joergkurtwegner

Because you put it best, for ever. - Bora Zivkovic

I find the effortless interchangeability of open-access and peer-review models in the text rather confusing if not misleading - without even going into the pros and cons of subscription-based / open-access publishing on the one side and peer-review/preprint models on the other. - Joerg

I agree. Open Access (OA) has nothing to do with changing/reforming existing peer review models or whatever. Just about the last thing OA needs is a reputation of "doing away with (journal) peer review". - Wobbler

Is the whole article that one page? (I could not see any more). Incredibly superficial, for example does not mention the fact that ArXiv has an indexing system. - Maxine

I should note: the instructor for this particular course was not a scientist, but a history lecturer, so the teaching material was his original thoughts. In science this is different of course, but you could still consider someone selling something to an educational publisher. - Eva

I think you answered your own question Eva -- timestamped archive in, say, the Wayback Machine is a pretty good starting point if you have to go after someone. - Bill Hooker

It's a very poor argument against, without more details such as: how commonly does it occur? One or two isolated cases? A constant stream of plagiarism? Were any of the cases documented, or is it hear-say? It sounds like someone using an anecdote to support their own opinion. - Neil Saunders

I can't really remember the context of it, that's the annoying part. It's in a section about how to design a course. It comes right after the advice to not use your personal e-mail address for corresponding with students during a course, and right before the advice to ask a student to orally defend a dubious essay that might be plagiarized, but I wasn't taking continuous notes, so it's just a list of things I felt like writing down. - Eva

There was a court case addressing the question of who owns the notes taken from a course lecture: Williams v. Weisser (1969). The court found that "the lecturer retains a property right to his words spoken before a limited audience" and ruled in favor of the professor, who had sought permanent injunction and damages. In that case, the professor had a leg to stand on, although I'm sure he had to provide proof that the ideas were his own (e.g. by making his notes, musings, etc available to the court) - Hilary

I think the benefits would outweigh the risk, but perhaps it is a reason to be explicit about the license. - Matt Leifer

I agree about being explicit about the license. Any work that you make public should have a license that you and your institute feel is appropriate. - Allyson Lister

According to Brian Clegg at Nature Network where we've had similar discussions, content you write belongs to you, you do not need a licence or copyright statement. However, plagiarism is rife all over the internet as we know - eg the NYT and other US media recently tried to stop bloggers using just a few lines of their content in blog posts. They failed - for now - , but it is instructive that the limitations they wanted were draconian. I agree with some of the commenters above that it can be costly and time-consuming to prove you wrote it first, even if you are right. But any respectable publisher would use due-diligence before being "sold" something to publish- this would certainly include an internet plagiarism check (easy enough) and should include some kind of peer-review of the item being "sold" before a decision is reached to publish it. Publishers have entire legal departments for this kind of thing. - Maxine

@maxine - sure, would be great - Chris Cotsapas

You can keep an eye out for two colleagues of mine: Alain Hovnanian and Matthias Titeux, who will talk about gene therapy in the skin for Netherton's disease (I think). Matthias is a highly approachable postdoc and a friend, and it would tickle me if you accosted him on the strength of a name tag on my behalf. - Heather

I'm in Philly, if you want assistance in coordinating a spot for meeting up for drinks. - Jill O'Neill

@heather - will have to see if I can find him in this mess! @Jill - thanks, might take advantage of that offer. Any tips on where to find good cheesesteaks downtown? - Chris Cotsapas

Just found out that senior Nature editor Magdalena Skipper is there. - Maxine

And our science journalist has just got going http://blogs.nature.com/news/b... - my colleague Brendan Maher who is based in Philly so I should have guessed. Hope you can catch up with Brendan or Magdalena, Chris. - Maxine

isn't "who you know" a factor of "who you are"? - Rajarshi Guha

Rajarshi, no. - Pawel Szczesny

Ditto. - Paulo Nuin

Pawel, why? - Rajarshi Guha

John W's point, I think, is that the web has the potential to democratise the accessibility of ideas. You don't have to be an invited keynote speaker to voice your thoughts anymore. - Neil Saunders

I agree with that. It still seems that you need to be 'plugged' into the appropriate community to be considered trustworthy (?) - Rajarshi Guha

... and when you are plugged in such community, doesn't matter how bad you are, you are one of them. - Paulo Nuin

Comment deleted :) Neil and Paulo described it better. - Pawel Szczesny

I may be wrong, but I think there is bit of a mix-up of the ability to voice one's thoughts vs. democratising access to ideas. As I understand John, he is mainly talking about how to make sure that everyone has access to whatever text and data they need access to in order to do research. With open access you don't need to be part of any network to have access. (cont'd) - Lars Juhl Jensen

