Technology Blog

AOL must certainly deserve the 2006 Doublespeak Award for this slippery bit of rhetoric snipped from the debates over their right to auction off a direct unfiltered path to your inbox for Premium Grade Spam, or maybe, could we dare suppose, the great flagship of the AOL really has become so shareholder saturated as to truly believe that the spammers who pay the tithe to line AOL’s pockets are really and truly purveyors of a ’sacred’ experience? Naw ….

AOL has no intention of backing away from CertifiedEmail, which will be rolled out within 30 days, according to AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham. Like the U.S. Postal Service’s Priority Mail, the service simply gives customers another choice in how to send and receive messages, he said. “We are absolutely intent on using this as an additional tool to protect the sanctity of the e-mail experience for our members.“
[ Yahoo! News ]

Ok, fare’s fair, or at least it’s only $3 per thousand and yes, it may have real legit uses such as ensuring you get your tax assessment or utility bill and all that badly designed corporate email that would otherwise bristle SpamAssassin’s neckhairs … but it also fasttracks all the very latest coolest must have gotta see limited time act now worthless gotta move it move it product pumping from your satellite or cellular provider …

source: AOL Introduces Premium Paid Spam

The library and history department at Georgia State University will soon launch an OA journal devoted to Atlantic World history. No details yet; stay tuned. (Thanks to William Walsh.)

source: Forthcoming OA journal of Atlantic World history

source: Access v. protection debated at WIPO

source: Two Spanish universities sign the Berlin Declaration

ALA President Michael Gorman has issued a statement on the closing of the EPA libraries (February 23, 2006).  Excerpt:

The American Library Association is deeply concerned about the very negative impact on public access to environmental information that will result if theproposed 80 % cuts to funding for the Environmental Protection Administration’s (EPA) libraries are made.  ALA has a long-standing commitment to promoting free public access to government information and we are troubled by what seems to be an accelerating trend in increased restrictions on access to government information. Individuals and communities need to be able to find high quality, accurate information about issues that concern them, such as the health and safety of their families and communities. EPA has, since its creation in the early 1970s, been a key source of such information. We fear that the drastic budget cuts proposed in the FY 2007 EPA budget will have severely deleterious effects on the ability of the EPA libraries to continue their essential role in ensuring public access to critical health and safety information. We encourage members of Congress to maintain the funding necessary to support key government information programs such as the EPA libraries and to ensure adequate future funding for this purpose.

source: ALA statement on EPA library closings

President Abdul Kalam of India gave a speech last Sunday to the Indian Intitute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore. The title was, Towards World Knowledge Platform. (Thanks to Subbiah Arunachalam.) Excerpt:

Initially, the mission of World Knowledge Platform is to connect and network the R&D Institutions, Universities and Industries using fiber broadband from the partner nations on selected R&D Missions. The underground fiber cable infrastructure already exists between the many partners. It is only waiting to be lighted up with state-of-the-art optical networks and to ignite the minds of the knowledge workers. This knowledge GRID will support multitude of seamless connections supporting both synchronous and asynchronous communication, carrying either text or audio or video. We can then use this network in the academic environments to teach courses online and share expensive equipments remotely….The components of the vision [for IISc] are:…(f) Be a partner in the World Knowledge Platform to promote world class knowledge creation, knowledge dissemination and knowledge sharing among all partner countries….(i) Create an IISc-Virtual Education Hub - so that the quality education from IISc can reach out to the entire nation. It should also act as a Virtual Collaborative Hub, which will become the platform for the scientists, researchers from IISc, world wide scientists and Nobel laureates to share their knowledge among the students and faculty across India.

