Heads-up, Dublin geeks:
Vint Cerf will be speaking at the Dublin Googleplex on Thursday.
Sadly, I won’t be able to make it myself — I had to visit the UK this week. Pity; I would have loved to hear him speak 
This post was written by Justin, source: Vint Cerf speaking at Google on Thursday
David Kushner, Uncommon Law, IEEE Spectrum, March 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). An interview with Lawrence Lessig. Excerpt:
Since first being released in 2002, Creative Commons licenses have been used more than 50 million times, and the rate of adoption is growing. With the launch this year [PS: it was last year, January 2005] of an offshoot, the Science Commons, Lessig hopes to expand into the world of research. IEEE Spectrum contributing editor David Kushner talked to Lessig about his plans….[DK] How does a Creative Commons license benefit the copyright holder?
[LL] Well, a lot of copyright holders benefit primarily by having their work made accessible and encouraging others to build on their work. The clearest example of that is the world of scholarship. As a scholar, I’m interested in people reading my article. I don’t get paid when people copy the article. I don’t get paid by journals that distribute the article. We support the open-access publishing movement in the context of scholarship, especially through our Science Commons project, because this is perfectly consistent with the desires of the author, which are basically to spread his or her work.
source: Lessig on OA
Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) and Blackboard have struck a deal allowing Blackboard users to search the bepress portal ResearchNow and incorporate the results into their Blackboard projects. From today’s announcement:
Blackboard Inc. and The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) today announced the launch of the ResearchNow Blackboard Building Block, a new tool that integrates with the Blackboard Learning System, enabling online access to tens of thousands of scholarly materials. The ResearchNow Content Building Block makes it possible for educators to search directly in Blackboard for access to more than 85,000 journal articles, working papers, institutional repository materials, theses and dissertations hosted within ResearchNow, The Berkeley Electronic Press’s innovative database of scholarly information. Relevant resources may be easily selected and incorporated into the Blackboard Academic Suite. ResearchNow is a collection of academic materials drawing from several primary sources: the roster of peer-reviewed, Berkeley Electronic Press journals (27 and counting), bepress-hosted subject matter repositories such as the bepress Legal Repository and COBRA: The Collection of Biostatistics Research Archive, and all working papers, preprints and other “grey literature” content from institutional repositories hosted by bepress that have opted for inclusion. More than 50 schools — including the University of California system, Boston College, Cornell, and the University of Nebraska, as well as major universities in Europe and Australia — use the bepress platform for their institutional repositories. The bepress repository platform has been co-marketed with ProQuest Information & Learning since 2004 as Digital Commons. Collectively, ResearchNow materials have been downloaded more than 3 million times in the past year.
Comment. Bepress offers three degrees of access to ResearchNow, two forms of paid access and its famous quasi-open access. Today’s announcement doesn’t say what level of access Blackboard users will get.
Update (3/2/06). I just heard from Greg Tanenbaum, President of Bepress. In answer to my question about the level of access that Blackboard users will get, he writes, “It mirrors the existing ResearchNow setup. All content that is freely available to the world (e.g., IR working papers, reports, etc.) will be free to Blackboard instructors and students. Our own journal content will be free under the quasi-open access policy.” (Thanks, Greg.)
Teachers said students in rural areas would bear the brunt of cuts if the Copyright Agency was successful in
source: Australia may charge fees for viewing OA pages in school
Universities across the United States are considering digitizing classic works for their libraries; the University of Hawai’i at Manoa’s Hamilton Library is no exception.
