Monday, September 06, 2004

Data showing that OA increases citation impact. Tim Brody, Citation Analysis in the Open Access World, a preprint. Excerpt: "OA is now firmly on the agenda for funding agencies, universities, libraries and publishers. What is needed now is objective, quantitative evidence of the benefits of OA to authors to researchers, their institutions, their funders and to research itself. Web-based analysis of usage and citation patterns is providing this evidence. One of the many misconceptions about the OA debate is that it is primarily about economics. Although the journal pricing/affordability problem certainly helped draw attention to OA, it has now become a distraction from the deeper problem: the research access/impact problem....[E]very potential user that an article loses is lost potential impact for its author, its author's institution, its research-funder, and for research itself....[Summarizing the data:] Articles with OA versions consistently receive more citations than those that do not. This OA advantage is biggest within the year before and the two years after an article is published (an early-access pre-print advantage followed by a new-article post-print advantage), but older OA articles also continue to be cited more in these fields." [Open Access News] 10:57:05 PM      Google It!.

NIH Proposes to Open Tax-Funded Research [Slashdot:] 1:48:00 PM      Google It!.

Database File System [Slashdot:] Treepad also has a database file system -- BL 11:39:30 AM      Google It!.

Public must 'help direct science'. The public needs to have greater say in scientific decision-making, the British Association leader says. [BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition] 11:36:44 AM      Google It!.

A GMail-based blog With 1000 MB of entries [Slashdot:] 11:35:12 AM      Google It!.

A Smart Learning Environment - Howard Strauss, Syllabus. ....A smart learning environment can be used best by smart learners. While the infrastructure for a smart learning environment would be distributed, every smart learner needs to own an appropriate learner’s workstation. Since a learner’s workstation is [Online Learning Update] -- consider new samsung 1.5 gig phone --BL 8:23:43 AM      Google It!.

Newborns prefer beautiful faces. Newborn infants display an innate preference for looking at attractive faces, researchers say. [BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition] 8:20:54 AM      Google It!.

Samsung shows 'world's first' hard drive phone. 1.5GB handset for the price of two 8GB iPods [The Register] 8:18:50 AM      Google It!.

Self-assembling 3D Nanostructures [Slashdot:] 8:02:29 AM      .