Technology Blog

Arthur Sale, Submission to the Australian Research Council - Funding Rules & Agreements, self-archived May 26, 2006.

Abstract: The submission is addressed to making a change in the reporting requirements for all funded schemes, which will make it a requirement of receiving the grant to deposit an electronic copy of any refereed research journal or conference articles deriving from the grant with the institution administering the grant. Minor changes are needed in the Funding Rules and the Funding Agreements. Precise wording is supplied to eliminate any concerns by publishers and to make the implementation easy.

The benefits to Australia are that Australia’s ARC publicly funded research is made visible to all through the Internet, and in the majority of cases publicly accessible. This will raise Australia’s research impact and is consistent with Australia’s espousal of a level playing field in the dissemination of research, and with activities currently underway or implemented in the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.

PS: I hope other Australians will support this excellent recommendation to mandate OA for publicly-funded research in Australia. (Disclosure: I’m listed as a co-author, with Stevan Harnad and Alma Swan, but Arthur deserves all our thanks and congratulations.)

source: Recommending an OA mandate for Australia

• the rise of “Nevaeh” as a first name for girls since 2000
  ‘The surge of Nevaeh can be traced to a single event: the appearance of a Christian rock star, Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D., on MTV in 2000 with his baby daughter, Nevaeh. “Heaven spelled backwards,” he said.’ you stupid, stupid people
  (tags: stupidity nevaeh names lemmings fashion-victims christians sonny-sandoval funny mtv)
• O’Reilly Radar: Controversy about our “Web 2.0″ service mark
  oh dear. tip: allowing your “VP of Corporate Communications” to respond is not the way to do it cluetrain-style
  (tags: oh-dear cluetrain oreilly it-at-cork web-2.0 trademarks lawyers ip)
• EAST VILLAGE RADIO New York City: The GBH Radio Show
  ‘Tom from GBH and guests, playing Robot-Rock, Distortion-Disko, Electronic, Rock, New Wave Hip-hop, house, punk, electro, downbeat and classics.’ lots of good mashups and remixes, one 2-hour 128kbps MP3 every week
  (tags: mashups music mp3 podcasts radio gbh new-york remixes)

Tags:

This post was written by dailylinks, source: links for 2006-05-26

As I was recently watching my many DVDs of FRIENDS, I was surprised that they included a little bit on computer security. In this little one minute clip, we see perfect examples of:

- why we dont download emails from strangers

- how viruses can destroy your hard drive (though Ross is using a Mac, which is kind of funny)

- and why you always need to make hard copies or at least BACK UPS of important data.




I hope it doesnt take too long to load because its cute and very educational.





Click here to watch ‘FRIENDS-UPDATED-SECURITY’

source: TV Security Lessons

Open Business is –openly– seeking help in defining what counts as an open business.

We started Openbusiness to share knowledge about business models that give a substantial portion of their main product away for free. By “free” we meant free as in “freedom” and also as in “free beer”, paraphrasing Richard Stallman….Putting it into one sentence for an unusual business advice: The more you give, the more you get! Giving away lots makes sense, because only then people will use your content, see you, recognize you. This is why Creative Commons now looks like a rational option for many artists, content creators, authors, photographers or even established media businesses….

For more than a decade we have known that the Internet reduces substantially transaction costs and because of this services like ebay could emerge. They connect thousands of sellers with potential buyers for even the most unlikely products (what has now become famous as the so-called “long tail theory), something that was logistically impossible in the physical-distribution environment….

[O]pen business models [are often] built around participatory architectures, where co-creation and collaboration are the norm and not the exception….[But] MySpace – one of the best known ‘open’ platforms for sharing content and information - recently changed its copyright policy following acquisition by Murdoch. Today everything which is uploaded to the site, your pictures, movies and recordings belongs, legally at least, to them. This position is clearly in opposition to some of the benefits sought by loosening intellectual property restrictions. The definition of ‘open’ also depends, in this regard, on encouraging communities which are sustainable.