UHM [University of Hawaii at Manoa] has already made efforts to digitize unique documents such as old Hawaiian language newspapers and images from the Charlot collection….Library officials at colleges like the University of Texas at Austin have made preliminary efforts over the last year to employ the Open Content Alliance, an organization attempting a mass-book digitization. Both MSN and Yahoo! have announced that they are willing to participate in providing books online. Despite the perception that this is a new field, book digitization has been occurring for more than 10 years. UTOPIA, an online program offering a broad range of content to the general public, has provided sources online, including the Gutenberg Bible….Columbia University and the University of California are among higher education institutions interested in providing free, digital access to major public works….According to Rutter, books from 1850-1923 are those that should be digitized soonest. Books from this period of time, referred to as the “brittle book period,” are exempt from the 50-year copyright period; therefore, there would be no copyright infringement. Cornell University has made efforts to digitize agriculture literature specifically from this time. “The books printed at that timelot of pulp and acid in it, so they’re crumbling a fair amount faster,” Rutter said. “The books from that time will not be available, so digitization makes sense.”…UHM’s dissertations are currently digitized using Proquest, a licensed database that has moved from using microfilm as a resource to using online versions of the documents. Currently UHM is looking at an institutional repository that would hold all of the data produced on campus in a safe and accessible place.”
In 1998 the British Medical Journal (BMJ), based on the principle of facilitating free and unrestricted access to scientific information, decided to make the entire contents of the journal freely available on the Internet. By January 2005, due to a drop in income, the journal partly reversed that decision, making some of the contents accessible online only to paying subscribers, though many elements of the journal such as a selection of research articles remained freely available at bmj.com. In February 2006, the BMJ published the results of a survey ‘To determine whether free access to research articles on bmj.com is an important factor in authors’ decisions on whether to submit to the BMJ, whether the introduction of access controls to part of the BMJ’s content has influenced authors’ perceptions of the journal, and whether the introduction of further access controls would influence authors’ perceptions.’It was a relatively small survey with a little over 200 authors participating but the results suggested free online access was important to a large majority (75%) of them, so the publishers agreed to retain their partial open access policy for the time being.
Other important medical journals, like The Lancet, only provide online access to paying subscribers….So is putting complex personal healthcare decisions in the hands of the individual a good idea?…What about if I have a bit more time to do some research and find out a bit more about say an ongoing chronic condition? A friend of mine with a hip complaint went to great lengths to research his condition and ended up impressing his doctor with the depth of his knowledge on the subject. But supposing the materials he read had not been as freely available as they had been and he had to pay The Lancet, the BMJ and hundreds of other sources a hefty fee for each article he read, would he have had the ability to make the decisions he did about his treatment? Doctors could justifiably claim that most lay people are insufficiently well trained to understand even the language of medics or the reliability of the sources, especially on the Internet, from which we might derive much of this medical ‘information.’ And if the truly reliable peer reviewed sources like the BMJ do gradually move towards a subscription only service, where is the average patient going to get access to important medical information required to make informed healthcare choices?
PubChem now contains bioassay data from the Penn Center for Molecular Discovery (PCMD).
source: PubChem keeps growing
The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia could become the main source of chemical information in 5–10 years, according to a professional chemist who contributes to the site….a recent study in Nature found that the accuracy of scientific entries in Wikipedia was not far behind those in Encyclopaedia Britannica. This finding is supported by regular contributor Martin Walker, assistant professor of organic chemistry at the State University of New York at Potsdam, US. Many of the chemistry entries are now reasonably accurate, he said, but you have to know where to look.‘A general rule on Wikipedia is that an article that has been heavily edited and around for a long time is usually pretty good,’ Walker told Chemistry World, ‘if it hasn’t, it may be flawed.’
The accuracy of Wikipedia’s entries will continue to improve as contributors begin to organise themselves and take responsibility for certain subjects, he said. Chemistry content on the site is coordinated through two so-called ‘wikiprojects’, said Walker: chemistry and chemicals.
Entries can still suffer from poor English and deliberate vandalism, but these problems are gradually being resolved and can be pinpointed quickly. ‘Try vandalising something like hydrochloric acid and see how long it takes someone to fix it,’ said Walker.
Many of the Wikipedia contributors are quite young, but Walker estimates that there are around 10 PhD-qualified chemistry contributors, as well as several knowledgeable graduate and undergraduate chemists. More professional chemists should get involved, urged Walker. ‘We have come a long way, but there is still a huge amount to be done,’ he said.
