Zzzoot

The article When Is Open Access Not Open Access? (CJ MacCallum) PLoS Biology examines the slippery activities of publishers that try and fly the flag of Open Access (with varying degrees of capitalization) but who only offer the free-as-in-beer definition of freedom, as opposed to the Open Access definition, which includes --- as well as free- gratis freedom -- extensive intellectual property rights permitting unrestricted derivative use. This issue and these distinctions were discussed earlier this year in " Free but not open? " at the PLoS blog. I have noticed that many journals use the weasel words like " We conform to open access as defined by SHERPA ". The SHERPA definition does not include the extensive IP rights described by Open Access: By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of...

I have been working with Tag clouds and other Web 2.0 sorts of things quite a bit lately [see earlier post: Drill Clouds for Search Refinement ] and couldn't help notice that it might be useful to use the Tag cloud "Size reflects frequency/importance" idiom in HTML select lists, so I did a little bit of experimenting (BTW, I did look for these on the Web but didn't find them: it doesn't mean they are not already out there...). So I played with the styles of these elements, and was able to get something that looks like this: Aggregators Blogs Collaboration Joy of Use Podcasting RSS Web 2.0 XHTML Aggregators Blogs Collaboration Joy of Use Podcasting RSS Web 2.0 XHTML I am not sure how the above HTML renders in your browser (Update: Daniel has some info on how/if this works in different browsers ), but here is how it renders in mine (Firefox 2.0.0.4 on Linux (Suse 10.2): It i...

The October issue of the Communications of the ACM has two complementary articles in the area of Intellectual Property. Complementary in that one is one copyright reform and the other is on (software) patents: Does copyright law need to be reformed? Pamela Samuelson. Abstract: Considering the issues involved in developing a simplified new copyright law and associated administrative mechanisms . [Software Patents]: The good, the bad and the ugly . Matt E. Thatcher, David E. Pingry. Abstract: The goal of improving patent quality remains elusive both from an economic and process perspective.

Peter Suber of Open Access News reports that a U.S. Senate labour bill has recently had an amendment added to it, putting the Open Access mandate of the NIH at risk: The provision to mandate OA at the NIH is in trouble. Late Friday, just before the filing deadline, a Senator acting on behalf of the publishing lobby filed two harmful amendments, one to delete the provision and one to weaken it significantly.

Richard Akerman - my colleague here at CISTI - has a couple of excellent pointers to digital preservation and cyberinfrastructure resources at Science Library Pad: -- CLIR cyberinfrastructure short articles: Cyberinfrastructure: It's All about Sharing. Amy Friedlander As We May Rethink . Chuck Henry. -- PV 2007 - Ensuring the Long-Term Preservation and Value Adding to Scientific and Technical Data : The Role of Standards in Managing and Preserving Heterogeneous Scientific Data . John Rumble, Jr. - Information International Associates, USA. Long term digital preservation of scientific and scholarly information: the perspective of the European Commission . Carlos Oliveira - EC, Luxemburg. Preserving and Re-using 20th Century Astronomical Observations . Elizabeth Griffin - Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics , DAO, Canada. Observations on Cost Modeling and Performance Measurement of Long Term Archives . Kathy Fontaine -...

It is good to see this advisory body -- promised in the Canadian government's science and technology strategy ( Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada's Advantage ) released in May 2007 -- has now been created and appointments made . I hope that it will be effective in its activities. Now that it is in place, perhaps this body might lend some focus (and hopefully its support) to various national science activities, initiatives and proposals, such as the recommendations of the National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data (NCASRD).

The International Journal on Digital Libraries has a special issue entitled " Connecting digital libraries to eScience". I haven't had a chance to read any of the articles, but they look very interesting, and include some discussion on various scientific data issues, collaboration, repositories, research infrastructure, etc: Connecting digital libraries to eScience: the future of scientific scholarship . Michael Wright, Tamara Sumner, Reagan Moore, Traugott Koch Not by metadata alone: the use of diverse forms of knowledge to locate data for reuse . Ann Zimmerman Little science confronts the data deluge: habitat ecology, embedded sensor networks, and digital libraries . Christine L. Borgman, Jillian C. Wallis, Noel Enyedy Collaborative eScience libraries . Linn Marks Collins, Mark L. B. Martinez, Ketan K. Mane, James E. Powell, Chad M. Kieffer, Tiago Simas, Susan K. Heckethorn, Kathryn R. Varjabedian, Miriam E. Blake, Richard E. Luce Pathways: augmenting interoperabilit...

As part of its DISC -UK DataShare project , JISC has released two documents: DISC-UK DataShare: State-of-the-Art Review , Harry Gibbs Data Sharing Continuum graphic , Robin Rice The former is a summary of recent projects and policy, and introduced me to a number of projects and initiatives that I hadn't previously known about. The latter is a well thought-out view of the data sharing continuum, showing us where we have been (and perhaps for some of us, still are!) and a good idea of where we will/should be going. A good graphic to show to a manager trying to understand the big picture.

I'd like to introduce something I call drill clouds , an extension to tag clouds for search refinement in information retrieval. I will be using an experimental Lucene -based search platform that I have developed, called Ungava (more in this later), which includes my implementation of drill clouds. Note that much of this posting is derived from a posting of mine on drill clouds on the CISTI Lab wiki . Drill clouds are what I call an extension to tag clouds to make them a useful tool for search refinement. That is, to use a tag cloud to refine an existing query by adding new elements to the query through interactions with the cloud. As this results in a kind of drill-down search behaviour, these new clouds have been named drill clouds . Some differences between traditional tag clouds and drill clouds: Tags in drill clouds can be any useful metadata and are not necessarily user applied or exclusively keyword-like (but can include controlled and uncontrolled vocabularies,...