There is also another aspect of how “Openess” changes the way business operates: Big industrial organisational models which were made for the era of mass-media and mass-production make no sense anymore. An online record label run by a staff of three can perform similar functions to a big record label run by hundreds of people. New organizational forms, new management styles and cultural norms are emerging, as well as new revenue models. But are these businesses more ethical, because they can re-distribute more, or radically reduce the costs of publishing making access to educational resources much cheaper?

If you have a comment or discussion that you would like to contribute we would love to hear from you!

source: What counts as an open business?

The Wellcome Trust has issued a Publishers’ Guide and FAQ to help publishers understand its OA policy. Excerpt:

8. What happens in cases where the journal does not allow the final, peer-reviewed manuscript to be made freely available from PMC/UKPMC within 6 months of publication?

8.1 If a publisher’s policy does not allow the deposition of Trust-funded research papers to be deposited in PMC/UKPMC and made freely available within 6 months of publication, then the author should not proceed with the submission to the journal for publication.

8.2 The Wellcome Trust’s Grant Conditions are mandatory and binding on institutions, grantholders, and all others supported by a grant. An author’s obligations to the Wellcome Trust will therefore, in almost all cases, pre-date any agreement with a journal….

15. Can a publisher directly invoice the Trust for any Wellcome-funded papers they publish under an OA - author/funder pays model?

No. The Trust sees publication costs as a research cost. Consequently, the additional funding it has made available for open access publishing is channelled through the University system.

Also see the Authors’ Guide and FAQ.

Note that Wellcome requires papers to be deposited in PMC or UKPMC. Hence, the new Elsevier option, which provides free online access only through ScienceDirect, will not satisfy Wellcome’s requirement.

source: Wellcome Trust FAQ for publishers on its OA policy

Charlie Rapple, Same debate, different forum: self-archiving of academic papers … via iTunes? All my eye, May 26, 2006. Excerpt:

Here’s a development in OA that might be considered, well, a little leftfield: Greg Restall has submitted an RSS feed of the metadata of his research opus to iTunes, to enable interested parties to locate and download the full text of his articles….Although Greg admits that “using iTunes in this way is just a bit of a joke”, this is an interesting (and, in some quarters perhaps, alarming) development of the self-archiving idea….

For example, this reader is already suggesting that all journal articles should be thus distributed, thereby saving users from having to pay to access research….[But this] reader is confusing availability of metadata in iTunes with free availability of full text….[His] suggestion that publishers “rethink their distribution” and take advantage of iTunes misses the pretty obvious point that publishers already distribute their metadata widely, and via more appropriate, and in some cases more accessible, channels (think, for example, PubMed, which is freely available and, unlike iTunes, doesn’t require you to have a plugin to use it).

Ultimately, of course, this is not a new issue. If a publisher is “green“, i.e. allows authors to self-archive their papers for open access, then iTunes is just another potential self-archiving channel. What Greg’s use of iTunes, and the responses it provoked, highlight is the lack of awareness of existing repositories amongst many of those who are best placed to use them, and perhaps also an underlying need for greater repository functionality, to help users quickly locate, collate and share relevant research.

We’ve been mulling over the implications of this, and had some ideas about what repositories could usefully do that might encourage increased usage by publishers [if, like iTunes, we didn’t insist on OA]….

source: Self-archiving in a new key

source: Harold Varmus, Free Radical

source: OA to historic animations

How a Dutch B-school is helping its diverse student body develop lasting networks:

One answer, at least at RSM, is technology. Dianne Bevelander, executive director of RSM programs, is using software to map the networks that students form among themselves and track the student connections over time. School administrators hope to use the lessons learned to teach students how to more effectively create the networks they’ll need to succeed in a global business environment.

Two weeks after students arrived in October, Bevelander asked them to identify their personal networks. A questionnaire asked them to name students with whom they work, those from whom they seek ideas, and those with whom they socialize. Then Bevelander color-coded the three types of connections to produce an image of the current class that, on a PC screen, looks like a lacework project gone haywire.

