Archives
Monday, September 26, 2005
The value of Open Access
- Open Access journals get impressive impact factors-
Journals published by BioMed Central have again received impact factors that compare well with equivalent subscription titles, with five titles in the top five of their specialty. The high impact factors for these journals affirm that they are respected by researchers, and are fast becoming the place for authors to submit important research findings.
- in-cites - Journals - Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics-
Some of the most important advantages of free online availability of scientific information are the opportunities for enhanced scientific quality assurance, which are unfortunately often neglected in discussions and reports about open access publishing
- We get letters (2)-
Howard and Melissa of Boca Raton, Florida, were the happy new parents of twins, a boy and a girl named Andrew and Carly. Though they were preemies born in mid-July, both babies were safely home two weeks later. “Then suddenly,” Howard wrote to us, “Andrew had to be admitted to the ER. We thought it was for something little - but the doctors discovered something major.”… “We were shaken and quite upset,” Howard recalls. “Armed with only a cell phone - and a very low battery - I was able to Google [hemoglobin "premature infant"] and found a medical journal article claiming that it’s perfectly normal for preemies to have their hemoglobin levels drop to 7 between the first and third months of life, and apparently this is especially true with twins.” He showed the mobile screen citing this fact to the neonatalogists, who went off to research the issue for a couple of hours. They returned, says Howard, “and sheepishly admitted that our son was indeed fine - no treatment was necessary.”
Howard concludes, “Google literally saved our newborn son from having to endure an extremely dangerous, and totally unnecessary, blood transfusion. Melissa and I really appreciated your help with this one.”
Peter Suber is the OA god.
Open Access — laura
My First Librarian Story
I’m lying on a table in the ER, both in pain and drugged to the gills and the tech drawing my blood wants to know if we a have a particular book in the library.
Library Links — laura
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility with Firefox
Get Tooled Up:’Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility with Firefox’, Ariadne Issue 44
Often developers lack time or training and simply rely on one of the many automated testing tools such as WebXACT [5], Cynthia [6] or Wave [7]. But even those mechanical checks need to be supplemented (and, to avoid false positives, counter-checked) by manual checks.
Based on some of the WCAG 1.0 checkpoints, this article aims to provide a quick outline of how Mozilla Firefox and the Web Developer toolbar can help with these manual checks.
Website Design — laura
Friday, September 16, 2005
Meebo
Basically, it’s a webpage where y0u can log into several instant messaging services simultaneously without having to download anything. Good for users and librarians with locked-down computers. Now if they would add Google Talk support.
Web Tools — laura
I did it again
The carnival has been good for me. It gives me a reason to write more essay type posts even though I’m really busy at work.
Library Links — laura
Thursday, September 15, 2005
ColLib
I [Magnus Enger] have created colLib - a prototype of a system for organizing and finding documents that are available in Open Access repositories:
Harvesting and tagging of open access library and information science articles, complete with a meta-search function!
Library Links, Open Access — laura
Friday, September 9, 2005
Wikiphobia
I’m pretty sure I come off as a permanent early adopter, the first to use anything new and shiny. But that’s only true to a point. Blogs? Instant understanding and adoration. (Online, Roll-Playing, MMOR) Games? Didn’t touch one till I was in my 20s and my roomate played them constantly. Wikis. I’ve always understood the usefullness of wikis but they don’t really appeal to me. Mostly it’s that I have trouble with letting go of my words so others can change them but I also have a paranioia about the quality. I firmly believe spammers are demons in hell forcing their pain on the rest of us. And they just can not leave a good thing alone. So a good wiki takes a lot of supervision. The users of Wikipedia do this themselves. But you can’t just assume you’ll have an interested and paricipative audience. And yet, it does fulfill a purpose of collaborative knowledge sharing in real-time without the delay and confusion of comments.
With the advent of two library-focused wikis (LISWiki, Library Success), I took the plunge and did a little contributing and editing. And it was very easy. The wiki structure doesn’t make much sense to me but I think that’s the default interface design of MediaWiki which both wikis use. However, I’m struck by how easy it would be for my colleagues to use. I’m thinking that once we get the intranet set up that I’ll install a wiki instead of a blog for keeping track of internal information. Currently, there’s a paper notebook at the reference desk and a wiki could be an electronic notebook to take its place. While blogs are item-oriennted, the wiki would have a page on each topic that would always have the latest information.
