Free Culture projects:
Now bringing the power of Google Sketchup and the Google 3D warehouse as model & resource authoring options to the Cobalt virtual world platform !
Early benchmarking is showing .kmz & .zip (Collada) import success to be in the 90% range !
A big congratulation to Fong, John and the entire Cobalt team !
In the files section there are patches starting with toautotools* and
ending with the date 20081119 that patch OCRopus and other external
projects to use libtool to build programs and libraries. I have
tested these patches on Mac OS X 10.5.5 on an Intel Macbook using
Macports and on a PC running Cygwin under Windows XP. The libraries
Hi! I read through ([link]
TrainingTesseract) but wanted to see if there's an easier option than
creating specific bounding boxes for each letter (which is what I
understand the tutorial says one needs to do?). Is there any option
where one would simply point to a TIF and TXT file, the TXT file
The Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group published four Working Drafts today. The purpose of the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) is to provide a means for individuals or organizations to describe a group of resources through the publication of machine-readable metadata. Description Resources (Last Call); which details the creation and lifecycle of Description Resources (DRs), which encapsulate metadata Grouping of Resources (Last Call); which describes how sets of IRIs can be defined such that descriptions or other data can be applied to the resources obtained by dereferencing IRIs that are elements of the set. Formal Semantics (Last Call); which describes how the relatively simple operational format of a POWDER document can be transformed for processing by Semantic Web tools Primer (First Public Draft) Last Call comments are welcome through 5 December.
The American Psychological Association revised its self-archiving policy on November 1
Both the old and new policies say that "Authors...may post a copy of the final manuscript...on their Web site or their employer's server...." However, the old policy added that "APA does not permit archiving with any other non-APA repositories" and the new policy deletes that rule.
The deletion looks progressive, removing a restriction on the set of eligible repositories. But the unchanged parts of the policy may leave that restriction in place. May APA authors now deposit in a disciplinary repository, such as the Social Science Research Network? It's not clear.
PS: For background, see our past posts on the evolving APA self-archiving policy.
Recent results about the robustness of kernel methods involve the analysis of influence functions. By definition the influence function is closely related to leave-one-out criteria. In statistical learning, the latter is often used to assess the generalization of a method. In statistics, the influence function is used in a similar way to analyze the statistical efficiency of a method. Links between both worlds are explored. The influence function is related to the first term of a Taylor expansion. Higher order influence functions are calculated. A recursive relation between these terms is found characterizing the full Taylor expansion. It is shown how to
Statistical models on full and partial rankings of n items are often of limited practical use for large n due to computational consideration. We explore the use of non-parametric models for partially ranked data and derive computationally efficient procedures for their use for large n. The derivations are largely possible through combinatorial and algebraic manipulations based on the lattice of partial rankings. A bias-variance analysis and an experimental study demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method.
Feature selection is the task of choosing a small subset of features that is sufficient to predict the target labels well. Here, instead of trying to directly determine which features are better, we attempt to learn the properties of good features. For this purpose we assume that each feature is represented by a set of properties, referred to as meta-features. This approach enables prediction of the quality of features without measuring their value on the training instances. We use this ability to devise new selection algorithms that can efficiently search for new good features in the presence of a huge number of features, and to dramatically reduce the number of feature measurements needed. We demonstrate our algorithms on
In this paper we use the methodology introduced by Dhurandhar and Dobra (2009) for analyzing the error of classifiers and the model selection measures, to analyze decision tree algorithms. The methodology consists of obtaining parametric expressions for the moments of the generalization error (GE) for the classification model of interest, followed by plotting these expressions for interpretability. The major challenge in applying the methodology to decision trees, the main theme of this work, is customizing the generic expressions for the moments of GE to this particular classification algorithm. The specific contributions we make in this paper are
