Technology Blog

Science Commons has signed the Berlin Declaration. Director John Wilbanks explains why:

I’m in Golm, Germany at the Berlin 4 Conference on Open Access. It’s been a wonderful week here and the movement behind open access is really remarkable.  I signed the Berlin Declaration on behalf of Science Commons yesterday. It’s an important step in connecting the philosophy of a statement like the Declaration with the practice of the Creative Commons copyright licenses that implement Open Access philosophy in a free, legal manner. To be clear, Science Commons is not engaged in writing new copyright licenses: Creative Commons licenses already implement the Declaration, are already international, and are used by a large number of Open Access journals.  There are too few signatories to the Declaration in North America. We’ll be encouraging our partners in the Neurocommons project and other work to examine the Declaration and sign up for the scientific benefits of Open Access to their institutions and their own research.

source: Science Commons signs the Berlin Declaration

source: Posting mathematical proofs to arXiv without formally publishing them

source: Notes on the Michigan mass-digitization symposium

Simon Chester blogged some notes yesterday on a public talk by Michael Geist. Unfortunately, we don’t know the occasion or event. According to Chester, Geist argued that “Government funding should require research to be open access.” I’ll blog Geist’s words if I can find the text online.

Update. Geist was delivering the 2006 Hart House lecture at the University of Toronto, “Who owns creativity? What is wrong with copyright?”

Update. Joe Clark has blogged more detailed notes on Geist’s talk, though he’s equally brief on the call for a Canadian OA policy: “Choose research: Open-access scientific publication, especially for federally-funded research (including some of his, he told us).”

source: Michael Geist calls on Canadian government to mandate OA to publicly-funded research

I don’t have many blogging rituals, but marking the first appearance of golden-green spring leaves is one of them. I did it in 2003, 2004, and 2005, and it’s time to do it again.

It’s remarkable how much earlier spring comes here in the pacific northwest. I noticed the telltale golden glow on the not-quite-bare branches the day we returned from Rochester, nearly a month before the same signs are likely to appear back east.

Here’s my annual tribute to this beautiful and fragile time of year.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

—Robert Frost

source: spring has sprung with gilded greens

Technology has made it possible for teams with members around the world to work on virtual projects. A monthly budget for such a project can easily exceed $1.2 million and involve more than 60 team members worldwide. Although email and other communication tools make this possible, what happens when team effectiveness is hampered by the same technology? Dominic M. Thomas, a visiting assistant professor of decision and information analysis at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, and colleagues studied the failure of large virtual projects to learn what went wrong. Their findings are presented in a new paper titled “Making Knowledge Work Successful in Virtual Teams via Technology Facilitation.”

http://knowledge.emory.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewArticle&ID=945

This post was written by David Teten, source: How to Prevent Technology From Impeding Communication and Wrecking Your Virtual Project

I’ve just given Feed43 a go. It’s very nifty.

Basically, it’s a pattern-based HTML-to-RSS scraper — similar to my own
Sitescooper in that respect — but built entirely
as a web app.

Until now, I’ve been hacking up scrapers one by one, using either
Sitescooper or WWW::Mechanize, run from cron, and
putting the output up on taint.org; for example, http://taint.org/scraped/ has
the public ones: Threadless, Perry Bible Fellowship, and White Ninja comics.

Today, I came across a case where I wanted a new RSS feed, and since I’d been
hearing of Feed43, thought I’d give it a try, to save running yet another cron
on our server. It was reasonably simple, although still required a fair bit
of knowledge of the concepts of scraping via pattern matching against HTML; but
the UI was fantastic, with everything previewed using a clean AJAX UI, and
within 3 minutes I had a new feed.

For the curious — the feed was for TCAL’s Ireland category , and the results are here: Feed43 (Feed For Free) : TCAL - Ireland. (go ahead
and sign up if you like

New web pattern, by the way — there’s a trend towards using “secret URLs”
instead of username/password authentication for the kind of “trivial” auth
task, like editing feed-scraper details. Good idea.

feed43 feeds html rss scraping syndication

This post was written by Justin, source: Feed43 Rocks

Stevan Harnad, Formaldehyde and Function, Open Access Archivangelism, March 30, 2006. Excerpt:

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Helen Hockx-Yu wrote in JISC-REPOSITORIES:

“I should be grateful if anyone can provide me some evidence to back the following statement:

‘Concern of longevity has contributed to the lack of active engagement from many researchers [with institutional repositories]. Guarantee of long-term preservation helps enhance a repository’s trustworthiness by giving authors confidence in the future accessibility and more incentives to deposit content’

“I guess longevity here also applies to the financial sustainability of the repository itself as a business operation, in addition to its content.”

The statement is (1) not based on evidence at all, but pure speculation and (2) speculation not on the part of the content-providers (i.e. the authors…)…but on the part of others, whose a priori concept of an institutional repository is that it is for long-term preservation (rather than for immediate access-provision and impact maximisation)….[I]t would be absolutely absurd of their employers and funders to mandate self-archiving for the sake of long-term preservation! Preservation of what, and why? Articles are published by journals. The preservation of the published version (PDF/XML) is the responsibility of the journals that publish it, the libraries that subscribe/license it, and the deposit libraries that archive it. None of that is the responsibility of the author or his institution, and never has been. Hence it is ridiculous to think the reason authors are not self-archiving today is because they are fretting about preservation!  Nor is there the slightest evidence that the 15% of articles that has been self-archived spontaneously in central or institutional repositories has vanished or is at risk! Arxiv content is still there today, a decade and a half since its inception in 1991, under nonstop use. CogPrints contents likewise, since its inception nearly a decade ago. Ditto for the IRs that have been up since GNU Eprints was first released in 2000….

