Technology Blog

Being back in Rochester for Christmas this year is a Good Thing. We have a real tree again, instead of the artificial one we settled for in Seattle. We visited Weez’s house tonight for a Christmas eve open house that featured wonderful food prepared by her mom, and we’ll see her and her family again tomorrow when they stop by our Christmas Day open house. This year our holidays are all the brighter because Erin’s living with us, and it means there’s that many more presents under the tree. Tomorrow I’ll post pictures of the aftermath

Right now I’m in the midst of a baking extravaganza. Cookies and brownies and biscotti, oh my! It smells wonderful. I’ve got Big Bad Voodoo Daddy’s “Rockabilly Christmas” playing, which always makes me happy. (One of the things I didn’t put in the “five things you probably didn’t know about me”—because so many people know it already—is that I love Christmas music.)

May your holidays be happy and warm and filled with friends and family and food and love!

source: have yourself a merry little christmas!

So very very close … Just click the image and help close the gap.

source: All I want for Christmas (or anytime in the next week) is $22,029.08 $9,385.00 $3393.34

“Radical” changes in Washington always have this Charlie Brown/Lucy-like character (remember Lucy holding the football?): it doesn’t take long before you realize how little really ever changes in DC. The latest example is the Dems and IP issues as they affect the Net. Message to the Net from the newly Democratic House? Go to hell.

As everyone knows, one issue critical to those who are making the Net interesting (for politics at least) is IP reform. Not “reform” in the sense of the last decade (e.g., Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, DMCA, NET Act, etc.), but real reform designed to make IP laws work sensibly in the digital age. Real reform — not the piddly full-employment-act-for-lawyers reform proposed by the Copyright Office for “orphan works,” or the puny reform suggested for digital libraries. Instead, reform that tries to fit the legitimate objectives of copyright — to assure that artists have the incentives they need to create great new work — into the contours of digital technology.

To craft that reform would require real work. I don’t think anyone has a clear picture of what would be best yet. But what is clear is that the war on technology of the last decade must come to an end. And the efforts by content holders to leverage their power over rights they can’t even prove they own (see, e.g., the Google Book Search battle) into control over the architecture of the net must be stopped. No one should defend “piracy.” But no one should believe that the way the law currently defines “piracy” makes any sense at all.

So is there any hope for such reform from the Democrats? Word from Washington so far: Fat chance. As reported in the LA Times two weeks ago (registration required but hey, it’s LA), the crucial House IP subcommittee will be chaired by Hollywood Howard (Berman) — among the most extreme of the IP warriors. It is this committee that largely determines what reform Congress considers. It is the Chairman who picks what voices get heard. And while Berman is a brilliant man — whose brilliance could really have been used in the problems facing the mid-east — his brilliance has not yet been directed towards working out the problems of IP and the Net with any view beyond the narrowest of special interests.

This is like making a congressman from Detroit head of a Automobile Safety sub-committee, or a senator from Texas head of a Global Warming sub-committee. Are you kidding, Dems? The choice signals clearly the party’s view about the issues, and its view of the “solution”: more of the same. This war — no more successful than President Bush’s war — will continue.

No doubt, there are Net issues beyond copyright — surveillance, net neutrality, etc. But I suggest this choice is an important signal about this party (and I’m afraid, any party). I once asked a senior staffer of a brilliant Senator why the Senator didn’t take a stronger position in favor of Net Neutrality. “No Senator remains a Senator opposing an industry with that much money” was his answer.

And so too here. The Dems have looked at the potential “return” from the activists on the Net. They’ve considered the kids being sued by the industry (including the kids running MySpace, and maybe soon, YouTube), and the kids creating amazing new (but presumptively illegal) mashups and remixes, and they have compared that value to the party with the value promised by Hollywood. Result: the 20th Century continues to rule.

Dems to the Net: “Thanks for the blogs. And please continue to get outraged by MoveOn messages. But don’t think for a second we’re interested in hearing anything beyond the charming wisdom of Jack Valenti. We appreciate your support. We appreciate your money. But come on — you’re all criminals. Don’t expect your criminal ways to be taken seriously by an institution as respected as the US Congress.”

source: Dems to the Net: Go to hell

1. I’m slowing down for the holidays, and will try to catch up later with the developments I missed while making merry.
2. Sometime yesterday Open Access News passed the milestone of 10,000 posts.  About 200 of them were posted by my co-contributors during the time when OAN was a group blog.

