Zzzoot

Sandy Payette has plans to expand Fedora to support open access publishing, eScience and eScholarship. With a recent $4.9M grant from the Moore foundation, it looks like she might have the opportunity to do this...

Clifford Lynch 's closing keynote to the 2007 Seminars On Academic Computing entitled " The Institutional Challenges of Cyberinfrastructure and E-Research " is now available as a podcast . Abstract: It has become clear that scholarly practice and scholarly communication across a wide range of disciplines are being transfigured by a series of developments in IT and networked information. While this has been widely discussed at the national and international levels in the context of large-scale advanced scientific projects, the challenges at the level of individual universities and colleges may prove more complex and more difficult. This presentation will focus on these challenges, as well as the development of truly institution-wide strategies that can support and advance the promises of e-research.

A study by economists from Tel Aviv University and the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) entitled " Open source software: Motivation and restrictive licensing "[ 1 ] ( pre-print ) looks at the productivity of developers on Open Source projects and concludes: " ...that the output per contributor in open source projects is much higher when licenses are less restrictive and more commercially oriented. " and observe: " Projects written for the Linux operating system have lower output per contributor than projects written for other operating systems ... " and: "Output per contributor in projects oriented towards end users (DESKTOP) is significantly lower than that in projects for developers." They also observed that the median # of contributors in "restrictive" projects (13) to be much less than for "non-restrictrive" projects (35). They chose the 71 most active projects on SourceForge in January 2000 and studied them ...

I see how the Australians appear to have the good fortune of having the discussion on research data archiving moving forward, as suggested by the upcoming meeting in September, " Long-Lived Collections: the Future of Australia's research data " at the National Library of Australia. This meeting is a follow-up to some very good efforts, including the Australian government's " Data for Science (DFS)" prepared for the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council, and the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories' " Sustainability Issues for Australian Research Data: The report of the Australian eResearch Sustainability Survey Project ". I can only be envious of this activity, given the -- unfortunately -- almost complete vacuum of activity following the release of Canada's National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data (NCASRD). The two reports - DfS and NCASRD - are very similar in scope and in reco...

Carol Perry presented this revealing study at last year's Access & Privacy Workshop 2006 held in Toronto. Its objectives were: "To assess the attitudes of academic researchers regarding the archiving of data resulting from publicly funded research To assess impediments to the creation of a national data archive program in Canada" She randomly polled 173 SSHRC grant recipients for 2004-2005 (with 75 respondents). Her results: "41% indicated they had current plans to archive their research data Of these, only 18.7% identified an established data archive as a deposit site for their data. 72% were not aware of SSHRC’s mandatory data archiving policy for all grant recipients 90% were not aware that Canada is a recent signatory to the OECD declaration on access to publicly funded data ." and •" In 2001: 60% favoured a national data archive 39% analyzed data created by others •In 2006: 69% favoured a national data archive 48% analyzed data created by others...

University Affairs has an interesting article on Open Science that examines the patents and licensing regime and its impacts on science and the ability to do science. While at times advocating an Open Source-like model of Open Science, the author is a little to wishy-washy and supports hybrid models which are too much of a slippery slope for me. I also don't agree with a number of statements including: But now an international scientific counterculture is emerging. Often referred to as "open science" this growing movement proposes that we err on the side of collaboration and sharing. Counter-culture ? I think that he has it backwards: despite the many biotechnologists and biotech companies and other science-based industries that use the patent system to support their business interests - usually encumbering further scientific discovery - the vast majority of scientists - at least working in academia, and of course with exceptions - have long been and will continue, wo...