We design an online algorithm for Principal Component Analysis. In each trial the current instance is centered and projected into a probabilistically chosen low dimensional subspace. The regret of our online algorithm, that is, the total expected quadratic compression loss of the online algorithm minus the total quadratic compression loss of the batch algorithm, is bounded by a term whose dependence on the dimension of the instances is only logarithmic. We first develop our methodology in the expert setting of
Classical approaches used to learn Bayesian network structure from data have disadvantages in terms of complexity and lower accuracy of their results. However, a recent empirical study has shown that a hybrid algorithm improves sensitively accuracy and speed: it learns a skeleton with an independency test (IT) approach and constrains on the directed acyclic graphs (DAG) considered during the search-and-score phase. Subsequently, we theorize the structural constraint by introducing the concept of super-structure S, which is an
Web sites must forecast Web page views in order to plan computer resource allocation and estimate upcoming revenue and advertising growth. In this paper, we focus on extracting trends and seasonal patterns from page view series, two dominant factors in the variation of such series. We investigate the Holt-Winters procedure and a state space model for making relatively short-term prediction. It is found that Web page views exhibit strong impulsive changes occasionally. The impulses cause large prediction errors long after their occurrences. A method is developed to
This paper proposes new approaches to rank individuals from their group comparison results. Many real-world problems are of this type. For example, ranking players from team comparisons is important in some sports. In machine learning, a closely related application is classification using coding matrices. Group comparison results are usually in two types: binary indicator outcomes (wins/losses) or measured outcomes (scores). For each type of results, we propose new models for estimating individuals' abilities, and hence a ranking of individuals. The estimation is carried out by
The success of support vector machines in binary classification relies on the fact that hinge loss employed in the risk minimization targets the Bayes rule. Recent research explores some extensions of this large margin based method to the multicategory case. We show a moment bound for the so-called multi-hinge loss minimizers based on two kinds of complexity constraints: entropy with bracketing and empirical entropy. Obtaining such a result based on the latter is harder than finding one based on the former. We obtain fast rates of convergence that adapt to the unknown margin.
We replaced the conditional probability tables of Bayesian network nodes whose parents have high cardinality with a multilevel empirical hierarchical Bayesian model called hierarchical pattern Bayes (HPB). The resulting Bayesian networks achieved significant performance improvements over Bayesian networks with the same structure and traditional conditional probability tables, over Bayesian networks with simpler structures like naive Bayes and tree augmented naive Bayes, over Bayesian networks where
100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work [flashbulbinteraction.com] is an online reference for product teams creating new applications for work involving thinking, with a heavy emphasis on visualization in the example domains used throughout: Clinical Research (data analysis visualization), Financial Trading (market analysis visualization) and Architecture (building information modeling visualization). Specifically written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools.
The ideas and illustrations in the "Enhancing Information Representation" and "Pursuing Aesthetic Refinement" sections are especially relevant to this blog's focus.
The work is freely available by the creative commons license as a browsable website, as a set of highly summarized idea cards (PDF), and as a printable 143 page book (PDF).
See also Visualizing Information for Advocacy.
Yesterday, the New York Times ran the story "Early Test for Obama on Domestic Spying Views", describing the national security-related issues facing the incoming Obama Administration. Chief among them is the issue of immunity for telecoms that illegally assisted in the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program:
In perhaps the most critical test, civil liberties groups that are suing major phone companies that took part in the N.S.A. program are waiting to find out whether a federal judge will throw out the lawsuits based on immunity granted by Congress in June.
The Justice Department has already moved to take advantage of the immunity provision by certifying in court that the phone companies were complying with a presidential order. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that has taken the lead in the lawsuit, maintains that Congress acted beyond its powers.
A hearing is set for Dec. 2. Cindy Cohn, legal director for the foundation, said that as the case moved forward the new administration could act to withdraw the immunity certification made by the Bush Justice Department.
“Nothing will be over by Jan. 20,” when Mr. Obama is inaugurated, Ms. Cohn said.