Happy holidays!

source: Housekeeping notes

Tactical Tech and iCommons have released the Open Publishing Edition of NGO-in-a-box.  From the site: 

The Open Publishing Edition of NGO-in-a-box is a toolkit of Free and Open Source software, tutorials and guides for producing, publishing and distributing content. The Edition…is aimed at small to medium sized non-profits, independent media organisations, free culture creators and grassroots journalists with a particular emphasis on those in developing and transition countries.

The contents of the toolkit were selected by an editorial team made up of leading international practitioners working in DIY publishing, free culture, technology for social justice and the development and deployment of free and open source software….

source: Open publishing tools for non-profits in developing countries

On September 26, 2006, the American Philological Association (APA) and the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) issued a joint statement on electronic publishing.  (Thanks to Ross Scaife for alerts to this and the documents below.)

The statement didn’t mention OA, but the draft Issues and Recommendations for Discussion (October 20, 2006) discussed the problem of OA in the humanities in good detail –but for the false assumption that “most” OA journals charge author-side fees (in fact, most charge no fees).  It recommend a study of the extent to which American classicists lack access to American classics journals.  It also recommended OA archiving and the launch of new OA archives.  The two organizations called for a period of public comments, which ended on December 20.

Gregory Crane, Editor-in-Chief of the OA Perseus Project, has made his December 20 comment public.  Excerpt:

[O]ne way to improve working conditions and research opportunities for university and college teachers is to support, in every possible way and with as much energy as we can muster, the creation of massive digital libraries based on open access such as those now being built by Google, Microsoft, the Open Content Alliance and others. Even if only partially realized, these efforts will expand the intellectual reach of all college and university teachers. If these efforts come close to their original goals, we will find online and freely accessible a larger and far more useful research library than any institution of higher learning has ever created. Classicists stand to gain more than any other discipline, for the field is often strongest at liberal arts colleges which have never had access to first class research environments. Nor is open access alone always enough. After sustained requests from an increasing set of researchers, we at Perseus decided to make all the content that we could available under a Creative Commons attribution/sharealike/non-commercial license. Researchers want to apply their own analytical tools to the full source texts and to create derivative works….

Saving money is a good way to go bankrupt. The strategic challenge that classics faces as a field is to maintain and expand its role in the broader intellectual life of society. Our situation is much closer to that of a university competing with other universities than it is to Hollywood or the music industry raising capital from mass market sales….

The APA reports 3,195 members.21 In our last survey of users (April 2005), 400,000 unique users consulted the Perseus Digital Library, 90% of whom were working with classical materials….

The joint APA-AIA Task Force on Electronic Publication ”plans to reach some conclusions when it meets in San Diego in January 2007.”

source: Movement toward OA in classics

John Blossom, Second Nature: PLoS One Picks Up Where Nature Left Off, Content Blogger, December 22, 2006.  Excerpt:

The launch of the new PLoS ONE scholarly research portal looks like a big win for open access research content from a number of angles. PLoS ONE is posting research and will allow interactive review before and after publication for scientific articles via a very sophisticated publishing environment. The PLoS ONE platform applies many of the best practices of social media, providing ready access to comments posting and awareness of active discussions to draw in more active discussions. PLoS ONE will publish all papers that are judged to be rigorous and technically sound, and had already posted more an 100 papers by its launch - a remarkable number for a just-launched scholarly journal of any kind. By contrast Nature’s recently shuttered open-review portal trial, which ran for around four months, attracted only 71 authors willing to post their work online and attracted 92 technical comments.

As we noted in our latest news analysis article one of the keys to successful social media products is a dedicated core of trusted contributors who will be able to ensure editorial success. PLoS ONE starts with a global editorial board of more than 200 scholars, ensuring a broad array of inputs for reviewing content. Some of the fears about having content rejected after having had it exposed to comments prior to publication may be relieved by the PLoS ONE policy that allows papers that have been already rejected by PLoS Biology and Medicine journals to be re-submitted via PLoS ONE. This is a potentially valuable feature, allowing research that may not have yet reached the highest levels of acceptance to mature through its exposure to comments from a broader audience.