Comment. I’ve only excerpted the parts most relevant to OA above. But the whole speech is worth reading if only to see how an educated President can speak, in case you’ve forgotten. If you’re not from India, try to imagine your head of state speaking these lines. “It is reported that gene differences between humans and most animals are very nominal. More than 90% of our DNA is similar. This property is a boon to researchers since animal models can be subsequently used for curing human diseases based on trial data.” “When I think of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, I…[think of] Mr. Richard Feynman…Mr. Eric Drexler…[and] Prof CNR Rao.” “The era of wood and bio-mass is almost nearing its end. The age of oil and natural gas would soon be over even within the next few decades. The world energy forum has predicted that fossil based oil, coal and gas reserves will last for another 5 - 10 decades only.” “I would like to discuss the latest research in the area of photo-voltaic cells using Carbon nano tubes which can give an efficiency of over 45%, nearly three times the efficiency which the present technology can offer.”

source: India President outlines vision of knowledge sharing

source: Google corrects misunderstandings about its Library project

Peng Dong, Marie Loh, and Adrian Mondry, The “impact factor” revisited, Biomedical Digital Libraries, December 2005.

Abstract: The number of scientific journals has become so large that individuals, institutions and institutional libraries cannot completely store their physical content. In order to prioritize the choice of quality information sources, librarians and scientists are in need of reliable decision aids. The “impact factor” (IF) is the most commonly used assessment aid for deciding which journals should receive a scholarly submission or attention from research readership. It is also an often misunderstood tool. This narrative review explains how the IF is calculated, how bias is introduced into the calculation, which questions the IF can or cannot answer, and how different professional groups can benefit from IF use.

Excerpt from the body of the text. Note the sentence I’ve put in bold.

Given the rapid growth of electronic publications, the online availability of articles has recently become an important factor to influence the IF. Murali et al. determined how the IF of medical journals is affected by their online availability. In that study, a document set obtained from MEDLINE was classified into three groups, namely FUTON (full text on the Net), abstracts only and NAA (no abstract available). Online availability clearly increased the IF. In the FUTON subcategory, there was an IF gradient favoring journals with freely available articles [PS: emphasis added]. This is exemplified by the success of several “open access” journals published by BioMed Central (BMC) and the Public Library of Science (PLoS). Open access journals publish full-text online papers free of subscription fees. BioMed Central (BMC) is an “open access” publisher in business since 2000. BMC hosts over 100 biomedical journals ranging from general interest to specialized research. More than twenty journals published by BMC are currently tracked by the ISI and over half of these have IFs available for the recent years. BMC Bioinformatics was assigned its first IF for 2004. At 5.4, it places the journal second in the field, only marginally below the traditional competitor Bioinformatics (IF = 5.7), which has a 20-years’ publishing history and is connected to a major learned society within this field of research (International Society for Computational Biology). PLoS (Public Library of Science) is another example of a successful “open access” publishing strategy. It started publishing two open access journals in biology and medical research in 2003 and 2004 respectively. PLoS Biology was assigned its first IF of 13.9 for 2004. In the ISI subject category “biology”, it is thus placed at the number 1 position of 64 in its first year of reporting an IF. FASEB journal at position 2 has an IF of 6.8, but has been in circulation since 1987. Similarly, in the other SCI subject category (”biochemistry and molecular biology”)in which PLOS Biology is listed, it ranks at position 8 out of 261. Monitoring the development of such journals’ IF will inform the determination of the online-availability bias in the future. This effect will increase in the future with the availability of new search engines with deep penetration such as Google Scholar, allowing researchers to find relevant articles in an instant, and then choose those with immediately and freely available content over those with barriers, economic and otherwise.

source: OA improves impact factors for journals

source: OA and non-OA resources on complementary and alternative medicine

In June 2004, James Howison and Abby Goodrum asked, Why can’t I manage academic papers like MP3s? They decided that the answer lies in metadata.

Why can’t downloaded academic papers be managed in the simple and effective manner in which digital music files are managed? We make the case that the answer is different treatments of metadata. Two key differences are identified: Firstly, digital music metadata is standardized and moves with the content file, while academic metadata is not and does not. Secondly digital music metadata lookup services are collaborative and automate the movement from a digital file to the appropriate metadata, while academic metadata services do not.

Two days ago, Alf Eaton took a whack at solving this problem by proposing a way to manage metadata for Academic PDFs.

source: Managing downloaded eprints like MP3s

source: Handbook on access to government information

source: Licenses for humanitarian access

Good news. It appears that SourceForge are now offering full, public use of
Subversion for all projects on sf.net!

