Hilary › Comments

A brief article covering “The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery” - a collection of essays in honor of Jim Gray. - Hilary

"The Administration is seeking public input on access to publicly-funded research results, such as those that appear in academic and scholarly journal articles. Currently, the National Institutes of Health require that research funded by its grants be made available to the public online at no charge within 12 months of publication. The Administration is seeking views as to whether this policy should be extended to other science agencies and, if so, how it should be implemented." - Hilary

From the Office of Science and Technology Policy: "The question that this Forum will address is: To what extent and under what circumstances should such research articles—funded by taxpayers but with value added by scholarly publishers—be made freely available on the Internet?"... the first phase of the forum plan requests input on Implementation: who should enact policies, how should such a policy be designed... The OSTP is requesting input from the public and various stakeholders. - Hilary

"Publisher lawsuit against public university that makes electronic copies of course readings available to students without paying royalty fees." - Hilary

"Clearly modeled after PubMed, PubSCIENCE wanted to attract scientists and the general public to its information. Noting that the U.S. federal government funds 80 to 90 percent of scientific research and development, [the Department of Energy] touts PubSCIENCE as a significant taxpayer benefit. The private sector never saw it that way. Since its inception, PubSCIENCE has been a target. Database producers and some scholarly publishers felt threatened by the free availability of peer-reviewed scientific information." - Hilary

DOE/OSTI keeps trying. Worldwide science and science.gov and other things. I think that original one had too much competition, too many naysayers, and was too expensive while not being that effective. - Christina Pikas

Journal publishing in the humanities is much more expensive than in the sciences with a much lower acceptance rate: "Waltham estimates an average of almost $526 per page published in these journals, as compared to an average of just $266 in STM journals." Another surprising fact: "more than half of our institutional subscribers have opted for print-only subscriptions" - Hilary

Some interesting observations on legal scholarship: "In the past five years, legal blogs have become an acknowledged and accepted part of the world of legal scholarship....Citations in the Westlaw JLR database are an imperfect metric, but they tend to confirm the change. Consider the number of times that the phrase “Volokh Conspiracy” and/or “volokh.com” appeared in the database...In 2005, the phrases appeared 24 times in the JLR database. The year 2009 isn’t over yet, with roughly 20–30% of issues schedule for a 2009 publication not yet out and on Westlaw. Still, the phrases have appeared 108 times so far in the JLR database." - Hilary

When we visited Paris I really liked how they brought the card reader to you, so your credit card is never taken to some back room for 5 minutes like it is here. Square solves that. Also email receipts? Sign me up. - Benjamin Golub from Bookmarklet

Will the receipts be able to contain more transaction information : i.e. items purchased for return/exchange purposes? - Bryce Roney

"the Contributed track seems to yield less influential papers on average, but is more likely produce truly exceptional papers" - Hilary

"The effect of press releases, and popular press coverage more generally, on citation counts is an open question which deserves further study [2]." - yes. - Daniel Mietchen

By Theresa Velden and Carl Lagoze: "New web-based models of scholarly communication have made a significant impact in some scientific disciplines, but chemistry is not one of them. What has prevented the widespread adoption of these developments by chemists — and what are the prospects for adoption over time?" - Hilary

Mat - if there is any follow-up meeting it will be discussed in the Google group http://groups.google.com/group... - Jean-Claude Bradley

"This paper is intended as a starting point for discussion on the possible future of scientific communication in chemistry, the value of new models of scientific communication enabled by web based technologies, and the necessary future steps to achieve the benefits of those new models. It is informed by a NSF sponsored workshop that was held on October 23-24, 2008 in Washington D.C. It provides an overview on the chemical communication system in chemistry and describes efforts to enhance scientific communication by introducing new web-based models of scientific communication. It observes that such innovations are still embryonic and have not yet found broad adoption and acceptance by the chemical community. The paper proceeds to analyze the reasons for this by identifying specific characteristics of the chemistry domain that relate to its research practices and socio-economic organization. It hypothesizes how these may influence communication practices, and produce resistance to... more... - Hilary

By Theresa Velden and Carl Lagoze, with input from myself and several others. - Hilary

An analysis of acknowledgment statements (mostly in the computer science literature) - the authors compare acknowledgments to citations and finds that "[the] number of citations made to the most acknowledged individuals does not correlate well with the number of acknowledgments to those individuals". - Hilary

A long report/book from the National Academies of Sciences with recommendations for how to address issues related to data sharing and code/software sharing. Several journal policies have been based on this, such as the PLoS journals statement on software sharing: http://www.plosone.org/static... - Hilary

Peter Hirtle comments on the case with a view towards fair use - the case involved Blackwell, Elsevier, OUP, Sage and Wiley (spelled Wily here???) who sued a coursepack copying shop (Excel Copying) and its owner. Summary judgment has been granted in favor of the publishers. Excel argued first that the copying was permitted under UMich's licenses, and then that they did not engage in direct infringement because the students were doing the copying. The court also rejected a fair use defense "because Excel is a commercial operation, the purpose of the copying was not educational". - Hilary

They'll feel it when the library cuts off reserves. - D0r0th34

The university has also dismissed 3.2% of its non-faculty workers. The value of the endowment dropped 27% in the fiscal year ending Aug 31. - Hilary

Yes, we do that. Quite a bit. :) - D0r0th34

Mark Pilgrim's excellent book "Dive Into Python" was republished on Amazon.com, under the terms of his GNU Free Documentation License. This is driving his publisher nuts. I'm surprised it doesn't happen more - why aren't books by Doctorow, Lessig et al immediately republished by other publishers? - Michael Nielsen

