Monday, July 19, 2004

Duke University Giving iPods To 1650 Freshmen [Slashdot:] 11:57:08 PM      Google It!.

Clues to prevent aggression. Aggressive and violent behaviour could be prevented by good parenting, study findings suggest. [BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition] 7:29:46 PM      Google It!.

Mental health - 3 fulltext journals of varying degrees of openness. In descending order of openness, here are three journals from the mental health field. The publishing models range from Open Access, to embargoed, to a frozen slice of fulltext. eCOMMUNITY: International Journal of Mental Health & Addiction [Open Access News] 7:22:07 PM      Google It!.

RIAA Co-Opts More Universities [Slashdot:] 7:19:28 PM      Google It!.

PHP Not Moving To The GPL [Slashdot:] 7:16:05 PM      Google It!.

UK House committee releases its report on open access. About 90 minutes ago, the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee released the long-awaited report on its inquiry into journal prices and open access, Scientific Publications: Free for All? Here's my summary of the major recommendations: The government should provide funds for all UK universities to launch open-access institutional repositories. Authors of articles based on government-funded research should deposit copies in their institutional repositories. The government should appoint a "central body" to oversee the launch of the institutional repositories, their networking needs, and their compliance with "technical standards needed to provide maximum functionality" (presumably the OAI metadata harvesting protocol). The government should create a fund to help authors pay the processing fees charged by open-access journals. The committee is not yet ready to endorse the upfront funding model for OA journals (which it calls the "author-pays" model), but wants to create such a fund in order to promote further experimentation with the model. The government should develop a wider, long-term open-access strategy, including open-access journals, "as a matter of urgency". Universities should develop their "capacity to manage" the copyrights that faculty will increasingly retain in the future. These steps can and should be undertaken without jeopardizing "rigorous and independent peer review". The government should fund the British Library to take on the long-term preservation of digital scholarship. Because the market for science and scholarship is international, the government should "act as a proponent for change on the international stage and lead by example". The full report (a 118 page PDF file) will soon be available at the committee's page of reports. (It's still night time in England.) In a posting to SOAF, I've quoted extensively from the report's conclusions and recommendations, for those who don't have time to read the full report. [Open Access News] 7:12:22 PM      Google It!.

Downloading for Democracy. Peer-to-peer networks aren't just for trading music and movies. A law student, frustrated by government secrecy and possible conflicts of interest, launches a website that uses P2P networks to distribute telling government documents. By Kim Zetter. [Wired News] disruptive technology on the move -- BL 10:03:27 AM      Google It!.

Virginia to Launch Virtual Advanced Placement School: Satellite and Internet access to 13 AP courses - Converge [Online Learning Update] 9:25:43 AM      Google It!.

Designing Online Information Systems for Portfolio-Based Assessment: Design Criteria and Heuristics - Terence Love and Trudi Cooper, JITE [Online Learning Update] 9:23:29 AM      Google It!.

New MusE Release, A Step Toward The Linux Studio [Slashdot:] 9:20:49 AM      Google It!.

Feedster/Bloglines citation bookmarklets. Feedster's Scott Rafer wrote to point out that there is a URL syntax for assembling the conversation around a blog post: ... [Jon's Radio] 9:18:03 AM      Google It!.

Proof of Concept PocketPC Virus Created [Slashdot:] 9:17:15 AM      Google It!.

More on the NIH OA plan. Andrea Foster, House Committee Tells NIH to Post Research Results Online and Make Them Free, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 19, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: "In a coup for the open-access movement, the Appropriations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives has recommended that the National Institutes of Health provide the public with free, online access to articles resulting from research it has financed. The recommendation is included in a report that accompanies a spending bill for the Departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services for the 2005 fiscal year. The report says that within six months after an article is published, the NIH should make available researchers' final manuscripts via PubMed Central, a popular digital archive maintained by the National Library of Medicine. The Association of American Publishers is aggressively pressing members of Congress to gut the open-access language in the report, saying that the recommendation is worded like a requirement and would threaten publishers' ability to decide when and if to make articles free." [Open Access News] 9:15:59 AM      Google It!.

More on Google indexing of OAI-compliant archives. Kinley Levack, A Giant Leap for Academia? Google Ventures into DSpace, EContent, EContent, July/August, 2004. Excerpt: "DSpace is open-source software designed to assist colleges and universities in creating, managing, and maintaining digital repositories. There are currently about 125 schools using this software, but no tool existed that enabled searching across repositories instead of just within them. [PS: Untrue, but these tools are not as popular or comprehensive as Google.] Enter Google into DSpace. Google and 17 partner schools have joined forces on a pilot program to enable searching among DSpace repositories....Although both sides have been tight lipped about the project, representatives from DSpace have commented that the agreement with Google is not exclusive and that they are open to working with other search engine companies or even developing their own technology. Plans with Google continue to move forward, though, and if all goes well with the pilot, then Google may launch the program under its Advanced Search section within the next few months." [Open Access News] 9:14:12 AM      Google It!.