As President, it will be up to Obama whether or not the Administration wants to continue seeking dismissal of the lawsuits against AT&T and other telecoms based on the immunity provisions of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). Specifically,
President Obama can end the immunity process. Consistent with his previous opposition to immunity — then-Senator Obama voted in favor of Senator Dodd's amendment to strip the immunity provisions out of the FAA altogether — Obama could instruct his new Attorney General to withdraw the government's motion to dismiss the lawsuits based on the immunity statute. Or,
President Obama can temporarily freeze the immunity process until he has learned all the details about the NSA program. Consistent with his support of Senator Bingaman's proposed FAA amendment to delay implementation of the immunity provisions, Obama could instruct his new Attorney General to ask the court for a temporary stay of the immunity proceedings. That would give the Administration time to review the classified details of the NSA program as well as the FAA-mandated reports about the program that are expected by this July from the Inspectors General of the Department of Justice, the NSA, and other agencies involved in the program. After having reviewed all the facts, the new administration can then re-evaluate whether it wants to continue to press for immunity in court, or drop its motion to dismiss and let the cases against the telecoms continue. Or,
President Obama can choose not to appeal if the immunity statute is found unconstitutional. If, after the hearing on December 2nd, Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the federal Northern District of California agrees with EFF that the immunity statute is unconstitutional and denies the government's motion to dismiss, Obama could instruct his new Attorney General to not appeal that decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
All of these are things Obama could do — on his own and without any help from Congress — to stop the implementation of the immunity scheme that he repeatedly opposed during his presidential campaign.
These recommendations aren't EFF's alone: as part of the transition roadmap published yesterday by a broad coalition of groups including EFF, seventeen different civil liberties organizations signed onto national security surveillance recommendations that included the proposition that President Obama should "[d]irect the Attorney General to withdraw the government’s motion to dismiss pending privacy litigation brought against telecommunications carriers for assisting with unlawful warrantless surveillance, or seek a stay of those proceedings until such time as the Attorney General, based on review of the Inspectors’ General reports required by the FISA Amendments Act, determines that a grant of immunity is appropriate."
Advanced Beauty [advancedbeauty.org] is an ongoing exploration of digital artworks influenced by sound, as a collaboration between programmers, artists, musicians, animators and architects.
The first artwork collection includes a series of audio-reactive video sound sculptures, as manifestations of sound, sculpted by volume, pitch or structure of the soundtrack. The films embrace unusual video making processes, the visual programming language Processing, high-end audio analysis and fluid dynamic simulations alongside intuitive responses in traditional cell animation.
Rendered in the 1920 HD format, with 5:1 surround sound, each artist was given the same set of parameters to work within; to start, finish and exist within a white space, creating a seamless coherence, all sculptures sharing the same white environment.
Watch all the videos online here, or check out a few below.
See also lyrics and audio-responsive visual and rethinking the music video. Via Ping Mag.
Greg Boustead, Garrett Lisi's Exceptional Approach to Everything, Seed Magazine, November 17, 2008.
Virginia Hughes, Reviewing Peer-Review, Seed Magazine, November 17, 2008.... Why did you choose not to submit your paper to a traditional peer-reviewed journal?
I think peer review is important, but the journal-operated system is severely broken. I suspected this paper would get some attention, and I chose not to support any academic journal by submitting it. Under the current system, authors (who aren't paid) give ownership of their papers to journals that have reviewers (who aren't paid) approve them before publishing the papers and charging exorbitant fees to view them. These reviewers don't always do a great job, and the journals aren't providing much value in exchange for their fees. ... I think a better peer-review system could evolve from reviewers with good reputations picking the papers they find interesting out of an open pool, such as the physics arXiv, and commenting on them. This is essentially what happened with my paper, which received a lot of attention from physics bloggers?—?it's been an example of open, collaborative peer review. ...
How will "open science" and other new ways of sharing information transform science?
I think we're in the midst of a gradual revolution, following the rise of the Internet. The success of the physics arXiv?—?where physicists post freely available versions of their papers?—?has made it possible for anyone to access the literature from anywhere. This let me move to Maui 10 years ago and stay in touch with the field. Now an NIH mandate, requiring that publicly funded papers be posted to PubMed [Central], will produce the same liberating effect in other fields. The net is also affecting the way scientists work directly, with wikis and blogs used for discussions, collaborations, and individual note keeping. These new tools, along with online social networks, allow geographically independent researchers to keep in perpetual, productive contact. ...