The SourceForge.net: Subversion
(Version Control for Source Code) document contains full details on their
setup. Notable key points:

1. It’s using authenticated HTTPS — which is great, going by my experiences with the ASF’s setup
2. Imports are done from either an existing SF.net CVS repository using cvs2svn, from a Subversion ’svnadmin dump’ file, or from a CVS repository tarball
3. CIAbot support is offered as standard

Awesome. I’ll be trying this out with Uffizi, which I registered as a Sourceforge project a few weeks ago just to try this out.

subversion svn sourceforge open source projects software source code management

This post was written by Justin, source: SourceForge.net now offering public Subversion

Paul Ginsparg has won the CNI/ARL/Educaus Paul Evan Peters Award for 2006. From today’s announcement:

Paul Ginsparg, physicist and Internet scholarly communications pioneer, is the latest recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award, announced today by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and EDUCAUSE. The award will be presented on April 3, 2006 at the CNI Membership Meeting in Arlington, VA, where Ginsparg will deliver the Paul Peters Award lecture at the opening plenary. A professor of physics, computing and information science at Cornell University, Ginsparg has distinguished himself as the visionary behind arXiv, an Internet e-print archive for articles in the sciences, which allows scholars to circulate and comment on research prior to publication in traditional peer-reviewed journals, thereby significantly reducing the amount of time it takes for an article to be available to researchers. Started in 1991 as a service for preprints in physics, arXiv eventually expanded to include mathematics, computer science and quantitative biology. Today, the resource boasts open access to over 350,000 articles.

“Paul Ginsparg’s accomplishments as a theoretical physicist, alone, distinguish him as a superb scholar, but his innovations in scientific publication, for which the Paul Evan Peters award honors him, truly places him in the annals of history as a transformative figure who has changed the landscape of scholarly communication forever,” remarked Ronald Larsen, Dean of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and a member of the award search committee. “This is a richly deserved award,” Larsen continued, “that honors the legacy of Paul Evan Peters.”

Commenting on how Ginsparg’s brainchild has revolutionized science publishing, in the October 2005 issue of Sky & Telescope, author Richard Tresch Fienberg reports that papers published in more than a dozen major astronomy journals are twice as likely to be cited by other researchers if they have also appeared on arXiv. He observes, “Clearly, professional astronomers are gravitating toward [arXiv] as their primary - perhaps even exclusive - reference source.” Expressing this view directly as part of the 2001 UNESCO Expert Conference Electronic Publishing in Science, Ginsparg wrote, “The essential question for ‘Electronic Publishing in Science’ is how our scientific research communications infrastructure should be reconfigured to take maximal advantage of newly evolving electronic resources.”…In 2002, Ginsparg was named a fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Upon announcing the award, the foundation stated that, “Ginsparg has deliberately transformed the way physics gets done - challenging conventional standards for review and communication of research and thereby changing the speed and mode of dissemination of scientific advances.” Commenting on the impact Ginsparg’s work has had on scholarly communication, CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch said, “Paul’s work has shown how technology can fundamentally change the patterns of flow and the pace of scientific communication and has challenged scholarly disciplines to reconsider their practices.” Ginsparg joins previous award recipients Brewster Kahle (2004), Vinton Cerf (2002) and Tim Berners-Lee (2000).

Congratulations, Paul!

source: Paul Ginsparg wins CNI/ARL/Educause Award

source: University policies are the next step for OA

Stevan Harnad announces that Eprints has renamed two of its services.

• The Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) was formerly called the Institutional Self-Archiving Policy Registry.

• The ROMEO Journal/Publisher Self-Archiving Policy Directory was formerly called Journal Policies - Self-Archiving Policy By Journal.

If you remember, the Eprints Institutional Archives Registry was renamed the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) back on January 26, 2006.

source: Two Eprints services renamed

source: Nancy Davenport on scholarly communication and OA

Hooray!

SpamAssassin has been voted DataMation Anti-Spam Product of the Year for 2006, earning three times as many votes as the next contender.

This is the second year in a row, which is fantastic — and our margin is increasing each year.

This post was written by Justin, source: DataMation Anti-Spam Product of the Year!

source: OA to grey literature: a report on the conference

source: Open-source, open-access chemistry