sennoma's Feed

Overcoming barriers: access to research information | Research Information Network

sennoma — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 12:48:00 -0500

This RIN report ﬁnds that many researchers are encountering difﬁculties in getting access to the content they need and that this is having a signiﬁcant impact on their research. Based on the ﬁndings of ﬁve studies, the report investigates the nature and scale of key restrictions on access to information resources of importance to researchers; the impact of these restrictions and the ways in which they might be alleviated or overcome. The report examines the frequency with which researchers encounter problems in accessing content; researchers’ perceptions of the ease with which they can gain access and the issue of researcher access to information resources in the public and private sector which are not formally published and which are often subject to copyright restrictions. It also reviews academic and research libraries arrangements to provide access to researchers who are not members of their institutions. The report’s key ﬁnding is that access is still a major concern for researchers. Tagged by sennoma under oa, oa.access,

Patterns of information use and exchange: case studies of researchers in the life sciences | Research Information Network

sennoma — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:03:00 -0500

This report by the British Library and the Research Information Network (RIN) provides a unique insight into how information is used by researchers across life sciences. Undertaken by the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation, and the UK Digital Curation Centre and the University of Edinburgh’s Information Services, the report concludes that ‘one-size-ﬁts-all’ information and data sharing policies are not achieving scientiﬁcally productive and cost-efﬁcient information use in life sciences. The report was developed using an innovative approach to capture the day-to-day patterns of information use in seven research teams from a wide range of disciplines, from botany to clinical neuroscience. The study undertaken over 11 months and involving 56 participants found that there is a signiﬁcant gap between how researchers behave and the policies and strategies of funders and service providers. This suggests that the attempts to implement such strategies have had only a limited impact. Key ﬁndings from the report include: * Researchers use informal and trusted sources of advice from colleagues, rather than institutional service teams, to help identify information sources and resources * The use of social networking tools for scientiﬁc research purposes is far more limited than expected * Data and information sharing activities are mainly driven by needs and beneﬁts perceived as most important by life scientists rather than ‘top-down’ policies and strategies * There are marked differences in the patterns of information use and exchange between research groups active in different areas of the life sciences, reinforcing the need to avoid standardised policy approaches Tagged by sennoma under scholarlycommunication, oa,

ScieCom Info

sennoma — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:41:00 -0400

Mission: • To inspire new activities and facilitate knowledge exchange between Nordic/Baltic • stakeholder, and to increase the international visibility of Nordic and Baltic policies and initiatives • To stress the importance of Open Access in the Nordic and Baltic countries and to describe both theoretical and best-practice models for financing, rights management and other fundamental issues. • To disseminate to both a Nordic/Baltic and an international readership information about successful initiatives and other activities in the Nordic and Baltic countries. Tagged by sennoma under oa, opendata, openscience, oaos.misc,

The Ferryman: Growing significance of communities and collaboration in discovery and development

sennoma — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 10:21:00 -0400

The benefits of community participation or collaboration should outweigh the costs to support a rational decision to pursue such routes. Lions usually prefer to hunt as a group as the shared food from group kills offers a better return and lower risk than hunting alone; in a similar manner organisations may also choose to collaborate to have greater success in acquiring new resources or income. The current convergence of a number of factors appears to be driving up the R&D collaboration benefit/cost ratio. The drivers include: 1. Scientific research is becoming more complex and multi-disciplinary, requiring researchers to move more away from “working in the expert’s box”. 2. Our work, economy and society are becoming more knowledge-oriented. (I define knowledge here as including understanding gained from experience and involves individual and collective knowledge in addition to explicit knowledge such as intellectual property (IP).) 3. Business models in the chemistry and pharmaceutical industry that worked fine historically, e.g., manufacturing products based predominantly on patents related to chemistry, appear to be increasingly lacking. 4. The goals of translational and personalized medicine have stronger requirements for networked and collaborative approaches over discipline and time than the historically relatively linear drug discovery and development process. Integrated services offer greater future value creation than stand-alone products. 5. Patient Safety has become an issue of growing concern requiring new more integrative approaches to data, knowledge and disciplines. 6. Computational Science continues to grow in importance, fueling overlaps and interactions between scientific disciplines including that of computer science. 7. The maturing of the Internet-based World Wide Web including enhanced usability, services, social software and the semantic web, provide new community and collaboration resource opportunities. 8. Challenging problems we face as a Tagged by sennoma under openscience, collaboration,