... Most OA advocates are quick to point out that open-access doesn't necessarily mean the end of publishers or peer-review. "In my view, it makes them both even more important, though both will of necessity be forced to evolve some new methods to deal with the new world," John Wilbanks wrote last month.
But....what about that peer-review system? Will that be the next stodgy institution to go? ...
Hello everyone,
I just started using FreeOCR trying to get text from PDF files, but I
only get 3 pages and program stops; I mean, it does not pass page 3,
so I cannot continue extracting new text.
My laptop has Windows XP Pro, SP3, and I am using the program from its
shortcut.
¿How can I ‘force’ program to go on?
The Fascinator is "a simple interface to Fedora that uses a single technology [Apache Solr] to handle all browsing, searching and security". See the demo and the blog post by Peter Sefton.
A coalition of more than 25 organizations, including EFF, yesterday released "Liberty and Security: Recommendations for the Next Administration and Congress", a comprehensive catalogue of policy recommendations on a range of critical civil liberties issues.
This collaboratively-created transition roadmap, coordinated by our friends at the Constitution Project, contains 20 chapters providing policy recommendations on a wide variety of issues, from Guantanamo Bay to warrantless wiretapping. EFF has signed on as an ally in support of the recommendations in eleven of those chapters, concerning issues within EFF's mission to protect free speech and privacy on the electronic frontier.
Most importantly, EFF has joined as a supporter of all the recommendations made in the area of "Secrecy, Surveillance, and Privacy", covering goals such as reigning in NSA spying, updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and reforming the State Secrets privilege (consistent with our Privacy Agenda for the New Administration), as well as combating excessive classification and urging greater transparency in government (as previously described in our Transparency Agenda for the New Administration).
After the jump, you can find links to PDFs of all of the individual chapters of the transition catalogue where EFF has signed on as an ally; the entire document is available here [pdf]. We hope that you — and the next President and Congress — find them enlightening.
Following a review by the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee, Trials has been accepted for indexing in MEDLINE, the National Library of Medicine's premier bibliographic database.
Trials was launched in 2006 as an evolution of the journal, Current Controlled Trials in Cardiovascular Medicine and has seen significant growth in the scope of its articles and readership in the past two years. The journal considers manuscripts on any aspect of the design, performance and findings of randomized controlled trials in any health care discipline, and encourages complete reporting of trial results, regardless of the outcome or significance of the findings.
Our congratulations to the journal's Editors-in-Chief and Associate Editors on this achievement. The inclusion of Trials in MEDLINE indicates its growing prominence and reputation, and is a strong endorsement of the journal's success to date.
The World Medical Association revised the Declaration of Helsinki on 18 October 2008 at its General Assembly in Seoul, South Korea. The new version replaces all previous versions. Of particular interest are paragraphs 19 and 30:
19. Every clinical trial must be registered in a publicly accessible database before recruitment of the first subject.
Existing trial registers include the ISRCTN register,
which is open to all study designs in all health care areas and all
countries. The register is administered by Current Controlled Trials, a
sister company to BioMed Central. BioMed Central and its journals
insist on public registration of clinical trials and will follow with
interest any increase in up-take of public registration following this
revision of the Declaration of Helsinki.
30. Authors, editors and publishers all have ethical obligations with regard to the publication of the results of research. Authors have a duty to make publicly available the results of their research on human subjects and are accountable for the completeness and accuracy of their reports. They should adhere to accepted guidelines for ethical reporting. Negative and inconclusive as well as positive results should be published or otherwise made publicly available. Sources of funding, institutional affiliations and conflicts of interest should be declared in the publication. Reports of research not in accordance with the principles of this Declaration should not be accepted for publication.
A number of BioMed Central journals including BMC Research Notes and Trials are working with the scientific community to encourage complete and transparent reporting of scientific research, including clinical trials. Making all information potentially relevant to patient care freely available - via publication in an open access journal - completes the scientific record and avoids publication bias, which can have serious consequences for evidence-based medicine practices.