source: Authors are not waiting for preservation guarantees

Stevan Harnad and Chawki Hajjem, Manual Evaluation of Robot Performance in Identifying Open Access Articles, Open Access Archivangelism, March 30, 2006. Excerpt:

In an unpublished study, Antelman et al. (2005) hand-tested the accuracy of the algorithm that Hajjem et al.’s (2005) software robot used to identify Open Access (OA) and Non-Open-Access (NOA) articles in the ISI database. Antelman et al. found much lower accuracy (d’ 0.98, bias 0.78, true OA 77%, false OA 41%), with their larger sample of nearly 600 (half OA, half NOA) in Biology (and even lower, near-chance performance in Sociology, sample size 600, d’ 0.11, bias 0.99, true OA 53% false OA 49%) compared to Hajjem et al., who had with their smaller Biology sample of 200, found: d’ 2.45, beta 0.52, true OA 93%, false OA 16%.

Hajjem et al. have now re-done the hand-testing on a still larger sample (1000) in Biology, and we think we have identified the reason for the discrepancy, and demonstrated that Hajjem et al.’s original estimate of the robot’s accuracy was closer to the correct one.  The discrepancy was because Antelman et al. were hand-checking a sample other than the one the robot was sampling: The templates are the ISI articles. The ISI bibliographic data (author, title, etc.) for each article is first used to automatically trawl the web with search engines looking for hits, and then the robot applies its algorithm to the first 60 hits, calling the article “OA” if the algorithm thinks it has found at least one OA full-text among the 60 hits sampled, and NOA if it does not find one….

source: More on the accuracy of robot identification of OA articles

The National Archives of Australia are preparing to adopt the OpenDocument format.

source: Boost for the ODF

source: Spanish university signs Berlin Declaration

source: More journal cancellations from high prices than OA archiving

source: Strategies to fill IRs regardless how we read the OA impact advantage

Stephen Pincock, UK knowledge transfer found lacking, TheScientist, March 29, 2006. Excerpt:

Britain’s Research Councils lack the internal skills base to do an efficient job of knowledge transfer, the authors of an internal report on the subject told the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology today (March 29).  Richard Brook, director of the Leverhulme Trust, John Murphy from aerospace firm BAE Systems and Barbara Doig from the Scottish Executive, were commissioned by the Research Councils to conduct an “external challenge,” and examine how well the eight government-funded councils transfer knowledge to and from business and the wider community.

Their report is still in the draft stage, and is not scheduled for publication until late April or May, a spokesman for the umbrella group Research Councils UK told The Scientist. But under cross-examination by the committee of politicians, the authors confirmed that it contains “some fairly strong messages.”  Among those messages is the view that “there are not sufficient skilled people in house in the Research Councils to carry out knowledge transfer effectively,” said Brook. The Research Councils are far from alone in suffering this shortage, he said, but nevertheless it was something that could be improved. One possible solution could be to use some kind of external facilitator to make improvements.  Brook also said that the Research Councils had a “rather limited” view of knowledge transfer, and tended to think of it as being a one-way, outward process….

Another area for improvement is coordination between the seven research councils, Brook said. In particular, the umbrella organization Research Councils UK could be better utilized for that purpose. “I think our view is that RCUK isn’t being used as effectively as it could be,” he said, adding that part of the difficulty arises because the individual research councils want to retain autonomy.  Murphy noted that RCUK does have a dedicated knowledge transfer group, but said “it could do better.” The research councils did engage in some sharing of good practices in knowledge transfer, he said, but again “there is big scope for improvement.”  Today’s evidence hearing was part of an ongoing investigation by the select committee into the knowledge transfer activities of the Research Councils. The 11-member committee is empowered by parliament to examine the spending, policy and administration of the Office of Science and Technology and other science-related public bodies.

source: Another argument for a strong OA policy from the RCUK

The University of British Columbia Library hosts two new OA journals. (Thanks to Dean Giustini.) Excerpt:

1. Transnational Curriculum Inquiry: The Journal of the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies…

2. New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry…

UBC Library will host the OA journals without charge, for now. Faculty interested in having ejournals hosted by UBC Library sign an agreement outlining the responsibilities and liabilities for the Library and participating ejournals. The agreement indicates that the Library will offer server space and the OJS software to store and disseminate the contents of the ejournals. Each of the journal publishers will be provided with administrative control to allow them to set up their own online area for their respective journals.  Bronwen Sprout, the Digital Initiatives Librarian, says that “This could potentially develop into a much larger initiative with the Library assuming an important role in supporting and encouraging new models of scholarly communication on the UBC campus.”

source: More library-hosted OA journals

source: VITAL repository software at five more universities

source: Searching PubMed for free full-text articles

source: How will OA affect library technical services?

source: Access policies and European library consortia

Sounds vaguely like “The IT Crowd for the Vera Lynn Era” :-

[www.bbc.co.uk]

Hut 33

It’s 1941 Britain stands alone. Bletchey Park is crucial in the fight
against the German war machine. Labouring in Hut 33, three
code-breakers Archie, Toby and Charles struggle with complex ciphers,
irritate one another and fail to impress women. Their boss is the
titannically incompetent Joshua Fanshawe-Marshall who lost a tank
regiment in the Battle of France -by driving them into the sea. Archie
hates Charles, because he rejected him from Oxford. Charles thinks
he’s an oik who wears brown shoes and Toby just wants everyone to get
on.

Recording on May 10th. Free tickets available from the link above.
I’ve already booked a pair.

[Comment Link for RSS]

source: Hut 33 - A Bletchley Park Sitcom, BBC Radio 4