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In 2008, under bipartisan pressure from Congress to ensure that all Americans would be able to access the results of taxpayer-funded biomedical research, the US National Institutes of Health instituted a Public Access Policy:
The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication. To help advance science and improve human health, the Policy requires that these papers are accessible to the public on PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication.
The policy has provided access for physicians and their patients, teachers and their students, policymakers and the public to hundreds of thousands of taxpayer-funded studies that would otherwise have been locked behind expensive publisher paywalls, accessible only to a small fraction of researchers at elite and wealthy universities.
The policy has been popular – especially among disease and patient advocacy groups fighting to empower the people they represent to make wise healthcare decision, and teachers educating the next generation of researchers and caregivers.
But the policy has been quite unpopular with a powerful publishing cartels that are hellbent on denying US taxpayers access to and benefits from research they paid to produce. This industry already makes generous profits charging universities and hospitals for access to the biomedical research journals they publish. But unsatisfied with feeding at the public trough only once (the vast majority of the estimated $10 billion dollar revenue of biomedical publishers already comes from public funds), they are seeking to squeeze cancer patients and high school students for an additional $25 every time they want to read about the latest work of America’s scientists. More…
Archive for the 'News' Category
From The Economist…
It is a familiar-sounding tale: after decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters’ message spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed.
That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform.
Scholars have long debated the relative importance of printed media, oral transmission and images in rallying popular support for the Reformation. Some have championed the central role of printing, a relatively new technology at the time. Opponents of this view emphasise the importance of preaching and other forms of oral transmission. More recently historians have highlighted the role of media as a means of social signalling and co-ordinating public opinion in the Reformation. More…
From Jon Kalish at NPR on Mind/Shift…
As information becomes more digital, public libraries are striving to redefine their roles. A small number are working to create “hackerspaces,” where do-it-yourselfers share sophisticated tools and their expertise.
The Allen County Public Library, which serves the city of Fort Wayne, Ind., has a modest hackerspace inside a trailer in its parking lot. Library director Jeff Krull says hosting it is consistent with the library’s mission.
“We see the library as not being in the book business, but being in the learning business and the exploration business and the expand-your-mind business,” he says. “We feel this is really in that spirit, that we provide a resource to the community that individuals would not be able to have access to on their own.”
The 50-foot trailer is known as the Maker Station and belongs to TekVenture, an educational nonprofit that had struggled to find a building it could afford before it was approached by the library. TekVenture signed an agreement with the library to operate in its parking lot for a year. TekVenture President Greg Jacobs says this partnership made sense. More…
(Credit: Miguel Medina/Agence France-Press/Getty Images)
From Matt Schudel at The Washington Post, Post Local…
George Whitman, the owner of Shakespeare and Company, a bookshop that became the center of English-language literary life in Paris and might be the most famous and beloved bookstore in the world, died Dec. 14 in his apartment above the store. He died two days after his 98th birthday.
According to the store’s Web site, he had had a stroke two months ago.
Mr. Whitman was an American expatriate who found his way to Paris after World War II and never left. He opened the bookstore, directly opposite Notre Dame cathedral, in 1951.
In time, Mr. Whitman’s jumbled shop, with its sloping shelves and teetering stacks of books, became something of a cathedral in its own right and a required stop for Americans in Paris. More…
(Christophe Boisvieux/Corbis)
From Robert Darnton at The New York Review of Books…
In a famous letter of 1813, Thomas Jefferson compared the spread of ideas to the way people light one candle from another: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
The eighteenth-century ideal of spreading light may seem archaic today, but it can acquire a twenty-first-century luster if one associates it with the Internet, which transmits messages at virtually no cost. And if Internet enthusiasm sounds suspiciously idealistic, one can extend the chain of associations to a key concept of modern economics—that of a public good. Public goods such as clean air, efficient roads, hygienic sewage disposal, and adequate schooling benefit the entire citizenry, and one citizen’s benefit does not diminish that of another. Public goods are not assets in a zero-sum game, but they do carry costs—up-front costs, usually paid through taxation, at the production end of the services and facilities that the public enjoys as users. The Jeffersonian ideal of access to knowledge as a public good does not mean that knowledge has no cost. We enjoy freedom of information, but information is not free. Someone had to pay for Jefferson’s taper. More…
From The Guardian
Beginning today, the historical archives of the peer-reviewed journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, are permanently free to online access from anywhere in the world, according to an announcement by The Royal Society.