The Guardian's front page story from a couple of days ago ("NHS medical research plan threatens patient privacy") looks like it has generated some healthy and opinionated responses from readers, but the government consultation that led up to it has now closed. The story here is that the proposed UK National Health Service constitution - enshrining the principles and values of the NHS - contained, buried amongst other important stuff on issues such as access to services, quality of care, and informed choice, a crucial nugget which could change the way that medical researchers get access to patients' data.
The Constitution Handbook says (p24): "...Therefore, the NHS will do all it can to give patients, from every part of England, with any illness or disease, a right to know about research that is of particular relevance to them and, if they choose, to take part in approved medical research that is appropriate for them. Patients can therefore expect that a health professional or a research professional who owes the same duty of confidentiality as a health professional may use care records, in confidence, to identify whether they are suitable to participate in approved clinical trials..."
According to the Guardian, Harry Cayton, the new chairman of the National Information Governance Board for Health and Social Care, has billed the proposal as "ethically unacceptable".
It's not obvious from the Handbook how it would be decided which researchers, and which research projects, could directly get access to medical records. It's also not stated whether researchers involved in commercially funded projects (eg, trials funded by drug companies) would be able to screen databases and directly contact patients. As some respondents have argued, the current system of recruiting patients may result in bias for some types of research. But if the proposals are to go ahead, it would be crucial to develop a secure framework to establish which research questions are in the greatest public interest and most in need of a broader approach to recruitment. This does seem to have been recognised by the National Health Service's own Patient Information Advisory Group, which has advised that the proposal be removed until fuller discussion has taken place.
Clearly, with centralised and (virtually) universal computerised medical records, the UK has enormous potential to strengthen its medical research culture; but I'd be interested to hear whether similar proposals are being developed in other countries, and what public reaction is developing.
Is there a way to install a ubiquity command when you install an
extension?
I'd like to be able to install a command and then setup some
configurations for it. One option is something like extension
preferences... Is there a way to, say, define an html page that comes
with the command and can interface with the command js? If that's
possible it seems easy to get/set preferences for the command using
Today the European Digital Library Foundation launched Europeana, the OA digital library of European literature, art, history, and culture. From today's announcement:
...Internet users around the world can now access more than two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archival documents, paintings and films from national libraries and cultural institutions of the EU's 27 Member States....[A]nyone interested in literature, art, science, politics, history, architecture, music or cinema will have free and fast access to Europe's greatest collections and masterpieces in a single virtual library through a web portal available in all EU languages. But this is just the beginning. In 2010, Europeana will give access to millions of items representing Europe's rich cultural diversity and will have interactive zones such as communities for special interests....
[S]aid Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media[:] "I now call on Europe's cultural institutions, publishing houses and technology companies to fill Europeana with further content in digital form....My objective is that in 2010, Europeana will include at least 10 million objects." ...
Europeana makes it possible to search and browse the digitised collections of Europe's libraries, archives and museums all at once. This means users can explore themes without searching for and visiting multiple sites and resources.
Europeana was initiated by the Commission in 2005 and brought to fruition in close cooperation with national libraries and other cultural bodies of the Member States as well as with the strong support of the European Parliament. Europeana is run by the European Digital Library Foundation, which brings together Europe's major associations of libraries, archives, museums, audiovisual archives and cultural institutions. Europeana is hosted by the Dutch national library, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek
Over 1,000 cultural organisations from across Europe have provided material for Europeana. Europe's museums, including the Louvre in Paris and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, have supplied digitised paintings and objects from their collections. State archives have made important national documents available, and France's Institut National de l'Audiovisuel supplied 80,000 broadcasts recording the 20th century, right back to early footage shot on the battlefields of France in 1914. National libraries all over Europe have contributed printed and manuscript material, including digitised copies of the great books that brought new ideas into the world....
PS: For background, see our past posts on Europeana.
