Scholarly Communication Reform : Articles on PLoS Biology in Nature. madtom writes "Nature News announced the debut of the first issue of PLoS Biology this coming Monday. Positioned to compete with Nature, Science, and Cell, its arrival is already causing a stir: unlike other journals that record research about biology and medicine, this one is free. The scientists behind the journal are challenging standard publishing practice, in which researchers pay to read others' results in journals, arguing that this is unfair both to scientists who submit their work freely and to the public whose taxes subsidize the research. Not surprisingly, Nature has published a letter from John Ewing, director of the American Mathematical Society, who makes the counter argument that the journal's revenue model of charging the authors (upwards of $1500 per paper) is unfair to the authors, noting that the journal's assumption that researchers, especially outside the U.S., have their work funded by grants or their institutions, is erroneous. Nature.com Article , Biology Journals , and see also, Ewing, John, 'Open access' will not be open to everyone [Correspondence], Nature 425, 559 (09 October 2003); doi:10.1038/425559a (requires subscription) Butler, Declan, Scientific publishing: Who will pay for open access? [News feature] Nature 425, 554-555 (09 October 2003); doi:10.1038/425554a (requires subscription)" [LISNews.com]  4:00:59 PM   [Feedback ]  

Weblogs : Weblogs Connect People.

An http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/computing/personaltech/20031013-9999_mz1b13blog.html">interesting piece on weblogs fostering community:

"Blogs were originally solitary endeavors, free digital soapboxes for anyone to rant or publicly wallow in angst or sorrow."

"Now, they're connecting people. For a decade, Net observers have talked and written about how electronic communications could foster meaningful social connections, or virtual communities. Blogs seem to be fulfilling that role."

[Library Stuff]  3:59:48 PM   [Feedback ]  

Catalogs and Languages : Language of Records in OCLC. This is great news for libraries that do not have English as their primary language.

Previously, records for the same title, but cataloged in different languages, such as English, Spanish and French, were considered duplicate records.

OCLC will no longer consider these records duplicates, but will consider them parallel records.

[Catalogablog]  12:33:39 PM   [Feedback ]  

Information Overload: Information Pollution.

The BBC has this article on dealing with "Information Pollution", an extreme form of information overload.

"The entire ideology of information technology for the last 50 years has been that more information is better, that mass producing information is better," he says."

"But the net is now so much an machine with all the answers instantly, it has mutated into a "procrastination apparatus", which spews information without much prioritisation Dr Nielsen argues."

The article mostly deals with e-mail, and e-mail is a deterrent to keeping current, one issue that I will probably start addressing more on LS. One comment: Dealing with e-mail is more than just getting a spam filter.

[Library Stuff]  9:34:13 AM   [Feedback ]  

Portals : Publishers Grudgingly Cooperate With Amazon Database Effort. Ender spotted This Publishers Weekly Piece on Publishers are keeping a wary eye on Amazon.com's new initiative: digitizing nonfiction titles to create an online database that can be searched by keywords. The plan, first reported about in the New York Times in July, is seen as a way to draw more traffic to the Amazon site as it competes with search engines such as Google and Yahoo. [LISNews.com]  8:05:05 AM   [Feedback ]  

Virtual Reference Service : Colorado Launches Statewide Virtual Reference Service [ResourceShelf]  8:04:04 AM   [Feedback ]