No, I’m not planning on rolling one out for public reference, yet. We have a lot of catching up to do technologically. Plus, I’m not sure the community is ready for one. There’s a lot of work to do first, and part of that is a survey to find out what the patrons want. I love new technology but it’s useless if people won’t use it.
Web Tools — laura
ongoing · Massachusetts XML
Update- more information.
This is a really smart move by Massachusetts… Because this way, they maximize the chances that the data is re-usable by lots of different programs, and not just office suites. Because they are entirely 100% free of legal entanglements. Because they maximize the chances that the data will still be usable by their grand-children, independent of the fortunes of any software company. Because if there’s something that needs adding to the format, there’s a standards committee whose job that is.
Note- Tim Bray is one of the people who created XML
Copyright — laura
National ID cards don’t fight crime
Boing Boing: UK Criminologist: National ID cards don’t fight crime
The more we try to fix ID on one person, the more information we demand from each person to identify them. But the more personal information that is available, the more vulnerable it is to being appropriated by fraudsters,she says.
Library Links — laura
Tuesday, September 6, 2005
EFF Guide to Music DRM
EFF layperson’s guide to crippling DRM in music services
EFF has just published an amazing, plain-language guide to the ways that online music services take away your rights — this is perfect for giving to your non-geek friends (directors, patrons, Friends, etc.) to explain the dangers of buying DRM-crippled music. Included are Microsoft Plays For Sure, Real Music Store, Napster 2.0 and iTunes Music Store:
EFF on DRM, iTunes: “The Customer Is Always Wrong”
In April 2004, Apple decided to “modify the DRM so people could burn the same playlist only 7 times, down from 10.
Copyright — laura
Office Politics
Massachusetts set to switch off Microsoft
[Massachusetts] said on Wednesday that all electronic documents “created and saved” by state employees would have to be based on open formats, with the switch to start at the beginning of 2007.
Documents created using Microsoft’s Office software are produced in formats that are controlled by the Microsoft, making them inelligible. In a paper laying out its future technology strategy on Wednesday, the state also specified only two document types that could be used in the future - OpenDocument, which is used in open source applications like Open Office, and PDF, a widely used standard for electronic documents.
The switch to open formats like these was needed to ensure that the state could guarantee that citizens could open and read electronic documents in the future, according to the state - something that was not possible using closed formats.
State may drop Office software
Microsoft and other companies could keep doing business with the state government by adding OpenDocument as a standard file format. The upcoming version of Microsoft Office, due next year, will use a file format based on the open XML document standard, which is similar to OpenDocument.
But Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft’s information worker business strategy unit, indicated in an e-mailed statement that the company isn’t interested in adopting the full OpenDocument standard.
Microsoft must drop its Office politics
Microsoft is deeply hurt by this ingratitude. Why not use its open standard, it asks? Why force a downgrade on interoperability and functionality on users, when sticking to the MS way would be so easy and work so well? In return, it is fair to ask whether the MS open standard really is open and can be freely used by anyone without encumbrance. Can it be included in GPL software, for example? Microsoft says it’s not for it to comment on other people’s licences — a curious stance for a company usually more than ready to talk at length about the legal and practical issues of open development.
Does OpenDocument, which is the result of a lot of hard work from people fully versed in contemporary corporate computing, really fail at the very things it was designed to provide? Microsoft had every chance to contribute to the standard during its development — wasn’t that the time for good corporate citizens to raise such issues? And what happened to
the customer is always right?
U.S. state plans to abandon Microsoft Office
While a number of government agencies across the world have expressed plans to drop Microsoft products in favor of open-source and open-standard technologies, Massachusetts is the first major public-sector institution to do so in the U.S. Other noteworthy instances in which Microsoft software is being replaced by open-source technology include the adoption of Linux in the cities of Munich, Germany; Bergen, Norway; and Vienna.
Computing News — laura