Hi,
I noticed the download link on the Ubiquity page doesn't work (Page
Not Found). I would like to give it a try, though. Does anyone know
where I can download it from?
Thanks!
Jeff
A new, RIAA-backed law in Tennessee will force Universities to filter their networks for copyrighted materials. The government’s estimation of how much it will cost exceeds $10 million, but more worrying is the trend towards networks filtered with systems that do not work and support legacy businesses at the expense of users. The massive lobbying [...]
The UK Serials Union CATalogue (SUNCAT) has added the DOAJ. From today's announcement:
The addition of the DOAJ to the catalogue ensures that these free titles are made visible and accessible to SUNCAT searchers alongside any subscription electronic journals they have access to. SUNCAT searchers can find these titles interspersed in their search results or can choose to limit their search to these titles alone....
Last month Nature launched OA special on what the financial crisis will mean for science and today it launched another on Darwin at 200.
Quote from the last page of the recent article On statistical approaches to thr study of ceramic artefacts using geochemical and petrographic data by Baxter MJ, Beardah CC, Papageorgiou I, Cau MA, Day PM, Kilikoglou V appeared on «Archaeometry» 2008 February;50(1):142-157. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4754.2007.00359.x .
Dear All,
I need tesseract-2.03.exe immediately. I build the exe from
tesseract-2.03 source into my pc and it successfully run, however when I try
to run the exe in another pc then it shows that "The system can execute the
specified program". One may ask me why I am not using other exe
(tesseract-2.00.exe and tesseract-2.03.exe) which are available in the site.
I want to ask user to fill a form, which is loaded into an iframe.
Currenty I do this by loading an iframe into an active document. But I
want the iframe to be overlayed and visible when I switch to another
tab too (like Google Notebook extension for example). I was looking in
XUL Overlays and XPCOM documentation, but can't find the answer.
The presentations, in English and Russian, from the Open Access Awareness Raising Workshop in Armenia (Yerevan, Armenia, October 15-16, 2008) are now online.
The presentations from ARROW Repository Day (Brisbane, October 14, 2008) are now online.
An interview with Timo Hannay, Publishing Director, Nature.com, Knowledge Speak, November 12, 2008. Excerpt:
Q: Tell us a little about your Manuscript Deposition Service. How is this service expected to help authors meet funder and institutional mandates?
A: Our Manuscript Deposition Service makes it quick and simple for authors to comply with funder and institutional mandates, by depositing manuscripts to open-access repositories on their behalf.
Authors opt in to the service via a simple form during our usual submission process. This has the advantage that the author will have a lot of the necessary information to hand, and can be assured that this requirement will be taken care of. On acceptance, NPG automatically deposits the accepted version of the author's manuscript to their specified repository, setting a public release date of 6-months post-publication. All the author should need to do is validate the submission with the repository when asked to do so.
We currently offer this service for depositions to PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central on about 40 of our journals. We're working to expand this to all NPG journals that publish research content.
Also, NPG's self-archiving policy allows the author's final version to be made freely accessible six months after publication, so authors can be confident that they can comply with the requirements of all major funders, even for repositories to which we can't currently deposit on their behalf.
Q: Talking of open access journals or free content on the web, how much is this a challenge to you.
A: Open access is just another aspect of online publishing that makes it so much more multi-faceted and interesting than print publishing. Whether it's a threat or an opportunity depends on how individual organisations respond. Some publishers have certainly tried to resist it, but the common claim that publishers in general have been resistant (at least since I came into the industry just over a decade ago) is a long way from the truth. Some publishers have embraced it while others haven't, though there's an increasing realisation that it's not going away. (Incidentally, I think much the same can be said about the attitudes of scientists themselves).
It's also important to recognise that there are multiple routes to open access. A lot of attention has been given to author-pays journal publishing, but this model isn't currently sustainable for journals with high rejection rates and heavy editorial input, so at best we're going to end up with a mixture of business models, not all of them open access. This is what we see in the industry today, and it's what we have at NPG too. Some of our journals publish papers that are free to readers, paid for by author fees, but most of them continue to charge subscription fees because that's the only model that's currently sustainable for high-end journals. Personally, I wish it were otherwise.