PLoS ONE is finally opening the doors to the potential for fundamental changes in how scholarly research proves its worth. With an open exchange of ideas and commentary facilitated by technologies long available to the general public and a solid body of research and reviewers PLoS ONE holds out the potential to liberate the highest levels of scholarly innovation from the regimen of the printing press. Changing the way that research is paid for was a good first step for open access, but with the ability to eliminate artificial distribution bottlenecks that choke off natural conversations PLoS ONE may do for scholarly research what Wikipedia has done for reference materials - with much more integrity in the underlying editorial processes.

source: John Blossom on PLoS ONE

Alf Eaton has launched PLoS Too, a mirror of PLoS ONE that he’ll use as a “testing ground for trying out article display formats” –taking advantage of the fact that all PLoS ONE articles are free to manipulate under CC licenses and published in XML under the NLM DTD.  If you know Alf’s earlier work, this experiment will be worth watching.

source: After PLoS ONE, PLoS Too

Mia Garlick, “Returning Author’s Rights: Termination of Transfer” Beta Tool Launched, Creative Commons blog, December 21, 2006.  Excerpt:

Creative Commons is excited to launch a beta version of its “Returning Authors Rights: Termination of Transfer” tool….It’s a beta demo so it doesn’t produce any useable results at this stage. We have launched it to get your feedback.

Briefly, the U.S. Copyright Act gives creators a mechanism by which they can reclaim rights that they sold or licensed away many years ago. Often artists sign away their rights at the start of their careers when they lack sophisticated negotiating experience, access to good legal advice or any knowledge of the true value of their work so they face an unequal bargaining situation. The “termination of transfer” provisions are intended to give artists a way to rebalance the bargain, giving them a “second bite of the apple.” By allowing artists to reclaim their rights, the U.S. Congress hoped that authors could renegotiate old deals or negotiate new deals on stronger footing….A longer explanation of the purpose of the “termination of transfer” provisions is set out in this FAQ.

Despite this admirable Congressional intention, the provisions are very complex and have not been frequently used. CC’s tool is intended to go some way towards redressing that….Unfortunately, the termination provisions are currently so complex and technical that this tool can only serve an informational role. Many aspects of the “termination of transfer” provisions require legal analysis which is impossible to code so we are working on linking the tool to legal referrals. This FAQ provides an explanation of the tool’s intended architecture….

We have set up a page on the Creative Commons wiki to gather comments….

Comment. I’ve never heard of a researcher using this provision to reclaim rights to a published journal article.  If any one knows a past case, please drop me a line.  I’d also like to hear about any researcher who uses the provision in the future to reclaim key rights, especially for the purpose of providing OA to the peer-reviewed full-text.

Update. Read Lawrence Lessig’s blog post on the right of termination and transfer. The right doesn’t kick in until an agreement is 35 years old, which makes it moot for most journal articles. Journals that don’t provide OA to 35 year old articles, and don’t let authors do it themselves, are an endangered species.

source: Undoing bad copyright transfer agreements

Gracian Chimwaza and Vimbai M. Hungwe, AGORA/HINARI Training of Trainer workshops: imparting hands-on skills on the use of e-resources in agriculture and health in Sub-Saharan Africa, INASP Newsletter, December 2006.  Excerpt:

Since April 2004, ITOCA [Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa] has carried out 20 AGORA/HINARI National Training of Trainer workshops in 14 Sub-Sahara Africa countries, and over 500 professionals in health and agriculture sectors have been trained. The aim of the training is to equip participants with adequate practical knowledge on the use and access of scholarly literature and relevant electronic resources to enable researchers and information managers improve on research and teaching in the region. The train-the-trainer model has seen over 6000 users trained downstream at participating institutions….

ITOCA spearheads outreach and training programmes for TEEAL (The Essential Electronic Agricultural library), FAO’s Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA) and WHO’s Health InterNetwork Access to research Initiative (HINARI) programmes in the region.

These workshops are conducted over 3-4 days for 25-30 participants. During the workshops, researchers, policy-makers, educators, librarians and extension specialists have access to high quality, relevant and timely information on agriculture and health via the Internet and CD-ROM….

source: Making use of AGORA and HINARI

Joe McCarthy tagged me with the “five things you don’t know about me” meme, which I thought I’d safely avoided.