Walker will speak about his Wikipedia involvement at the American Chemical Society national meeting in March. ‘[Wikipedia] will become for information what Google is for searching,’ he predicted.
source: Chemists using Wikipedia
Steve Gibb, Opposition Heavy To US Environmental Health Agency Plan To Privatise Open Access Journal, IPWatch, February 28, 2006. Excerpt:
The director of the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) is facing overwhelming opposition to a plan to privatise an open-access environmental science journal NIEHS publishes, according to public comments on the plan.NIEHS last September proposed privatizing Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP), a free, online monthly that publishes information on major toxics like dioxin, mercury and lead and distributes the data free to developing countries. The privatization plan came after a budgetary review, and NIEHS’ new director suggested the funding could be re-directed toward research.
But the privatization plan is drawing broad domestic criticism from academics, state health agencies, and many US Environmental Protection Agency officials, who fear they would lose access to critical data that helps agency scientists set toxic risk limits and other policies affecting vulnerable populations, according to comments obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
There also is a lengthy set of international comments expressing opposition to the plan as well. In addition to comments from Taiwan, Israel, Argentina, New Zealand and India, over 35 Chinese scientists emphasized the value of the information to them in addressing the country’s environmental challenges and praised EHP’s quarterly Chinese edition. “Don’t let the world fall down into black fog,” a Taiwanese commenter says. NIEHS director David Schwartz said in a recent interview that he will decide about the privatization option in the next three to six months. “We will be exploring all the opportunities and options available to make this the strongest environmental science journal that is accessible to the widest audience. If he opts for privatization, he likely would establish a formal procedure soliciting bids, reviewing them, and deciding on open-access policies for the archives.
About 94 percent of over 330 public respondents opposed privatization of the journal outright, saying it would be a “disadvantage” or “strong disadvantage.” In addition, just over four percent support privatization only if EHP’s content remains free online, according to an analysis of the comments. Less than two percent of the comments supported unconditional privatization.
As Frazier noted, a key feature of journal bundling is strict limits on a library’s ability to cancel titles. This restriction of cancellations creates challenges for budget management, for collection management, and for the marketplace of scholarly journals. As library budgets are locked into large bundles, cancellation pressure on unbundled titles increases and funds to acquire new journals outside of bundles are squeezed out.In addition, the size of the largest bundles has been growing. There is a history of significant consolidation among the largest publishers in recent years, reducing libraries’ choices among journal bundles. In the three years since ARL last surveyed its members regarding e-journal subscriptions, several of the largest players have merged: Academic with Elsevier, and Kluwer Academic with Springer. The consequence of these mergers is that a short list of publisher bundles account for substantial and growing proportions of library budgets. A short list of negotiations increasingly determine sales terms and access to hundreds of titles and consume the majority of a research library’s journals budget….Experience with past surveys has shown how difficult it is to obtain comparable price information on journal bundles. Because of nondisclosure clauses, the diversity in the structure of pricing models between publishers and among customers, varying practices for allocating of costs within and between institutions, and occasional funding from sources outside the library budget, it is nearly impossible to construct a rubric for reporting pricing that is not unbearably burdensome for libraries to use….There is evidence in the survey responses that, by and large, publishers are encouraging this movement from print to electronic journals. However, savings incentives are generally reported to be modest or even nonexistent….The picture is more mixed with regard to assessments of publishers’ archiving arrangements to protect content in the case of business failure or other loss of content on the publishers’ side. A strong majority of libraries (71% of contracts) reported that they had investigated a publisher’s archiving plans. However, for those who checked, the publisher’s arrangements were found satisfactory by only 60% of the respondents. While a 40% dissatisfaction rate represents a minority assessment, it is a substantial customer base to be expressing “no confidence”. It may be that until publishers increase customer confidence in their archiving arrangements, substantial numbers of libraries will continue to retain print subscriptions out of concerns about long-term access to electronic journals….Libraries reported an average satisfaction rating of 3.4 (on a 5-point scale) for the pricing of their first contract with any given publisher. They reported somewhat lower satisfaction with consecutive contracts—down to 3.25 for current contracts—suggesting a perception that, as contracts are renegotiated, perceptions of advantageous pricing are weakening….There is no doubt that large commercial publishers’ bundles are a substantial part of research library collections. It is also clear that significant changes in library collections are underway. Cancellation projects are common….Cancellation of bundled titles has been effectively limited in recent years. Publisher’s archiving arrangements are unsatisfactory to at least a substantial minority of the community. Satisfaction with bundle pricing is decreasing through successive negotiations. This survey documented that journal bundles have already enjoyed substantial protection from cancellation. With the majority of respondents reporting recent cancellation projects, the inescapable conclusion is that other segments of research library collections have been reduced to a greater extent in compensation for the protection afforded to bundles. This should be of concern to the library community and to publishers without the market power to gain similar protection for their titles….If libraries could eliminate nondisclosure clauses, obtain more generous cancellation terms, and achieve better price structures, satisfaction with bundles would likely increase.