But patterns emerge. “This group works well together as a team,” says Bevelander, pointing at an octagon representing one student work group. “But if you look at the social network, they don’t talk to each other at all.” Indeed, the lines representing social connections all lead to other groups. The lesson: Teams can get the job done even if the members don’t like each other that much.

more…

This post was written by David Teten, source: A Dutch Business School Using Social Network Analysis to Improve an MBA’s Value

David Brown, Bird Flu Fears Ignite Debate on Scientists’ Sharing of Data, Washington Post, May 25, 2006. (Thanks to Eric Kansa.) Excerpt:

As fears of an influenza pandemic grow, a struggle has emerged between experts who believe the latest genetic data on the H5N1 bird flu virus should be made public immediately and others who fear that such a policy would alienate the countries collecting virus samples and the scientists analyzing them. The issue may come to a head this week at the World Health Assembly in Geneva, the governing body of the World Health Organization. Health ministers from more than 190 countries will consider a resolution that would require them to provide flu data and virus samples to the scientific community “in a timely manner.”…

WHO supports the change….Without guarantees [of credit], scientists and clinicians may be unwilling to hand over virus samples or collect them in the first place, Margaret Chan, WHO’s director of pandemic influenza planning, said recently.

Critics of the current system say the possibility of global catastrophe trumps any concern about hurt feelings or career advancement.

"Science just moves more rapidly when you share the data openly," said Steven L. Salzberg, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland and a leader of the Influenza Genome Sequencing Project at the National Institutes of Health. He said the chief fear is that one researcher will expropriate another’s hard-earned data before the first can produce a scientific paper. "It will happen, I can’t deny it," he said. "But the problem is that when you take that attitude with a public health matter, then you’re essentially putting your scientific goals ahead of matters of the public." But the resistance to sharing data may wane as the specter of a pandemic grows.

Comment. I strongly support the OA mandate under consideration at the World Health Assembly. For background, see my April article on OA to avian flu data.

source: World Health Assembly may require OA to avian flu data

Dorothea Salo, Both/And, Caveat Lector, May 25, 2006. Excerpt:

The author of last week’s open-access citation-advantage article has been getting strong pushback from Stevan Harnad. His latest response is well worth reading (except for one small quotation that is fortunately easily skipped)….[I]n the main, I agree with Eysenbach. It’s a complicated world. There is no one clear definition of open access (and what is with this pregnancy metaphor, anyway?). There is no easy road to it; both green and gold roads have serious bumps to contend with….I do, however, want to quibble with one section near the end of Eysenbach’s statement:

As to Harnad’s statement that the advantage gold-over-green will wash out as self-archiving repositories become more interoperable, I would also dispute this notion. If the advantage of gold-OA is delivered through community building (building networks of peer-reviewers, networks of users, and promoting the content to the right users) and promoting the journal site and its content (by press releases, participation in conferences to build relations with readers and authors etc.), then this advantage cannot be simply washed out by a vast interdisciplinary repository of articles where no such efforts are undertaken (surely, you could have people doing the same for subject areas in a repository, but then these people can be called editors, and you are reinventing OA journals).

A few unexamined assumptions underlie this: that community-building and promotion are unique to the journal model of information dissemination, that post-publication selection measures are functionally equivalent to pre-publication selection measures such as editing, and that green-OA cannot come up with other attractions. I’m not happy with any of those assumptions….

I’m not convinced, first, that journals are the community-building tool they once were, or even that communities form around journals at all these days, be they promoted howsoever expertly….I suspect that a growth area for scholarly societies intimidated by all this open-access business is, indeed, community –a gated section of the Internet on which to talk turkey. Do I think scholars will pay membership fees for that? I surely do, given a few hotshots to seed it with. Do I think that article citations will circulate in this viral fashion, largely irrespective of the article’s publication venue? Of course I do…

[G]reen OA can exert some countervailing pressures. Interdisciplinarity is a major one; it’s easier for scholars to find related other-field materials via the big OAI-enabled interdisciplinary soup than to try to trace them through still-siloed journals and article databases. As journals themselves start interoperating better, this advantage may decrease, but I do think it exists and I do think it matters.