The problem, of course, is that depending on who “you” are, there are different things that “you” may or may not know about me. None of this is likely to be a surprise to my mother or my husband, for example. So I guess I’m really writing this for the people who know me mostly through my blog…

1. I hate green vegetables. I never outgrew this aspect of picky eating. I eat a wide variety of meat, fish, dairy, grains, and fruit. I eat a wide range of cuisines. But I don’t eat green vegetables (unless there’s absolutely, positively, no way to avoid them without being rude). No salad. No vegetable soup. There are a few exceptions to this—Linda Stone made it her personal mission to change this while I lived in Seattle, and she pulled it off by roasting asparagus and thin-sliced zucchini. I actually enjoyed those, but not enough to add them to a regular rotation. I do eat potatoes and corn, and in the world of green foods I do like Jalapeno peppers and pesto.
2. I lived in Malta when I was 13. My father, a political scientist, took a sabbatical leave to study the electoral system in Malta, and we all went with him. Thirteen, in case you don’t know, is not an age that takes well to change, and I was not at all happy to leave my friends behind for an isolated Mediterranean island. There was no internet back then, and international phone calls were outrageously expensive, so I was cut off from my friends the whole time we were there. Since the only schools on the island that used English were the Catholic schools, I have the distinction of being one of the few Jews I’ve ever met who can say a Hail Mary or recite the Lord’s Prayer in milliseconds (we had to say one or the other of these each time a nun entered the classroom). After a few months of Catholic School I threw one of the few tantrums of my life, which resulted in my leaving the school and getting a tutor for math (the only subject where I wasn’t already ahead of grade level). In an amusing twist, one of the members of my World of Warcraft guild is Maltese, and knows quite a few young women who attended that same Academy of the Sacred Heart!
3. I met Gerald, my husband, on FidoNet—which gives me Old Skool geek credentials far surpassing that of most current Internet users. The specific “echo” we were on was the New Age echo, which will baffle most people who know us, as neither of us is exactly a stereotypical New Ager. When I asked him early on what on earth he was doing on that Echo, his answer was “Waiting for you.” ‘Nuff said.
4. I didn’t change my name the first time I married, but I did the second time—mostly because there really is a Lawley, Alabama, and it really is named after Gerald’s ancestors. His mom lives just over the border from Lawley, in Randolph. I loved the idea that my kids would be able to point to a place on the map that was named after their family, since so few people in the US have that kind of deep connection to place.
5. In high school, I was a member of the Pantherettes—a dance/pom-pom squad that performed at football games. Senior year I was co-captain of the squad, and the other co-captain’s mother was our coach…which create somewhat of a power imbalance. After a few months of being completely ignored or overridden on all decisions, I finally lost my temper with the whole group, hurled obscenities at them as I left the gym, and went home and burned every single one of the hundreds of stupid white tissue paper flowers that I’d been making for our homecoming float. I look back on that as one of my finer adolescent moments.

So there you have it. Five things you may not have known about me, complete with colorful details.

And….Weez! Kathleen! Dorothea! Jenny! Adam I choose you! (…to carry on the meme, natch)

source: five things you may not know about me

SPARC has released its December 20 comment on the draft OA mandate from the Australian Government Productivity Commission.  The public comment period ended on December 21.  (For background on this proposal, see my blog post from November 13, 2006.)  Excerpt:

SPARC enthusiastically commends the far-sighted draft recommendation of the Productivity Commission that “published papers and data from ARC and NHMRC-funded projects should be freely and publicly available” (Draft Finding 5.1). This is an important step that will be welcomed by all beneficiaries of research.

While your recommendation recognizes the tremendous potential to expand the impact of Australian research outputs, we encourage you to go a step further in delineating the kind of public policies that are needed. The experiences of other nations have demonstrated that the effectiveness of well-intended policies can easily be undermined by unnecessarily timid implementations. For example, the voluntary public access policy of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, implemented in May 2005, has resulted in deposit of less than five percent of eligible articles in NIH’s digital repository. The agency is now evaluating steps to improve on this unfortunate outcome, but success has been delayed by years.

We believe that, in order to guarantee a better result, it would be useful if your report called for Australian public access policies that fall within these parameters:

• Research funders should include in all grants and contracts a provision reserving for the government relevant non-exclusive rights (as described below) to research papers and data.
• All peer-reviewed research papers and associated data stemming from public funding should be required to be maintained in stable digital repositories that permit free, timely public access, interoperability with other resources on the Internet, and long-term preservation. Exemptions should be strictly limited and justified.
• Users should be permitted to read, print, search, link to, or crawl these research outputs. In addition, policies that make possible the download and manipulation of text and data by software tools should be considered.
• Deposit of their works in qualified digital archives should be required of all funded investigators, extramural and intramural alike. While this responsibility might be delegated to a journal or other agent, to assure accountability the responsibility should ultimately be that of the funds recipient.
• Public access to research outputs should be provided as early as possible after peer review and acceptance for publication. For research papers, this should be not later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. This embargo period represents a reasonable, adequate, and fair compromise between the public interest and the needs of journals.

