make their information accessible online for the public. Senator Joe Lieberman, author of the E-Government Act of 2002, doubts that the new guidelines live up to the statutory requirements and will ask the OMB to explain. I don’t plan to cover this issue thoroughly, but I can recommend Jason Miller’s story in the December 23 issue of Government Computer News. Excerpt:
Patrice McDermott, deputy director for government relations for the American Library Association, called the policy “disturbing.” “Essentially, what OMB appears to be saying is, for information you want to make publicly accessible, if you put it on your Web site or post it electronically, you have fulfilled all requirements of law,” McDermott said. “That is not true. That is not the spirit or intent of the law.” She added that intent of law was to give the public the ability to know about and gain access to all information the government creates.
Earlier this month the Government Services Administration (GSA) released the comments from government and industry experts, showing that a majority thought the benefit of adding metadata tags to online government information was not worth the cost.
Ted Castranova has a fascinating post up on Terra Nova entitled “The Horde is Evil,” in which he argues that the Horde races on World of Warcraft are “on the whole evil,” and that this has moral implications for avatar choices:
I’ve advanced two controversial positions: that avatar choice is not a neutral thing from the standpoint of personal integrity, and that the Horde, in World of Warcraft, is evil. Nobody agrees, but it’s been suggested that the community could chew on this a bit.
So here’s my view: When a real person chooses an evil avatar, he or she should be conscious of the evil inherent in the role. There are good reasons for playing evil characters - to give others an opportunity to be good, to help tell a story, to explore the nature of evil. But when the avatar is a considered an expression of self, in a social environment, then deliberately choosing a wicked character is itself a (modestly) wicked act.
I don’t agree with Castranova (my horde character is a Tauren, a peaceful bison-like creature that lives in a Native American-inspired cultural context), nor do many of the commenters—but the issues he brings up are powerful and interesting, and the lengthy discussion in the comments is well worth reading.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between “real life” and “game life,” since I have personal and/or professional relationships with most of the people in my World of Warcraft guild, including both of my children. Castranova’s argument, in which he bolsters his argument by citing his 3-year-old’s reaction to his undead character, relates directly to those boundary-crossing issues.
When I was playing online on Monday, Joi said that he thought World of Warcraft was becoming the “new golf” for the technology set. I think there’s some truth in that, but it brings with it all kinds of additional social pressures and complexities, of which avatar racial choices are only the beginning. I think there’s some fertile ground for research in that boundary area, the crossover between the real and game worlds, and the extent to which they influence each other.
From Jenny Levine’s blog:
The Shifted Librarian: Morning Conversation with Brent:
Brent: You’re always on the computer — you’re addicted to it. What are you doing — are you talking to someone?
Jenny: Yes, I am. And I’m not always on the computer…
Brent: Can I talk to them?
Jenny: Not right now you can’t, no. And I don’t think you’re one to talk, Mr. I’m-Addicted-to-Instant-Messaging.
Brent: I’m not addicted. I just like talking to people.
Jenny: You know, you can talk to them on the phone, too.
Brent: Not to five people at once I can’t.
I think Brent and Lane would get along really well…
source: worth repeating
My stepfather, Don Reinfeld, is a cellist for the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. He’s currently having a new cello built for him by violinmaker David Wiebe, who recently sent him a series of photos of the cello in progress. Don has just posted them on Flickr—it’s really fascinating to see the instrument taking shape!
There’s an essay documenting the entire process of creating another cello on Wiebe’s site—it just cries out to be put into blog form, don’t you think?
source: cello construction
source: More on OA textbooks