Merrill Goozner, Innovation in Biomedicine: Can Stem Cell Research Lead the Way to Affordability? PLoS Medicine, May 2006. Excerpt:
The IP system may be contributing to the slowdown [of biomedical innovation]. The current innovation system encourages researchers to patent and commercialize discoveries that in an earlier era were considered basic science insights. This has led to an active market in the building blocks of further research, which can be anything from a genetic sequence or a cell receptor to the reagents needed to culture cells. This proliferation of basic science patents has raised the bar –what economists call transaction costs– for other researchers who want access to those research tools. While many researchers, especially in academia, find ways around patent restrictions, and many companies have no trouble executing license agreements, there are cases where “patent thickets” have discouraged other researchers from pursuing similar or subsequent lines of inquiry. The stem cell field, which is still years away from its first approved therapy, has already experienced patent thicket problems….A recent survey by the United Kingdom Stem Cell Initiative identified nearly 18,000 stem cell patents issued around the world since 1994, with two-thirds issued in the US. The Washington-based law firm of Sterne Kessler Goldstein and Fox has warned clients that “any company or research institution that plans to develop stem cells for therapeutic purposes may face a number of blocking patents and applications that will require licenses, if available”….CIRM [California Institute for Regenerative Medicine] and other stem cell funders can become catalysts for cutting through this patent thicket. They can require that all grant recipients agree to donate the exclusive license to any insights, materials, and technologies that they patent to a common patent pool supervised by a new, nonprofit organization set up for that purpose. A patent pool serves as a one-stop shop where investigators can obtain no-cost or low-cost licenses for subsequent research.
Open J-Gate is an electronic gateway to global journal literature in open access domain. Launched in 2006, Open J-Gate is the contribution of Informatics (India) Ltd to promote [OA]. Open J-Gate provides seamless access to millions of journal articles available online. Open J-Gate is also a database of journal literature, indexed from 3000+ open access journals, with links to full text at Publisher sites. Open J-Gate Features and Benefits: [1] Portal with the largest number of e-journals. Open J-Gate indexes articles from 3000+ academic, research and industry journals. More than 1500 of them are peer-reviewed scholarly journals. [2] Links to one million+ open access articles. This number is growing with 300000+ new articles added every year. Full-text links are regularly validated. [3] Constant updating. The Open J-Gate site is updated every day. [4] Well designed journal classification. All journals are classified in a three-level hierarchical system to provide for better relevancy in search results. [5] Table of Content (TOC) Browsing. Users can browse the TOC of latest issue and the back issues. [6] Easy-to-Use search functionalities. Database allows various search options for the user’s convenience. The subscriber can search by Title, Author, Abstract, Authors’ Address/Institution, Keywords, etc.
source: Launch of Open J-Gate
On January 16, 2006, the Governing Board of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) adopted a Recommendation On Open Access To Biodiversity Data. Excerpt:
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) Governing Board — representing 47 countries, 31 international organizations and the Secretariat on the Convention of Biological Diversity - hereby recommends that research councils, other funding agencies and private foundations:
- Promote that proposals for funding for biodiversity research include a plan for the maintenance and sharing of the digital biodiversity data generated in proposed projects;
- Promote that species and specimen level data and associated metadata that are generated in funded projects are made publicly available through mechanisms cooperating with GBIF, within a specified period after completion of the supported research.