We also recommend that, as a means of further accelerating innovation, a portion of each grant be earmarked to cover the cost of publishing papers in peer-reviewed open-access journals, if authors so choose. This would provide potential readers with immediate access to results, rather than after an embargo period.

While SPARC is not in a position to evaluate whether Australian public access provisions should be limited to ARC and NHMRC, we believe the benefits apply to all publicly funded research. We urge that your recommendations with regard to public access be framed broadly….

PS:  In October 2006, the Productivity Commission recommended OA mandates for the Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), and since then both agencies have adopted strong OA policies.  See the ARC policy (c. December 3, 2006) and the NHMRC policy (c. December 8, 2006).

Update (12/25/06). See comments by Stevan Harnad and Arthur Sale on the SPARC letter.

source: SPARC comment on a draft Australian OA mandate

Nick Hodson has recently launched a pilot project to let web users post OA copies of public-domain books to the Internet Archive.  From his announcement (on Klaus Graf’s blog, Archivalia):

I have recently started a project to upload the scans in PDF form of many of the above books to the Internet Archive. The main purpose is to clear the path so that people from all over the world can upload their scans, and was suggested to me by Brewster Kahle. He calls it a Grassroots Book-Scanning enterprise. I am doing a pilot study, with twenty-one books in Stage One, and a further fifty in Stage Two. All the problems should be ironed out by the time this is complete in a few weeks from now. I am working on a manual to advise people wanting to get involved. After that a further hundred books will be prepared, put onto a DVD, and possibly posted for me directly at Internet Archive. There will be many more to follow after that. You can review progress on this project [from this page].

In addition to the PDF I have posted an HTML file for each entire book, and a TEXT file that can be used to make an audiobook. The spelling in the latter has been converted to the American style (some of the posted books have not been done yet). There is also in each book’s folder a small text file that explains how easy it is to make a good audiobook, with a recommendation that people should use TextAloud MP3 available from NextUp whence you can also get the highly recommended voices from Acapela. These are of course once-off purchases, and after that you can make the audiobooks for free, except for the small cost of storing them on CDs. The technology also works for most novels on Project Gutenberg. There is a very easy process available within TextAloud for splitting the book into chapter files, correctly named, and from this creating a set of MP3 files for the book, one for each chapter.

source: Grassroots book-scanning for uncompromising OA

James Doran, Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google, Times Online, December 23, 2006. Excerpt:

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo!

Mr Wales has begun working on a search engine that exploits the same user-based technology as his open-access encyclopaedia, which was launched in 2003.

The project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”.

Mr Wales told The Times that he was planning to develop a commercial version of the search engine through Wikia Inc, his for-profit company, with a provisional launch date in the first quarter of next year….

Mr Wales believes that Google’s computer-based algorithmic search program is no match for the editorial judgment of humans….Mr Wales aims to exploit the same network of followers and the same type of free software [used for Wikipedia] to create his search engine.

“Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,” Mr Wales said. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” he added. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

Mr Wales believes that the reputation already fostered by his Wikipedia community and the transparency of his technology will build sufficient trust in his search engine to bring in advertising revenue and make the Wikiasari venture profitable….

Update (12/29/06). Ben Vershbow corrects some widespread errors about this project. For more corrections and new details, see Danny Sullivan’s interview with Jimmy Wales.

source: Wikipedia-based search engine to challenge Google

Enrico Alleva and Igor Branchi, Making available scientific information in the third millennium: perspectives for the neuroscientific community, a presentation delivered at Institutional archives for research : experiences and projects in Open Access (Rome, November 30 - December 1, 2006). 

Abstract:   The rules governing the globalised process of sharing scientific information in the research community are rapidly changing. From the 1950s, commercial publishers started owning a large number of scientific journals and consequently the marketable value of a submitted manuscript has become an increasingly important factor in publishing decisions. Recently some publishers have developed the Open Access (OA), a business scheme which may help stopping such tendency. Indeed, in the case of an open-access publication, the marketable value of a manuscript may be not the primary consideration, since access to the research is not being sold. This may push scientists to re-consider the purpose of peer reviewing. However, costs remain a key point in managing scientific journals because OA method does not eliminate peer review process. Thus, OA may not solve the problem of the market pressures on publishing strategies. Furthermore, the OA has another strong point: everyone can read OA papers, including scientist living in poor countries. But, will OA method create new discriminations on who can publish on OA journals? Will it be possible to really exclude or strongly limit the influences of the market from scientific publishing? The example of the non-profit e-print arXiv, a fully automated electronic archive and distribution server for research papers with no peer review will be discussed. For neuroscientists, the possibility to make available scientific data, even in the case of negative results (usually, very difficult to publish) is an important step to avoid purposeless repetition of costly experiments involving animal subjects. The possibility to arrange internationally or locally peer reviewed papers in institutional repositories (IR) is a necessity. However, access to IR should be regulated, e.g. banning or limiting profit organizations and exploiting internet systems, professional organizations or network groups.

