Zzzoot

This article takes the provocative (but well-argued) position that Creative Commons / FLOSS -type licensing applied to scientific data is too restrictive and that the default licensing model for this data should be that it be in the public domain. The arguments are quite convincing: I think I may be convinced... John Wilbanks. 2008. Public domain, copyright licenses and the freedom to integrate science . Journal of Science Communication 7 (2).

This Science Commons project looks at the restrictions on life science databases: Dulong de Rosnay, M. (2008). Check Your Data Freedom: A Taxonomy to Assess Life Science Database Openness . Nature Precedings DOI: 10.1038/npre.2008.2083.1 Abstract: Molecular biology data are subject to terms of use that vary widely between databases and curating institutions. This research presents a taxonomy of contractual and technical restrictions applicable to databases in life science. It builds upon research led by Science Commons demonstrating why open data and the freedom to integrate facilitate innovation and how this openness can be achieved. The taxonomy describes technical and legal restrictions applicable to life science databases, and its metadata have been used to assess terms of use of databases hosted by Life Science Resource Name (LSRN) Schema. While a few public domain policies are standardized, most terms of use are not harmonized, difficult to understand and impose controls that pre...

LNCS 5109: Data Integration in the Life Sciences (5th International Workshop, DILS 2008, Evry, France, June 25-27, 2008). Some interesting papers: Ontologies and Data Integration in Biomedicine: Success Stories and Challenging Issues BioWarehouse: Relational Integration of Eleven Bioinformatics Databases and Formats Analyzing the Evolution of Life Science Ontologies and Mappings Automatic Methods for Integrating Biomedical Data Sources in a Mediator-Based System VisGenome and Ensembl: Usability of Integrated Genome Maps Bio2RDF : A Semantic Web Atlas of Post Genomic Knowledge about Human and Mouse Chemical Knowledge for the Semantic Web Combining One-Class Classification Models Based on Diverse Biological Data for Prediction of Protein-Protein Interactions

LNCS 5071: Sharing Data, Information and Knowledge (25th British National Conference on Databases, BNCOD 25, Cardiff, UK, July 7-10, 2008). Some interesting papers: The Power of Data Visualisation to Aid Biodiversity Studies through Accurate Taxonomic Reconciliation Distributed Systems and Automated Biodiversity Informatics: Genomic Analysis and Geographic Visualization of Disease Evolution. Role Based Access to Support Collaboration in Healthcare Finding Data Resources in a Virtual Observatory Using SKOS Vocabularies Semantic Matching for the Medical Domain The Hyperdatabase Project – From the Vision to Realizations

Volume 5069 of LNCS titled " Scientific and Statistical Database Management " (20th International Conference, SSDBM 2008, Hong Kong, China, July 9-11, 2008) is just out. Some interesting papers: New Challenges in Petascale Scientific Databases Query Planning for Searching Inter-dependent Deep-Web Databases A Probabilistic Framework for Building Privacy-Preserving Synopses of Multi-dimensional Data ViP: A User-Centric View-Based Annotation Framework for Scientific Data Flexible Scientific Workflow Modeling Using Frames, Templates, and Dynamic Embedding Examining Statistics of Workflow Evolution Provenance: A First Study Adventures in the Blogosphere Ontology Database: A New Method for Semantic Modeling and an Application to Brainwave Data NB: I would be using DOIs for these articles as they are available but they do not seem to be registered yet with doi.org...

The proceedings for digital library conferences are a little hard to find. They are distributed across the ACM Digital Library, the IEEE Xplore, Springer's Lecture Notes on Computer Science (LNCS), and other less accessible sites. It is definitely not convenient having to look all over for these resources. I've decided to collect what I could find here in this blog entry. If there are any missing (I am sure there are) please let me know and I will add them. NB : I've focused on the proceedings, and only listed the conference web sites when I couldn't find the proceedings. 2009 JCDL2009 2008 ICADL 2008 - International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries 2 - 5 December 2008, Bali, Indonesia ECDL 2008 . Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries 12th European Conference, ECDL 2008, Aarhus, Denmark, September 14-19, 2008. Proceedings . Zzzoot post . JCDL 2008 International Conference on Digital Libraries. Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS joint confer...