Scholarly Communications @ Duke » A model copyright law

sennoma — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 09:58:00 -0400

The goal of the Draft Law is to provide librarians and their legal advisers with practical ideas to help them understand and influence the policy making process when national copyright laws are being revised. It is directed toward developing countries, from which the majority of eIFL’s membership is drawn. But there is much for all of us, in the US and the EU as in the developing world, to learn from this document. Its clear set of definitions and the explanatory notes that accompany each exception and limitation make it ideal for gaining a synoptic view of the state of international copyright law. Most important is the consistent focus on the public interest and the socially beneficial purpose that copyright law is intended to serve. Tagged by sennoma under kevinsmith, copyright,

I'm OK; The Bull Is Dead

sennoma — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 09:47:00 -0400

1. Punch line: The facts; no adjectives, adverbs or modifiers. "Milestone 4 wasn't hit on time, and we didn't start Task 8 as planned." Or, "Received charter approval as planned." 2. Current status: How the punch-line statement affects the project. "Because of the missed milestone, the critical path has been delayed five days." 3. Next steps: The solution, if any. "I will be able to make up three days during the next two weeks but will still be behind by two days." 4. Explanation: The reason behind the punch line. "Two of the five days' delay is due to late discovery of a hardware interface problem, and the remaining three days' delay is due to being called to help the customer support staff for a production problem." Notice the almost reverse order of these points in comparison with the common reporting style in which team members start with a long explanation of why things went wrong. Using the four steps described above, the project manager learns the most important information first, then he learns supporting information to help complete the story. Tagged by sennoma under work, management,

Publishing Ethics | RIN

sennoma — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:25:00 -0400

I was on Friday at the Royal Society, speaking at the annual seminar for learned societies held by Wiley-Blackwell. There were a number of interesting presentations, not least that from Gavin Sharrock on publishing ethics. His theme was how ethics had risen to become a much more important issue for publishers than it had been only a few years ago, with increases in the number of cases of malpractice, and of retractions of journal articles. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is doing valuable work in this area, and most publishers now have established procedures for dealing with such problems. But I had not realised that retractions at Wiley-Blackwell are now running at more than one a week. Publication ethics are a matter not just for publishers, of course, and they are at least mentioned in many of the codes of practice for research that are now proliferating (see for example the draft code recently issued by the UK Research Integrity Office). One of the points made in discussion by journal editors was that when problems of this kind arise, they can find themselves involved in many different sets of procedures, run by research funders or institutions, or in some parts of the world in formal legal proceedings. The relationships between these different sets of procedures can be highly complex, and also, of course, time cosuming. This is an issue that is going to have to be addressed if the number of cases conntinues to rise Tagged by sennoma under scienceisasnakepit,

Hacker News | How to read hard stuff

sennoma — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 08:28:00 -0400

I was a theoretical physicist for 13 years, and struggled a lot with this question [how to read hard stuff]. I found it very useful to develop several different styles for reading mathematics and physics. Mostly I did this in the context of reading papers, not books, but the comments below are easily adapted to books. One unusual but very useful style was to set a goal like reading 15 papers in 3 hours. I use the term "reading" here in an unusual way. Of course, I don't mean understanding everything in the papers. Instead, I'd do something like this: for each paper, I had 12 minutes to read it. The goal was to produce a 3-point written LaTeX summary of the most important material I could extract: usually questions, open problems, results, new techniques, or connections I hadn't seen previously. When time was up, it was onto the next paper. A week later, I'd make a revision pass over the material, typically it would take an hour or so. I found this a great way of rapidly getting an overview of a field, understanding what was important, what was not, what the interesting questions were, and so on. In particular, it really helped identify the most important papers, for a deeper read. For deeper reads of important papers or sections of books I would take days, weeks or months. Giving lectures about the material and writing LaTeX lecture notes helped a lot. Other ideas I found useful: - Often, when struggling with a book or paper, it's not you that's the problem, it's the author. Finding another source can quickly clear stuff up. - The more you make this a social activity, the better off you'll be. I organize lecture courses, write notes, blog the notes, and so on. E.g. http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=252 (on Yang-Mills theories) and http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?page_id=503 (links to some of my notes on distributed computing). - On being stuck: if you feel like you're learning things, keep doing whatever you're doing, but if you feel stuck, try another approach. Early on, I'd sometimes get stuck on a book Tagged by sennoma under learn, michaelnielsen, advice,

ScienceDirect - Government Information Quarterly : Tale of two databases: The history of federally funded information systems for education and medicine

sennoma — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:06:00 -0400

Access to scholarly information in the disciplines of education and medicine occurred primarily through the simultaneous development of two bibliographic databases. The Education Resource Information Center (ERIC) originated as a resource designed to be comprehensive in its inclusion of peer-reviewed and unpublished literature for the entire education community. MEDLINE began as a resource of selective materials for physicians and researchers. Today, ERIC includes selected peer-reviewed literature directed primarily to researchers and practitioners, although others use the database, while MEDLINE is a vast information system serving all health professionals and consumers. This literature analysis of their policy history shows important differences in their evolution. Tagged by sennoma under openscience, scholarlycommunication,