Neil is also right that web gives everyone the chance to voice their thoughts; however, in this case the big question is if anyone listens? As Rajarshi says, if you are not part of the appropriate community, no one may care what you say. - Lars Juhl Jensen

My friend Phil Lord http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/... always said "Science is more like an aristocracy than a democracy" (or words to that effect). I wonder if this means that "Scientific Royalty" will be doing everything they can to prevent a revolution by the underbelly of Science? - Duncan Hull

Oh, yes they will. I can tell many stories of the Royalty in Brazil, many stories. One worse than the other. I don't know about Canada, though. - Paulo Nuin

http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.c... - Egon Willighagen

wow ! I don't think I might be of any help here Egon :-) . I will look carefully your sources to see how you've integrated this into CDK/eclipse. - Pierre

BTW, does someone know of a Java library to interact/read from Google Doc spreadsheets? - Egon Willighagen

I don't filter - but I don't worry too much about tracking items as they arrive. Ever since GReader got search, I've viewed it as an archive that I can always revisit. For specific terms, I'd probably set up a PubMed search and subscribe to the feed from that. Still, I think there's a market for a "friendlier yahoo pipes" app which filters feeds for keywords, displays articles with terms highlighted + a tag cloud and so on. Might be a nice web framework project. - Neil Saunders

I don't filter, but i do categorize via NetNewsReader. I'm eyeing Planet Venus: http://www.intertwingly.net/co... Plug-able filters FTW. I'm contemplating how to add feed back into the filters so that I can setup an RSS SpamAssasin filter based on what I read. - Paul Davis

I'm using more and more 'saced searches' instead of firehose journal feeds. I just end up deleting a crapton of them unread. - Timothy Driscoll via Alert Thingy

No filter, read them all. I am a journal junkie, have to have them all. - Paulo Nuin

I use this filter http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/p... and I have a few pubmed queries set up - Pedro Beltrao

Probably not quite what you're looking for, but I use postrank.com to filter a bunch of my RSS feeds. It does a pretty good job of taking some of the big feeds (BoingBoing, TechCrunch and similar) and extracting just the most interesting. I use the postrank Firefox plugin to integrate with Google Reader. - Michael Nielsen

Pretty cool Pipe Pedro. Is there any reason you have done it by pulling the feeds direct from journals rather than as a series of PubMed RSS searches + filters based on your keywords ? - Andrew Perry

Does anyone use Barf? http://barf.jcowboy.org/ - Paulo Nuin

Used to use Barf to generate feeds back in the day when many journals didn't have their own. It's pretty outdated now, since most (all?) now do. - Neil Saunders

Yep, but there are a couple that I use from there still. - Paulo Nuin

I have a combo of ToC and search feeds in GReader. On abstract review, "Interesting" items get starred (and possibly shared) and later, theoretically, read. Starring is fairly inclusive and is analogous to an "interesting" tag, more than anything. Often reduces search space. - Chris Cotsapas

I have a 'daily' tag in Google Reader that contains all the feeds I want to see every day, including standing PubMed searches by RSS and Scopus alerts. Various other journal tables of contents go under other tags ('structural biology', 'high impact', etc), but I only drink from the firehose in a solid session once a month, when follow up any 'must read' articles and manually filter the rest. - Andrew Perry

@Andrew - I guess I could have filtered down the pubmed queries by journals as well but the idea is that from some journals I want everything and from others I filtered them by keywords. Plus I think yahoo pipes had just came out at the time :). - Pedro Beltrao

I subscribe to publishers feeds from a limited number of journals, but mostly rely on targeted keyword search feeds from PubMed. for details of how to make these, see the video at: http://smallworldz.wetpaint.co... Using Google reader, I can scan a large amount of data very quickly, but of course the trick is choosing the right keywords (and Boolean terms). - AJCann

Currently, I filter none of my feeds, and then feel guilty when I wake up one morning to 100+ new articles that have just been published and I just scan the titles! However, there are some interesting ideas here, which I will investigate... thanks! - Allyson Lister

I don't filter feeds, I subscribe to the results of certain key HubMed searches. This tends to generate 20-30 articles a day, which is easily manageable. And I don't think anything important has escaped my attention, I always already have the articles people give me to read. - Simon Cockell

If I convert POST to GET and use the example query, I have http://www.crossref.org/Simple... - Noel O'Boyle

Need to figure out how to handle JSESSIONID... - Noel O'Boyle