The most likely way in which content from across the full range of different journals will be made available for free is through funder-mandated self-archiving, most notably the NIH's PubMed Central project and its British counterpart, UKPMC. Eventually these kinds of initiatives are likely to result in the majority of research content becoming freely available in some form 6-12 months after publication in a journal. Nature has been a strong supporter of these initiatives -- see my earlier comments about our Manuscript Deposition Service....
A group of OA-supporting researchers from 12 countries launched ENCES (European Network for Copyright in support of Education and Science) at the recent conference, Copyright Regulation in Europe – An Enabling or Disabling Factor for Science Communication (Berlin, November 13-15, 2008). (Thanks to the Informationsplattform Open Access.)
Read the founders' press release in German or Google's English. Also see Stefan Krempl's article in yesterday's Heise online, in German or Google's English.
ENCES will be an EU-wide counterpart to Germany's Aktionsbündnis ,,Urheberrecht für Bildung und Wissenschaft" (Coalition for Action "Copyright for Education and Research"), founded by Rainer Kuhlen in 2004. For background, see our past posts on Kuhlen and the coalition.
Imagine scanning the barcode of a printed book with your cell phone and then running a search, from the phone, of a digital copy of the same book. You can now do that with a Google Android phone --at least for books already scanned by Google and showing their barcodes.
See the Google Book Search blog for details.
Comment. Very cool. Because Android is open source, this mashup could easily extend to books scanned by the Open Content Alliance and other projects as well. Even cooler.
SPARC's 2008 letter to members and three things we focused on this year, SPARC, November 4, 2008. Excerpt:
2008 marked the debut of two game-changing policies:
- The landmark NIH Public Access Policy, the first of its kind in the U.S., which now ensures that the results of our collective $29 billion investment in biomedical research is made openly accessible to the public.
- The groundbreaking vote by the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which served notice that Open Access is on its way to becoming the norm – rather than the exception – on our campuses.
SPARC worked throughout 2008 to support these policies and to continue to enable the climate of openness pictured in our shared vision, by ensuring public access to the results of publicly funded research, raising libraries’ role in campus policy, and expanding the coalition for Open Access to research....
Ensuring public access to the results of publicly funded research
In 2008, SPARC worked to secure the first U.S. mandate for public access and to support similar policies at the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the Research Councils UK, the European Commission, and in numerous other countries around the world. SPARC:
- Ensured that the library voice continues to be heard clearly at the highest levels of government, through SPARC’s leadership of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access and the Open Access Working Group.
- Brought to bear the power of our members’ voices as congressional constituents, rallying Nobel Prize-winners, attorneys and law professors, patient groups, and hundreds of librarians to weigh in with policy makers.
- Brought crucial balance to the congressional hearing on The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (HR6845), speaking as the only supporter of public access on behalf of libraries, researchers, and families.
Raising libraries’ profile in campus policy
...SPARC, collaborating closely with allied organizations:
- Published a timely guide to help define for institutions their responsibilities and options for complying with the NIH Public Access Policy and observing copyright law.
- Produced a guide for colleges and universities to create institutional open-access policies, setting out 10 clear steps for policy development and adoption.
- Showcased the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ adoption of a default policy for Open Access through the popular SPARC Innovator Series, the SPARC-ACRL forum, and subsequent video broadcasts.
- Highlighted the creation of open-access funds by profiling actions taken by the University of California at Berkeley, in conjunction with those of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Calgary.
- Became an original signatory on the Cape Town Declaration for Open Educational Resources, signaling libraries’ commitment to further pioneering open scholarship initiatives.
Expanding the coalition for Open Access to research
In 2008, SPARC welcomed students to the conversation on information sharing and access to research....SPARC-student collaborative activities have included:
- The launch of “The Right to Research: The student guide to opening access to research” campaign.
- The new openstudents.org blog.