Thirdly, I do not agree at all that filtering and selection post-”publication” are equivalent to acquisitions editing; someone who combs repositories for discipline-specific materials worthy of recommendation is not a “journal editor.” (She’s a lot closer to a library collection developer.) There’s quite a chasm between “this is worth saying” (which is the journal editor’s credo) and “this is worth reading” (which is the collection developer’s)….

Finally, I believe green OA carries certain advantages that gold OA could conceivably match but probably won’t, mired as it is in the journal model….It’s much easier for green OA to make a stab at capturing the rest of the data than it is for gold….

In short, green and gold open access should not really be considered competitors; they are complements….

source: Green and gold as complementary

Mike Carroll, Put Articles by Government Researchers Online Now, Carrollogos, May 24, 2006. Excerpt:

The proposed Federal Public Research Access Act of 2006 has an important provision that would require covered agencies to mark peer-reviewed articles by agency employees as being in the public domain and to post such articles online immediately. This is an incontestibly sensible requirement, but federal agencies and members of the public need not await the outcome of this pending legislation to make this provision effective.

Why? Because under Section 105 of the Copyright Act, any “work of the United States Government” is not subject to copyright. That means any journal article written solely by federal employee researchers (think NASA, NIH, etc.) is in the public domain. If an article is co-authored by one or more non-federal employees, then the copyright status is more complicated.

For the moment, let’s focus on articles written solely by federal employees. These articles, as part of the public domain, belong to you. If you find one, you are free to post it online and to mark it as part of the public domain.

The trick is to find these articles. If you are in an office of intramural research and have access to bibliographies of articles written by federal employees, can you send me a copy or post it online? If you otherwise have access to such bibliographies, please post it or send me a copy.

Going forward, agencies should start requiring that articles written solely by federal employees be marked as such so that we can get these online now.

source: Finding public-domain articles by govt employees

U-M Library launches Deep Blue: More access to U-M scholarship, press release from the University of Michigan, May 25, 2006. (Thanks to William Walsh.) Excerpt:

The University of Michigan Library has launched its new Deep Blue service that provides public online access to more than 24,000 items of research, a database that will grow as U-M researchers continue to add their work.

The service is available to the broader academic community and the general public and provides free, online and fully searchable results in a wide variety of research areas…."Increasingly, universities around the world are establishing services such as Deep Blue to disseminate research results," said James Hilton, associate provost for academic, information and instructional technology affairs, and interim University librarian.

"In addition, both public and private funding sources have begun to require public access to the results of research they support. Congress recognized the importance of open access to taxpayer-funded research by instructing the National Institutes of Health to encourage grant recipients to deposit published articles into open access databases like Deep Blue."

While access is Deep Blue’s main mission, the service also is committed to act as steward for the entirety of the scholarly and cultural information produced by U-M faculty, staff and students, he said.

The site is a customized version of the DSpace software created by MIT and Hewlett-Packard. It was designed and is managed by U-M’s Library Information Technology group, standard-setters for quality research and innovation via initiatives ranging from Making of America to the Google Print project.

Also see Michigan’s pre-launch press release (May 11) urging faculty to deposit their work in Deep Blue.

source: Michigan officially launches its IR

Congratulations to Charles W. Bailey Jr. for winning the first Dr. Ilene F. Rockman Award. The award recognizes his work in editing last year’s special issue of Reference Services Review on Reference Librarians and Institutional Repositories.

source: Charles Bailey recognized for editing issue on reference librarians and IRs

Semantic Web emerges from the sidelines at Edinburgh conference, a JISC press release, May 26, 2006. Excerpt:

Speaking in an interview for JISC at the end of the week-long International World Wide Web conference, David De Roure, Professor at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton and one of the conference organisers, said it would be remembered for the emergence of the Semantic Web from specialist and academic discussions into the mainstream of public debate.