@Matt: I really like your idea. In some sense, every open content license is transitional, pending even more openness, so I agree that such compromises can help. That's part of the genius of CC in the first place, after all. Before CC, there were very few gradations in pre-written licenses; you could go all rights reserved, BSD-style or GFDL, and that was about it. Now, you can specify if attribution is needed, if derivative and commercial uses are OK, etc., and I think we are far more open for the options. - Christopher Granade

"Academic abstention is the doctrine (never formally promulgated) that courts should defer to colleges and universities when it comes to matters like promotions, curricula, admission policies, grading, tenure, etc. The reasoning is that courts lack the competence to monitor academic behavior; they should get out of the way and let the professionals do the job....In 2009, courts still pay lip service to this doctrine but in practice, Amy Gajda tells us in her terrific new book, “The Trials of Academe,” they now boldly go where their predecessors feared to tread... “litigation and ‘rights talk’ have permeated every crease and wrinkle of academic life.”" - Hilary

Has the increasing willingness of courts to rule on cases involving the ivory tower/s led to an increasing reliance by academics on a legal framework to navigate and frame academic disputes (e.g. use of contracts in academic work and the rise of explicit university IP policies), perhaps as an attempt to preempt legal problems? Or has the increasing use of contracts encouraged court... more... - Hilary

These are fantastic and def. worth going to if you're in the SF area! I only wish there were similar events in other cities... - Hilary

"The bulk of digital books in libraries are treated like printed ones: only one borrower can check out an e-book at a time, and for popular titles, patrons must wait in line just as they do for physical books. After two to three weeks, the e-book automatically expires from a reader’s account." - Hilary

"Students with research interests in scientific data management, sharing and reuse have a unique opportunity to participate in the Open Data fellowship program. Open Data is an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) sponsored by NSF. Open Data fellows engage in a vibrant set of research activities at the University of Michigan in the conduct of responsible data-intensive science and engineering involving faculty and doctoral students from SI, Computer Science and Engineering, Bioinformatics, Materials Science, and Chemical Engineering." - Hilary

Very cool IGERT! - Steve Koch

Covers article processing fees, advertising, sponsorships, internal and external subsidies, donations / fundraising, endowments, partnerships, versioning, use triggered fees, and value added fee services. - Hilary

This follows the earlier announcement of Cell Death & Disease, a new OA (-only and online-only) journal from NPG: http://www.nature.com/press_r... - Hilary

By an individual user, yes. By a library for continued access, usually not. The problem from a library's perspective is that we can't offer articles a la carte because we have no way to budget for it (cost is completely unpredictable), and we may have to pay multiple times for the same article for multiple users. It's a losing game for us -- not that we have any wins other than OA at this point. - D0r0th34

Anders suggestion of adding citation information to the Google search API has been noticed by someone at google. Quote:"This is a really interesting suggestion. Could some of you elaborate on the use cases for a Scholar API? What kinds of applications would you make with it? The more the better :)" - Pedro Beltrao from Bookmarklet

integration into library catalog searches - JSNFLMNG

A slightly one-sided story, but it does emphasize a common theme across multiple industries... - Hilary

"Tranche is a free and open source file sharing tool that enables collections of computers to easily share data sets. Designed and built with scientists and researchers in mind, Tranche can handle very large data sets, is secure, is scalable, and all data sets are citable in scientific journals" - Hilary

So the hashes contain an MD5 and an SHA-1 and an SHA-256. Hope the rest of the system makes more sense :-) - Eric Jain

With a college like MIT actively endorsing student blogs (uncensored!), I wonder if this might later encourage science blogging and open research when these students move on to become grad students, postdocs, and faculty... - Hilary

Something that occurs to me on reading Jean-Claude's comment -- people like "us" (FFers), who are comfortable online, are probably less likely to be bothered about the potential conflict of interest -- we have multiple sources (many of them blogs that have passed our trust filters!) and bullshit meters in good working order, so we will sniff out pay-for-play if it happens. I can easily imagine, though, that anyone who is already a bit suspicious of blogs in general would be doubly suspicous of paid blogs. - Bill Hooker

"NCBI developed an archival service to support research shared through new venues for rapid communication enabled by the internet. Introduced in August 2009, the archive, called Rapid Research Notes (RRN), allows users to access and cite research that is provided through participating publisher programs designed for immediate communication....PLoS Currents: Influenza, [is] the first collection being archived in RRN. NCBI expects the RRN archive to expand over time to include additional collections in other biomedical fields and other critical topics." All articles in the RRN archive are available under Creative Commons Licenses. - Hilary

NB: the email provided on the about page (RRN@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) does not work :( - Hilary

At Stanford, all employees are required to sign an agreement promising to assign any future inventions that emerged from his/her employment to the university. This employee signed an agreement with Cetus to "hereby transfer" rights in the invention prior to actually assigning rights to Stanford. Therefore "[B]ecause Cetus’s legal title vested first, Holodniy no longer retained his rights, negating his subsequent assignment to Stanford during patent prosecution." - Hilary

Per the comments at the bottom of this post, I would suspect this would lead to likely changes in Stanford's (and other universities') employee agreements which would automatically transfer rights upon creation of the invention. - Hilary

I think this has been the case for a while - I used to work for a service that used Google Maps back in 2005 and the terms then basically granted G rights to use all the data that we collected and displayed on their maps. - Hilary

This is the rollout of a redesign discussed back in Aug at an NLM meeting: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs... (the presentation also provides a good overview of what has changed) - Hilary