Science Commons » Blog Archive » What’s open science?

sennoma — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 03:14:00 -0400

Tagged by sennoma under openscience, import090501,

PET: PHP Entrez Tools.

sennoma — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:57:00 -0400

PET is a library of PHP classes for use with the Entrez API. They give easy access to the NCBI databases, including PubMed, PubMed Central, OMIM, and the various *omics databases. The library is currently primitive, but under active development. Because PHP is one of the easiest languages to learn and is in very widespread use, it is hoped that PET may give those without extensive programming skills the ability to quickly produce useful services.\nPET services\n\nFive publically available services currently run with PET:\n\nAssEd:\n The semi-automatic assistant editor: a device for comparing multiple pubmed search results in order to find authors in common between them. Use when you are searching for an author who has published on two or more subjects, but where it is not important whether the two subjects occur in the same paper.\nOAFF:\n The open-access friend finder: a device for searching PubMed Central and returning a list of the most-published authors on a particular topic (or location). Use when searching for those authors in a field who most friendly toward open-access publishing.\nTiPS:\n Trends in Publishing Science: a device for creating graphs to show monthly trends in PubMed depositions for a particular topic, journal, location, etc.\nPubMed Cloud:\n A toy which runs a PubMed search and then generates the HTML for a word cloud from all of the abstracts in that search.\nAuthor Profile:\n Displays somebody's PubMed record, but with useful statistics and trends. You can use it from the search box on the left, or from the links in AssEd and OAFF results. Tagged by sennoma under webtools, publishing, joedunckley,

Choosing a journal for the neck-posture paper: why open access is important « Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

sennoma — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:14:00 -0400

Interesting perspective on OA and how to choose a journal. "So what criteria are we left with? Of the ten we started with, those left standing in the era of ubiquitous PDFs number just four: prestige, turnaround speed, figure reproduction quality and length restrictions/page charges. And this is excellent, because these are the actual services that journals provide to authors. A journal best serves authors by handling their manuscripts quickly and without charge, by imparting prestige due to the reputation of the editorial board and quality of previous issues, and by reproducing the figures well. I think it's great that we're moving inexorably towards an economy where the journals that get the best submissions will be the ones that provide the best services." Tagged by sennoma under oa, publishing.models, lostart,

Biological knowledge management: the emerging role of the Semantic Web technologies -- Antezana et al., 10.1093/bib/bbp024 -- Briefings in Bioinformatics

sennoma — Fri, 22 May 2009 06:35:00 -0400

New knowledge is produced at a continuously increasing speed, and the list of papers, databases and other knowledge sources that a researcher in the life sciences needs to cope with is actually turning into a problem rather than an asset. The adequate management of knowledge is therefore becoming fundamentally important for life scientists, especially if they work with approaches that thoroughly depend on knowledge integration, such as systems biology. Several initiatives to organize biological knowledge sources into a readily exploitable resourceome are presently being carried out. Ontologies and Semantic Web technologies revolutionize these efforts. Here, we review the benefits, trends, current possibilities, and the potential this holds for the biosciences. Tagged by sennoma under semanticweb,

Overview of trends in STM journals market « putting down a marker

sennoma — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:22:00 -0400

the authors describe as a “startling twist” Outsell’s Nov 2008 analysis that suggested that simply having the content wouldn’t be enough, and that the future of subscriptions would be in providing workflow tools and services to help users manage the existing ocean of information. Since Outsell (and others) have been predicting the importance of workflow solutions since at least 2002 it’s hard to see what’s startling about it, but it’s certainly an important trend. It’s also another trend (like consortia big deals) that favours large publishers (who can afford to invest in workflow technology and have a breadth of content to underpin it), potentially at the expense of smaller, society publishers. Some 25% of Thomson revenues now come from software-based products Tagged by sennoma under oa.money,