source: OA for negative results

The Alfa Institute of Biomedical Sciences has launched E-Meducation, a portal of OA resources for medical education.

source: OA resources for medical education

Maria Rosaria Bacchini, fedOA, Open access archives a “Federico II” University of Naples, a presentation delivered at Institutional archives for research : experiences and projects in Open Access (Rome, November 30 - December 1, 2006).  In Italian but with this English-language abstract:

In this paper the Author illustrates the Institutional Repository of “Federico II” Naples University: fedOA. This archive was developed since 2004 and it has been officially introduced in November 2005 based on GNU EPrints software.
This software use got the possibility too go through the following aspects:  [1] Eprint type, [2] Metadata set, and [3] Fulltext format type supported.  Moreover, FedOA archive will contain all the research doctorate e-theses and furthermore even all the University Teachers staff scientific releases.

source: The IR at the University of Naples

Franco Toni, Statistics of Open Access Journals, a presentation delivered at Institutional archives for research : experiences and projects in Open Access (Rome, November 30 - December 1, 2006). 

Abstract:   The exponential growth of e-journal access and downloads has strongly enhanced the role of statistical data, in order to evaluate the use of resources and define subscription acquisition strategies and their management.

On one hand, the automatic data harvesting performed by computers provides statistics, but on the other hand it does not guarantee the comparability and harmonisation of collected data. Therefore, the process of statistical data formulation has to be supported by the use of standards
- the most important being “counter” which is gradually becoming the de facto in this field. That could permit the merging of obtained results from different systems.

Furthermore, all the main commercial publishers regularly supply reliable statistics unlike Open Access resource suppliers and aggregators, with the exception of BioMed Central, that does provide statistics.

All this could have some negative implications for decision makers that do not have a suitable system to choose between Open Access and equivalent or similar non Open Access resources.

Recent studies have established that Open Access articles have an IF and a citation level higher than the others. It should be fundamental to verify the use of Open Access periodicals compared to the non Open Access ones in the same fields. If the results of this analysis are in favour of Open Access journals, these could become an important factor for the success of the Open Access initiative in terms of reducing library expenditure for serials. The access identification of journals through the user IP address is a globally adopted method and easy to apply, therefore it could bring about a significant increase in the diffusion of Open Access periodicals.

source: Getting good data on OA journals

Dan Hunter, Open Access to Infinite Content (or ‘In Praise of Law Reviews’), Lewis & Clark Law Review, 10, 4 (2006).  Self-archived December 20, 2006. 

Abstract:   This Article is about legal scholarly publication in a time of plenitude. It is an attempt to explain why the most pressing questions in legal scholarly publishing are about how we ensure access to an infinity of content. It explains why standard assumptions about resource scarcity in publication are wrong in general, and how the changes in the modality of publication affect legal scholarship. It talks about the economics of open access to legal material, and how this connects to a future where there is infinite content. And because student-edited law reviews fit this future better than their commercially-produced, peer-refereed cousins, this Article is, in part, a defense of the crazy-beautiful institution that is the American law review.

source: More on OA to American law reviews

Quinn posted a link to a nifty CGI by Aaron Swartz which detects uses of common cliches, with the list of cliches to avoid taken from the Associated Press Guide to News Writing. In addition, she also mentioned there’s the Passivator, ‘a passive verb and adverb flagger for Mozilla-derived browsers, Safari, and Opera 7.5′.

Combining the two, I’ve hacked together a bookmarklet version of the cliche finder — it can be found on this page. (Couldn’t place it inline into this post due to stupid over-aggressive Markdown, grr.)

Fun! Probably not IE-compatible, though.

Tags:bookmarklets cliches english grammar hacks javascript writing

This post was written by Justin, source: Cliche-finder bookmarklet