Tuesday, May 04, 2004

April issue of Ariadne. The April issue of Ariadne is now online. Here are the OA-related articles. Jeffrey Darlington, A National Archive of Datasets Chris Awre, Seeing is Believing: The JISC Information Environment Presentation Programme Andy Powell and Phil Barker, RDN/LTSN Partnerships: Learning resource discovery based on the LOM and the OAI-PMH Paul Miller, Towards the Digital Aquifer: Introducing the Common Information Environment Morag Mackie, Filling Institutional Repositories: Practical strategies from the DAEDALUS Project Malcolm Moffat, EEVL News: EEVL, VLEs, Institutional and Library Portals Phil Cross, Debra Hiom and Emma Place, The ePrints UK Workshop [Open Access News] 12:39:01 PM      Google It!.

New genetic database. Kevin G Becker et al, The Genetic Association Database, Nature Genetics 36, 431-432 (2004). (Access restricted to subscribers) Excerpt: The increasing availability of polymorphism data has allowed more gene association studies to be carried out and the number of published genetic association studies is growing rapidly. Studies done secondarily to successful linkage studies over the last decade have also fueled the increase in published association studies. Although there are single-nucleotide polymorphism and human variation databases there is currently no public repository for genetic association data. It is difficult to query association data in a systematic manner or to integrate association data with other molecular databases. OMIM, the main repository of genetic information for mendelian disorders, is largely text based and is of a historical narrative design, making it difficult to compare large sets of molecular data. Moreover, OMIM archives mature, high-quality data of high significance, the standard in rare mendelian disorders. Although this data is useful, OMIM does not routinely collect findings of lower significance or negative findings. The study of nonmendelian, common complex disorders is often a struggle to find disease relevance with lower significance values, and often conflicting evidence. Negative data are often not reported or are marginalized into obscure and less accessible scientific journals, resulting in a publication bias favoring positive genetic associations. Here, we describe the development of a genetic association database (GAD; http://geneticassociationdb.nih.gov) that aims to collect, standardize and archive genetic association study data and to make it easily accessible to the scientific community. [Open Access News] 10:49:02 AM      Google It!.

Open access to book draft via wiki. J.D. Lasica, Darknet: An experiment in group editing. Lasica has posted chapters from a draft of his forthcoming Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music and Television, to be published by John Wiley & Sons (no word on open access or free download yet.) With it he has set up a wiki, encouraging readers to "participate in this effort by contributing feedback, edits, criticism, corrections, and additional anecdotes." Lasica says the entire book will eventually be posted to the site. (Sources: Boing Boing; the Shifted Librarian) [Open Access News] 10:30:58 AM      Google It!.

How Do You Know You're a Gadget Whore?. Virtual Laser Keyboard Now Available "I am excited! I have been waiting for this release for some time now, and it has finally happened! 'The Virtual Keyboard (VKB) is now available from iBIZ Technology Corp. This device attaches to handhelds and uses a laser to project the image of a full-size keyboard onto the surface of the desk where the handheld is placed, allowing the user to input text without a physical keyboard.' " [PDA 24/7] When you see "Compatibility List: Palm Phones: Treo 600" and the next thing you know you have a confirmation email in your inbox! 8-) [The Shifted Librarian] 8:14:02 AM      Google It!.

Gates pays $800k for stock violations. Didn't know - aspects of vast money pile now semi-autonomous By John Lettice . [The Register] increasingly the stock market is actually a market of trading machines with assorted levels of AI and game technology - a community of machines without guilt or compassion or empathy.  The oversight is so delayed as to be meaningless in the context of the speed of present and future money flows.  The person investor is just fresh meat for the trading machines to hide behind and give credance to the "market" which is more likened to a blind trust managed by a psychopathic pathogen.  We could do better than this and have a market with human values and human welfare as an integral part of the necessary "trading rules" for the democracy of trading machines.  The computational power affords the luxury of being able to keep track and play with more than just the simple minded bottom line of dollars and turn plundering into sustainable progress for humanity.  The historic approach that the Barons of Bucks will address the problems of humanity with their charity is a quait idea that is more about public relations than doing good works.  To get a sense of the scope of the problem/opportunity consider the fact that more people died last year of industrial accidents than from armed conflicts around the world and the "trading machines" were partly to blame for both sources of human destruction. --BL 8:07:01 AM      Google It!.

Making digital scholarly resources sustainable. Donald J. Waters, Building on success, forging new ground: The question of sustainability, First Monday, May 2004. Abstract: "This paper focuses on three factors that contribute to the sustainability of digital scholarly resources. First, the development of such resources depends on a clear definition of the audience and the needs of users. Second, the resource must be designed to take advantage of economies of scale. Third, to create an enduring resource, careful attention is needed to the design of the organization that will manage the resource over time." [Open Access News] 7:43:40 AM      Google It!.

Testosterone gel study shows long-term benefits, safety [Science Blog] 7:39:03 AM      Google It!.

Third Largest Supercomputer... at Weta Digital [Slashdot] 7:36:21 AM      Google It!.

Here's locking down you, kid - MS hawks vision of DRM future. Catalyzes recurring revenue model, it says here By John Lettice . [The Register] 7:34:05 AM      Google It!.

Assessing PubMed Central. J. Michael Homan and Linda A. Watson, STM publishing meets NIH digital archive: librarian service on the PubMed Central National Advisory Committee, Reference Services Review, 32, 1 (2004) pp. 83-88. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far: "The PubMed Central (PMC) National Advisory Committee was established by the National Institutes of Health in 1999 to guide the development of a new, open-access digital repository of biomedical research reports. Headquartered at the National Library of Medicine's National Center for Biotechnology Information, PMC has achieved significant technical accomplishments, including a recommended publisher document type definition for digital archiving, but little interest in the use of the new digital archive has been shown by the medical publishing community. This article chronicles the evolution of the initial concept from digital publisher to digital archive and includes issues related to technology and the culture of scientific communication." (Thanks to Erik Arfeuille.) [Open Access News] 7:28:18 AM      Google It!.