Knowledge Ecology Notes » Prizes and Grants, Type I, II and III diseases, rich and poor countries, open and closed medicine development

sennoma — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:41:00 -0400

OPENNESS For all innovation efforts, there are quite important issues concerning openness, and the hazards of enclosures of science and the hoarding of knowledge. A number of academics writers, patent professionals and R&D experts have called attention to the potential risks that innovation inducement prizes might lead to less sharing of knowledge, as people position themselves to win prizes. But this risk should be seen in a broader context. It is also often pointed out that patents can discourage upstream research and downstream product development. Government grant programs that encourage the privatisation of publicly funded R&D (like the US Bayh-Dole Act) can also move things in the wrong direction. It turns out this whole important topic is complicated. One area to pay attention to are the “Bayh-Dole” issues relating to prizes. In many of the US government funded prizes, and in the early X-prize designs, all of the intellectual property rights go to the recipient of the prizes. In some non-medical cases in the US, the government is barred from asking for licenses to use the inventions that win the prizes — an even worse outcome than for patents developed under federal grants, which are subject to (rarely used [fn1]) royalty free government licenses, and march-in and access requirements. So one debate is about obtaining the right bundle of rights in patents or data from prize winners, and managing also the disclosures. After a series of workshops on medical innovation inducement prizes, proposals also emerged to include new “open source dividends,” which involve sharing of prize money to entities that openly share access to knowledge, materials and technology. The open source dividends were modeled in several of the 2008 Bolivia Barbados prize proposals, and have unfortunately been ignored by some of those who have commented on those proposals. There are also much more transformation proposals for funding open source medicine, including the proposals to introduce “competitive intermediaries” that have as t Tagged by sennoma under openscience, oa, prizes, innovation, patents, intellectualproperty,

Open Access News: Rachel Proudfoot, et al., IncReASe (Increasing Repository Content through Automation and Services), JISC Final Report, May 1, 2009.

sennoma — Mon, 04 May 2009 04:28:00 -0400

The IncReASe (Increasing Repository Content through Automation and Services) was an eighteen month project (subsequently extended to twenty months) to enhance White Rose Research Online (WRRO). WRRO is a shared repository of research outputs (primarily publications) from the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York; it runs on the EPrints open source repository platform. The repository was created in 2004 and had steady growth but, in common with many other similar repositories, had difficulty in achieving a “critical mass” of content and in becoming truly embedded within researchers’ workflows. The main aim of the IncReASe project was to assess ingestion routes into WRRO with a view to lowering barriers to deposit. We reviewed the feasibility of bulk import of pre-existing metadata and/or full-text research outputs, hoping this activity would have a positive knock-on effect on repository growth and embedding. Prior to the project, we had identified researchers’ reluctance to duplicate effort in metadata creation as a significant barrier to WRRO uptake; we investigated how WRRO might share data with internal and external IT systems. This work included a review of how WRRO, as an institutional based repository, might interact with the subject repository of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Tagged by sennoma under Berglund,

A Blog Around The Clock : ScienceOnline'09 - Saturday 4:30pm and beyond: the Question of Power

sennoma — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 06:35:00 -0400

Not just in education, but also in research and publishing, the Web is turning a competitive world into a collaborative world. Our contributions to the community (how much we give) will be more important for our reputation (and thus job and career) than products of our individual, secretive lab research. Tagged by sennoma under oaos.quotes,

The Journal of Electronic Publishing: Talk About Talking About New Models of Scholarly Communication

sennoma — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 06:38:00 -0400

Although many new forms of scholarly exchange have reached an advanced state of adoption, scholars and researchers generally remain remarkably naïve and uninformed about many issues involved with change in scholarly publishing and scholarly communication broadly. It is increasingly important that dialogue at research institutions involve a much wider group of researchers and scholars. Only active engagement by those undertaking research and scholarship can ensure that the advancement of research and scholarship takes priority in the development and adoption of new models. Research libraries have led in educating stakeholders about new models and are expanding their outreach to campus communities. In considering the effects of recent change, and looking to emerging trends and concerns, six dangers of the current moment are considered along with six topics ripe for campus dialogue. Tagged by sennoma under scholcomm, publishing, publishing.models,

Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research -- Seglen 314 (7079): 497 -- BMJ

sennoma — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:24:00 -0400

Evaluating scientific quality is a notoriously difficult problem which has no standard solution. Ideally, published scientific results should be scrutinised by true experts in the field and given scores for quality and quantity according to established rules. In practice, however, what is called peer review is usually performed by committees with general competence rather than with the specialist's insight that is needed to assess primary research data. Committees tend, therefore, to resort to secondary criteria like crude publication counts, journal prestige, the reputation of authors and institutions, and estimated importance and relevance of the research field,1 making peer review as much of a lottery as of a rational process.2 3 Tagged by sennoma under peerreview, scientometrics, bibliometrics,

OAN:"The benefits of more OA – however it is achieved – outweigh the costs"

sennoma — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 04:15:00 -0400

In a knowledge economy, the vast amount of research and scholarly information produced by UK higher education (HE) is incredibly important. ‘The full value of this knowledge can only be realised when it is effectively disseminated,’ argues Professor John Houghton of Australia’s Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University. Tagged by sennoma under oa,