The Scholar’s Space

That’s the name of a song by the legendary team of Rodgers and Hart.  It perfectly captures the concept of an interesting article in the Boston Globe, by freelancer Jessica Winter. In brief, forgetting is an important human skill. You need to remember where you parked your car; you don’t need to remember all the places in which you parked your car. Such memory would be crippling. But, that’s what the Internet does: everything, even the stuff you think you discarded or destroyed, is somewhere. Some place has every mouse click or keystroke. Not the same places, necessarily, but potentially everything is someplace. Researchers have been working strenuously to increase memory capacity in our computers and other gadgets, and they succeeded so well that we may find ourselves facing the need to turn things around. It may be necessary to use some combination of law and technology to mandate and carry out permanent erasure of at least some kinds of data. The previous state of human affairs required us to master ways of remembering, because we are naturally inclined to forget things, and forgetting is both normal and good, for us.  But our  devices don’t forget, so we may have to introduce or engineer this capability into them. If that’s not a paradoxical outcome, I don’t know what is. Not all commentators think it would be either necessary or even possible to mandate an engineering solution, and some suggest that, in a way, the problem might be sefl-solving. It is interesting to note that some of the Internet biggies are already moving in that direction.

Here’s the story:
Fohgedaboudid!

Barbara Quint has posted two notes at Information Today, Inc. providing 1) detailed analysis of the scope of, audience and business strategy for Elsevier’s ad revenue supported OncologySTAT (Elsevier Launches Vertical Portal With Ad Revenue Support: OncologySTAT) and 2) a take on the implications of the NY Times switch to ad revenue (Demise of TimesSelect Deals Blow to Pay-for-News and Alters Access to Archives). Both articles discuss not only the current business models and the implications of experimentation with advertising support, but the potential affect on libraries and other archive service providers. Both are short and interesting reads.

Fran Berman, of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, and Brian Lavoie, a research scientist and economist with OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. will co-chair the newly formed international Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access. The NSF and the Mellon Foundation are the funders.

Now you can post articles from BioMed Central to Citeulike, Connotea, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Facebook. See a sample article here.

Another cool new feature is that, in partnership with WebCite, BMC will keep an archive web pages linked to in BMC articles, so that some access is preserved if the original host has let the page lapse.

As reported by Peter Suber, Open Access News, the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is expanding its coverage to include, among other things, a new Philosphy Research Network. I have long been a fan of the SSRN. For some time now, most of the authors whose work I followed in the areas of law and law and economics routinely posted their working papers to SSRN. I didn’t realize several things about then network, however, and Peter Suber has brought them to my attention. First off, I didn’t know that it was hosted right here at UT Austin. I am still a bit skeptical about this. Is this really true? Let’s see… Hmm. SSRN is a corporate entity that is mirrored on four sites, none of which is UT Austin. UT Austin is not mentioned anywhere on the site. I guess I just don’t believe this. No big deal. It either is or it isn’t.

I also didn’t realize more serious things about the network. Peter Suber notes that all papers must be posted as pdfs. He also observes that:

SSRN imposes restrictions unheard of at other OA repositories. For example, it adds an SSRN watermark to the pages of some deposited articles and only allows links to SSRN papers in abstracts. As Vincent Müller pointed out to me, it doesn’t support data harvesting by ROAR.

See Peter’s note for more details. Nonetheless, despite its limitations, it has been enormously successful and illustrates a model for other repositories. There is no single model going forward and what works today may not work tomorrow. Peter says he’ll monitor it for changes on the points he complains about.

Actually, what I meant to say and got wrong in the headline is that the same group which publishes BioMed Central’s fleet of Open Access research journals is about to launch a companion structure for physics and math. Physmath Central will soon publish the first number of its first journal, to be called Physics A.  This seems to me to be very good news for OA supporters, since it indicates a certain stability in the publishing effort devoted to biosciences, and that stability is sufficiently constant to allow the publishers to think about expansion.  One possible problem I see is that arXiv already offers a lot of the same advantages that publication in Physmath Central would confer.  We shall see:
Physmath Central Home

Peter Suber, Open Access News reports that the latest issue of D-Lib is out and packed with articles of interest to those of us in academe working with institutional repositories and open access. Check it out!

One of the more interesting developments in web-based scientific publishing has been the growth of arXiv, a “preprint” server originally launched by Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos and now hosted at Cornell. The system was first called xxx, and the domain was high-energy physics. Later on, the subject focus was broadened to include most of the rest of physics, math, statistics and quantitative biology. Physicists post their drafts on arXiv to have the community review them and suggest improvements.  There was some fear at first that physics journals were headed for the bone yard, but that does not seem to have happened, since many authors go on to work up their preprints for publication in the accustomed style.   arXiv has become a very interesting and important  example of how internet publication can work, since physicists worldwide use it constantly. Maybe some of them use it a little too much, since Nature reported an outbreak of plagiarism based in four Turkish universities.  A couple of degree candidates had some impressive publication lists, in a rather outre area of Relativity theory, but they seemed to be having some trouble with Newtonian mechanics. Somebody smelled a rat, and did some digging on arXiv. It turns out that there had been quite a bit of “creative recycling”from one author to another. There was an investigation and in all some 70 publications by 15 authors were removed from the system.

I wonder if it is still approriate to describe arXiv as a “preprint” server, since a number of authors just post their work there and let it go at that. It’s as much publication as the paper gets. I shouldn’t post without checking my facts, but didn’t the man who won (and turned down) the Fields medal post his proof of the Poincare conjecture on arXiv, and say: “That’s it; if you want to check it, look there”

The current issue of Nature has an article on efforts at the National Institutes of Health to revise the current system for reviewing grant applications, and deciding which ones are to be funded. The NIH Director, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, has been leading efforts to reform the fifty-year old system now used,  and to streamline the process. Comments were invited from research and scientific organizations outside the government, and response has apparently been enthusiastic. Many people have a lot to say about the current system. Shorter application cycles, mandatory service on review committees by senior scientists, a limit on one grant application in the system per investigator at any one time are all suggestions that have been made and been greeted with considerable warmth.  Final versions of suggested reforms are due this winter, with the launch of some pilot programs slated for March. Today, 18,000 reviewers handle submissions to the NIH. Twenty years ago, one tenth that number handled the load.  NIH has asked for unusual and even radical suggestions to help meet the goal of getting the best science done with the least administrative complications.
NIH

Please see Ann Okerson’s liblicense email below about a new Elsevier access model for some of their medical publications. 

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/business/media/10journal.html>September 10, 2007

But now Reed Elsevier, which publishes more than 400 medical and scientific journals, is trying an experiment that stands this model on its head. Over the weekend it introduced a Web portal, www.OncologySTAT.com, that gives doctors free access to the latest articles from 100 of its own pricey medical journals and that plans to sell advertisements against the content.The new site asks oncologists to register their personal information. In exchange, it gives them immediate access to the latest cancer-related articles from Elsevier journals like The Lancet and Surgical Oncology. Prices for journals can run from hundreds to thousands of dollars a year.