‘The Semantic Web came through at all levels of debate,’ he said. ‘It’s become very real.’ Acknowledging that the Web community has not in the past been very good at articulating what the Semantic Web actually is, Professor De Roure says that some very good and concise definitions are beginning to emerge….‘The Semantic Web is about the integration of data, enabling data to come together - the data could be calendars, photographs, pictures, scientific data, experimental data - allowing it to be searched and browsed in ways in which it couldn’t be searched and browsed before, enabling those resources to come together, enabling you to ask questions that you couldn’t ask before….The Semantic Web has equal application in chemistry, history, archaeology, music, and any other subject, and it’s as useful for those putting together the learning materials as it is for those doing the learning.’

Also see Jonathan Bennett, Semantic Web ready for mainstream use, News.com, May 24, 2006. Excerpt:

Speaking at the World Wide Web 2006 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Wednesday, Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, said it is now time for Web developers and content producers to start using semantic languages in addition to HTML.

A panel discussion titled "The next wave of the Web" kicked off the second day of the conference and marked the start of the technical conference content. Nigel Shadbolt, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, told the conference attendees that what has been achieved with the Web so far is astounding by itself. "We’ve produced an information infrastructure that few would have anticipated, with the possible exception of Vannevar Bush, but I think even he would have thought the scale of all this extraordinary. Fifty years ago, it might have appeared audacious, perhaps even inconceivable, that we could have built the kind of global infrastructure that now surrounds us," said Shadbolt….

Berners-Lee said that building the stack of technologies needed to make the Semantic Web a reality has taken some time, but that we’re now at the stage where the technologies can be used….The last layer of that cake has recently been finalized. Berners-Lee explained that "the Query language, SPARQL, is now in the candidate recommendation phase, which means it’s time to implement it….

source: Semantic web ready for prime time

source: Eprints and DSpace one step closer to the RAE 2008

Xiaolin Zhang, Sustainable Digital Library Development for Scientific Communities in China, IFLA Journal, 32, 2 (2006) pp. 140-146. Xiaolin Zhang is (among many other things) the Director of the Chinese Science Digital Library and chair of the national project to develop Open Access Policy Guidelines. Excerpt:

Scholarly communication is taken new a turn when forces like Google Scholar/Print, the open access movement, and institutional repositories10 are creating a new information supply chain. Access to information is no longer solely intermediated by and channeled through a library; ‘library services’ can be more effectively provided by open or commercial systems. A distributed, producerdriven, value-enriched, and competitive market is here to stay, and providing access to information alone is no longer enough for a sustainable future, as predicted by a PEW study which found that any organization relying on intermediary services will be fundamentally changed within the near future….

Based on a new understanding of the essence of digital libraries as live knowledge systems incorporating knowledge content, context, and communities, the following framework of the CAS [Chinese Academy of Scieinces] Digital Library is outlined. The Overall Layered Framework (Figure 1) consists of three major layers: an Integrated Information Service (IIS) layer, a Discipline-based e-Scholarship Service (DSS) layer, and an Institution-Based Knowledge Service (IKS) layer….For the Resource Facet, Information Resources will cover STM literature, open access repositories, and other web resources; Sci & Tech Data Resources will provide organization and access to data grids in the field….For the Service Facet, a range of services are integrated to provide information alerting, selective dissemination of information, crossdatabase search, document delivery, and reference, to support research in the field. Many of these are provided by the services at the Integrated Information Services layer and may be customized according to the needs and resources of the field. In addition, the portal may host open access journals, blog services, mailing lists, and open conference systems to facilitate communications.

source: OA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences digital library

Follow the discussion at OpenBusiness.CC.

source: What is an “Open Business”?

Eric C. Kansa, Jason Schultz, and Ahrash N. Bissell, Protecting Traditional Knowledge and Expanding Access to Scientific Data: Juxtaposing Intellectual Property Agendas via a “Some Rights Reserved” Model, a preprint (draft) forthcoming in the International Journal of Cultural Property. Abstract: The 21st century has ushered in new debates and social movements that aim to structure how culture

source: Traditional knowledge and open knowledge

The AAP has publicly released its May 23 letter to Sen. Susan Collins, Chair of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the Senate committee considering the FRPAA. Excerpt:
Our Executive Council is writing to you on behalf of member publishers within the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP/PSP), as well as other

source: More AAP opposition to the FRPAA