Rationale: Many research projects generate biodiversity data sets that are relevant for the wider scientific community, government natural resource managers, policy makers, and the public. Because data sharing now requires small marginal costs compared to the full research costs that generate the data, it is wise to allow for further shared use of these data to benefit the widest possible range of users….
Two of the goals of GBIF are to bring together data for multiple uses, and to find incentives and mechanisms to make data freely available as quickly and effectively as possible. These goals underlie the recommendations made here….The advantages of free and open data sharing have been documented (Arzberger et al. 2004) and brought together in the collaborative Conservation Commons:
- Sharing data is good scientific practice and is necessary for the advancement of science, public awareness and education;
- Expanded access to data sources could impressively increase the value to taxpayers of the more than $650 billion spent annually by governments on all research disciplines….
- The openness of science stimulates and facilitates creativity;
- Open access to data enables greater accountability to funding sources as quality, reliability, productivity and use of data are enhanced with public utilization and review.
Requirements for open access to data…signal the importance of data sharing to science and to decision-making, as well as to the long-term benefits to society and the environment, while respecting the right of scientists to publish on their data before releasing it for use by others.
Comment. Also see last year’s GBIF Statement on Free and Open Access to Data (formulated 12/04, revised 1/05, released 3/05, issued 10/05).
Attention GTA-regionals
Forget the tropics. Forget Disney. Face it, you don’t just need a vacation from work and winter, you need a vacation from Planet Earth
Good news: just announced, the next Rocket Number Nine taking off for the Planets departs from Lulu’s Lounge next June 8th. Enroute from Saturn and outward bound for the Alter Destiny.
You don’t want to be on this planet. This planet is a hell on wheels. You need to get off this planet. Going nowhere here? You should go somewhere there! You need to be out there, in the outer realms, out beyond the kingdom of, someplace out there where there is no limit
to the things you can do, where there is no limit
to the things that you can be because your heart is free and your life is worthwhile. Out in space is a pleasant place; hock your ipod, sell the farm, stow-away if you have to, but just get on board before liftoff.
“… it’s very easy to think that jazz is just that quiet stuff in the background designed to facilitate up-scale shopping, latte consumption and the heartfelt discussion of a diversified portfolio. If you can recall occasionally that it’s music of joy, pain, blood, mind, heart and spirit … then you’ll probably enjoy what’s going on at Lula Lounge this week.
… It’s one of the great big bands (and concepts) in jazz history and it just might be the event of the year. Try to hear it. Oh, and you can buy a t-shirt.”
Stuart Broomer, CODA MAGAZINE
[ GARY TOPP PRESENTS SUN RA ARKESTRA ]
Attention space travellers. The next Arkestra is departing Thursday, June 8th, 2006 from Lulu’s Lounge, Toronto.
Seniors and passengers travelling with small children and pets should arrive at least an hour early.
The Stanford Center for Internet and Society is hosting a conference, “Cultural Environmentalism at 10,” on March 10/11 to reflect upon the decade since the publication of Jamie Boyle’s fantastic book, Shamans, Software, and Spleens. While the topic of Jamie’s book (IP policy) is something IP scholars had been talking about for ever, Jamie’s book was one of the best to introduce these issues to a community beyond law scholars. (I first heard about the book at lunch a decade ago when Harvard’s provost told me it was “one of the most important law books I had ever read.”). The book, and the articles that followed it, gave birth to what we should call the “cultural environmentalism” movement — the movement to think about IP policy as environmentalists think about pollution policy.