- The second annual Sparky Awards. This year, the contest has expanded to involve five new collaborators: ACRL, ARL, Penn Libraries, Students for FreeCulture, Student PIRGS, and Campus MovieFest, the largest student filmmaking competition.
- The production of the new “Voices of Open Access” video series, with the Public Library of Science, to showcase the views of librarians, students, research funders, scientists, and teachers on Open Access....
The Open Access Directory (OAD) just opened a list of Volunteer opportunities.
This is a place where volunteers can look for jobs that will help the cause, and where everyone can list the jobs they'd like to see someone do.
At the moment, many of the jobs listed are about building the OAD itself. But it's not at all limited to OAD-building. Use your imagination, take note of work that needs doing, and harness the energy and good will of the OA community.
Robin Rice, DataShare deliverables over last 6 months, DataShare blog, November 12, 2008. Excerpt:
Having just submitted our October progress report, it seems we've accomplished quite a lot over the last 6 months....
The project members have continued to engage with contacts at UK and international institutions – especially in the US and Australia - who are building services for data sharing....The findings from Oxford’s Scoping digital repository services for research data management project were disseminated. Several project team members participated in the Edinburgh Repository Fringe....An article in Online by Luis Martinez Uribe and Stuart Macdonald and an interview in CILIPS Update brought attention to the profession of data librarians, which was further amplified by the recent JISC-commissioned report by Key Perspectives....
The partners have created and received peer review on a Dublin Core based metadata schema for datasets in DSpace and EPrints, worked on procedures for storing and preserving databases, and have developed a content model for a database of sound files in Fedora. The Edinburgh DataShare repository was soft-launched, with an option for depositors to append the open data license developed by the Open Data Commons....
Ordnance Survey has confirmed to me that the crime maps being used by the Met Police break its licence. And any other police force that uses “ward boundaries” (subdivisions of their force’s policing area, which is how all police forces record crimes) or refers to an OS map in order to plot the location of a [...]
Andrea Gawrylewski, NIH research director steps down, The Scientist, November 13, 2008. Excerpt:
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) deputy director for extramural research stepped down last month to take on a new post.
Norka Ruiz Bravo, who had been in her position at the NIH for five years, vacated the role at the end of October and is now a special advisor to the NIH director (another position that recently changed). For the meantime she will be replaced by Salley Rockey, who has been in the Office of Extramural Research for three years.
Ruiz Bravo had been at the head of many NIH initiatives, including the hotly-debated public access mandate....
"I personally believe that the leadership of high level positions like that of the [deputy director of extramural research] should turn over every five or six years to make room for new perspectives and direction," Ruiz Bravo said in a statement posted on the extramural research Web site. She added that in light of Zerhouni's departure it seemed like the right time to make the change.
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John Harnad, Approaches to Open Access in Scientific Publishing, a preprint forthcoming in Physics World, self-archived November 19, 2008. (Note that this is John, not Stevan, Harnad.)
Abstract: Approaches to scientific journal publishing that provide free access to all readers are challenging the standard subscription-based model. But in domains that have a well-functioning system of publicly accessible preprint repositories like arXiv, Open Access is already effectively available. In physics, such repositories have long coexisted constructively with refereed, subscription based journals. Trying to replace this by a system based on journals whose revenue is derived primarily from fees charged to authors is unlikely to provide a better guarantee of Open Access, and may be in conflict with the maintenance of high quality standards.
From the conclusion:
...The research community provides not only the published material, but also the refereeing services that, with distribution, form the main “value-added” that journals offer. It is therefore up to its members to make the choices, and exert the necessary pressure to assure that they are beneficiaries of transformations in scientific publishing that are occurring as a result of evolution in technology and consumer reaction against inflated subscription prices.
Meanwhile, at least in most branches of physics, mathematics, computer science and some other domains, the benefits of Open Access will continue to be adequately provided by widely used repositories such as arXiv. Other fields seeking to develop effective vehicles for Open Access could do well to first consider such an approach, where preprint/postprint repositories have long been seen to coexist constructi