The Canadian Institutes for Health Research ( CIHR ) is hosting a Health Summit " Data Data Everywhere: Access and Accountability ", October 20-21 2008, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Here is the tentative program: Day 1 (October 21) Welcoming Remarks Alain Beaudet, President, CIHR Keynote Panel - Setting the Stage: Information Needs of the Health of Canadians Robyn Tamblyn Terry Sullivan, Chief Executive Officer, Cancer Care Ontario Penny Ballem, Chair, CIHR-IHSPR Health Information Summit Steering Committee Plenary Session 1: Secondary Use of Data: Different Perspectives Wendy Armstrong, Board Member, Consumers’ Association of Alberta Robert Ouellet, President Elect, Canadian Medical Association Dorothy Pringle, Professor Emeritus, Lawrence S. Bloomberg, Faculty of Nursing University of Toronto Jack Tu, Senior Scientist, Institute for Clinical Evaluative Studies Plenary Session 2: Ethics and Privacy William Lowrance, Consultant Pat Kosseim, General Counsel of the Office of the ...

The Scholarly Kitchen is a scholarly publishing & community blog looking at interesting projects, activities, other blogs, etc. I like its tone and its focus. Some recent postings include Open Access, the data vs. hypothesis debate, reputation and journal quality, happenings at/with PLoS, the h-index, applications not publications, etc.

International Study on the Impact of Copyright Law on Digital Preservation , A joint report of The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (U.S.), The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC - U.K.), The Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project (Australia) and The SURFfoundation (Netherlands) . July 2008

The Wired Campus is reporting ( Librarians Accuse Google of Using and Discarding Them ) how the ire of librarians with respect to Google appears to be cresting (again). This time I think it is more serious: some fairly strong words are being written: How Google Used Librarians…and Got Away With It Google punked us Google Gone Happy Birthday, Google Librarian Central! Good and Evil in the Garden of Digitization OM blog - Google Ignores Medical Librarians How Google used librarians Google Librarian Central has a 7 month summer break? Google Librarian Central - How many of us will it take? Google Librarian Central "Summer Break" Now 298 Days Google and Librarians When Google’s the library, who’s the librarian?

I was on the BBC site watching a video on carnivorous slugs in Wales (really!) using the BBC Media Player, when I noticed that on trying to turn-up the volume, that the volume control went - well - up to eleven ! I haven't seen this reported (Doh, just found someone found this on June 10 ), but this is perhaps a playful homage to Spinal Tap ? Or perhaps the BBC just wants to have the loudest-media-player-in-the-world ? ;-)

A recent article[ 1 ] looks at scientific research competitiveness of world universities in computer science, examining at individual university computer science departments as well countries as aggregates of their universities. The study looks at 233 university computer science departments, 127418 published papers, 468244 citations, 1856 highly cited papers and 57 hot papers over the last 10 years using data from Thomson. The evaluation criteria are (see the paper for more details): Canada as an aggregate region came in #4 after the USA, UK, Germany, followed by Italy. Canada had the third highest paper production, citations, and "hot" papers! For individual universities, only one Canadian university is in the top 23, with University of Toronto coming in at 16th . You can see the top 23 universities listed below: Stanford MIT UC Berkeley U Texas U Illinois Carnegie Mellon UCSD Georgia Inst Technol U Maryland Eth Zurich Technion Israel Inst Technol Princeton U Washingto...

A collection of excellent Open Access papers (somewhat Germany/EU-oriented, but with some good international and canonical content) has just been published: Open access: opportunities and challenges: - A handbook (PDF). 2008. The European Commission and the German Commission for UNESCO, translated from the original German edition published by the German Commission for UNESCO. Its table of contents: Chapter 1: Definition and Origin of Open Access The Concept of Open Access. Norbert Lossau Open Access – A Historical Survey. Peter Schirmbacher Chapter 2: An Introduction to Three Publication Models The Edoc-Server at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin: An Example of an Open Access Repository. Susanne Dobratz The New Journal of Physics as an Example of Open Access Journals. Eberhard Bodenschatz The Example of a Hybrid Model: Springer Open Choice. Jan Velterop Chapter 3: Implementing Open Access Models Financing Open Access Models. Stefan Gradmann Open Access and (German) Copyright. Karl-N...