We designed this conference a bit differently from others. I asked a bunch of IP professors to give me their list of the top “young” IP scholars. I tabulated the votes, and asked the top four to write papers. They agreed. Their papers will be commented upon by leading IP scholars. Here’s the list of presenters and commentators.
Here’s the Center’s announcement. If you can make it, be sure to reserve. There are already a large number who have RSVPd, so act soon.
Cultural Environmentalism at 10
March 11-12, 2006
Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/conferences/cultural/Ten years ago, Duke Law Professor Jamie Boyle suggested that the history of the environmental movement offered powerful theoretical and practical lessons to those who sought to recognize the importance of the public domain, and to expose the harms caused by a relentlessly maximalist program of intellectual property expansion.
On March 11-12, 2006, Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society will host a symposium to explore the development and expansion of the metaphor of “cultural environmentalism” over the course of ten busy years for intellectual property law. We’ve invited four scholars to present original papers on the topic, and a dozen intellectual property experts to comment and expand on their works.
Molly Van Houweling explores voluntary manipulation of intellectual property rights as a tool for cultural environmentalism. Susan Crawford extends Boyle’s analysis to the age of networks. Rebecca Tushnet, looks at the ways in which the law’s impulse to generalize complicates the project of cultural environmentalism, and Madhavi Sunder looks at how the metaphor affects traditional knowledge. Professor Boyle will also offer some remarks, as will Stanford Law School’s Professor Lawrence Lessig.
The event is free, but registration is required. We look forward to seeing you.
source: Cultural Environmentalism at 10
How should chemists respond to open access publishing?
The three respondents qualified their responses noting a suspected potential for lower standards and, most commonly, how to achieve a high level of editing, review and presentation while attempts are made to lower the cost of distribution.
[Thanks to Dana Roth, Caltech, for bringing this to my attention.]
Technology is now available to start a wiki on mechanics (wikimechanics) to document in a useful way everything known about mechanics. I mean everything: from everyday experience to esoteric theories, and everything in between. It should also have an exhaustive collection of pictures and data, all properly hyperlinked. I also mean useful. How do we catalog everyday experience to make it useful for serious decisions? How about an open-source finite element code, with links to a materials database? What if Ashby’s Materials Selector becomes an open-access, user-enriched, and ad-supported repository? Many open-source wiki engines are available today; our wiki need not be part of Wikipedia. The authors of the wiki could be from the entire international community of applied mechanics – professors, students, engineers, and amateurs. They would also be the users. Along the way, we’ll figure out how to assign credits to individual authors in such a collaborative effort. This wiki would co-evolve with the subject of mechanics: they would influence each other.
Abstract: The institutional repository (IR) is a contemporary concept that captures and makes available through Internet and intranet the institutional research output and other relevant documents to the users by way of digitizing the output The IRs have already started emerging in India. This study highlights the importance of IR, delineates the scope and methodology projects the findings. Most of the repositories are using open source information repository software like DSpace, Greenstone Digital Library Software and GNU EPrints. It is observed that generally documents like theses and dissertations, seminar papers, journal articles, etc., are being found more in the repositories. Some of the problems of the repositories have been highlighted and suggestions
offered.
Your mobile phone is a beacon - a radio transmitter in a
box. Therefore it is possible to trace the signal and work out where
it is.
There are now several web companies which will track your friends’ and
family’s phones for you, so you always know where they are.
But just how safe is it to make location details available online?
[…]
I attempted to find out, using regular contributor Guy Kewney, an
independent technology journalist and, for one day only, human guinea
pig.
I sent him on a tour of London. He could go anywhere he wanted, and I
planned to meet up with him later and tell him, hopefully, where he
had been.
Guy did not know that when I borrowed his phone for a few minutes
earlier in the day, I took the opportunity to register it on one of
the tracking services.
Continues at [news.bbc.co.uk]