The Royal Society, established in 1660, began publishing the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society — world’s first scientific journal — in March 1665. In 1886, it was divided into two journals, Philosophical Transactions A (mathematics, physics and engineering) and Philosophical Transactions B (biological sciences), both of which are published to this day. Its historical archives are defined as all scientific papers published 70 years or longer ago. These historical archives include more than 60,000 scientific papers.
During its long history, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society has published seminal papers by scientific luminaries such as Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, and William Herschel; it helped launch the scientific career of Isaac Newton after he published this paper, New Theory about Light and Colours, in 1672, and it published Benjamin Franklin’s account of his electrical kite experiment, which has achieved near-legendary status amongst American schoolchildren.
From Adam Kirsch, Salon.com via Barns & Nobel Review
This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the Loeb Classical Library, one of the most remarkable publishing projects in modern history. Yet as with everything book-related in the year 2011, the Loeb centenary carries with it a touch of wistfulness, and an uncertainty about the future. For the Loeb classics are the monument of a book culture that now seems on the wane — a culture that prized the making and owning of physical books, not just for the pleasure of turning the pages, but from a sense that the book was the natural, predestined vessel of every expression of human thought.
The mission of the Library is the same today as it was in 1911, when it was founded by James Loeb: to make the whole of Greek and Latin literature available to the amateur scholar and the common reader, by producing inexpensive editions of the classics with English translation on facing pages. Loeb himself was a remarkable figure, the scion of a German-Jewish banking dynasty who devoted himself to cultural philanthropy of the highest order — among other things, he helped found the music school that became Juilliard. But it was the Classical Library that turned the name “Loeb” into a common noun. Originally published by the British firm Heinemann, the American distribution of the Library was turned over to Harvard University Press in 1933. Since 1989 it has been reinvigorated with a program of new, up-to-date translations, which drop the age-old schoolmaster’s habit of veiling explicit sexual references with euphemism, or simply leaving them untranslated.
From George Monbiot, The Guardian
Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won’t guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.
Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a “keep out” sign on the gates.
You might resent Murdoch’s paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier’s journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50.
From Amanda Natividad, paidContent,org
From Flipboard and Aol Editions, to Ongo and LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) Today, the rise of tablets and apps is changing how we gather and consume content. A couple of apps have grabbed the headlines in recent months. Flipboard has closed over $60 million in funding and has a $200 million valuation. More recently, Zite was snapped up by CNN. Even Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is jumping on this bandwagon, based on reports of Google Propeller designed so Android and iOS users can curate content.
But is there a business in new-style aggregation?
Probably not for all of these or many of the versions we have yet to see. But the blend of style with the right devices and the right business model offers a decent foundation. Flipboard CEO Mike McCue thinks his company can do it with advertising revenue and, for now, all within Apple’s operating system. The Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) Co.‘s Trove is banking on mixing advertising revenue with being completely cross platform. Others, like News.me and Ongo are counting on a blend of subscription fees and advertising. What they all have going for them: a plethora of information and sources and, thanks to HTML5 and other innovations, formats that are far more pleasing to use than the batches of linked headlines that keep some away from RSS. It also helps that they have consumer-friendly names, some more so than others, and an easy threshold for use.
From Minou Arjomand, n+1
During one midsummer night party, Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, goes searching for his host. He wanders into a library, where a stout, spectacled man is drunkenly staring at the books.
‘What do you think?’ he demanded impetuously.
‘About what?’ He waved his hand toward the bookshelves.
‘About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real . . . have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and—Here! Lemme show you. . . . It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too—didn’t cut the pages.’The books—not the gardens, the bottles of champagne, the lithe dancers, or the starlets under plum trees—are Gatsby’s great triumph. The library is impressive in its hyperrealism, on par with the stage sets of theater director David Belasco. (Belasco once transported an entire room of a flop house—wallpaper included—to a Broadway stage.) The library shows Gatsby’s virtuosity, not at reading, but at set design.
While Gatsby’s library embodies the superficiality and hypocrisy of West Egg society, Fitzgerald also suggests that the library might be uniquely capable of creating a connection between people: the spectacled man is the only one of Gatsby’s many party guests who shows up for his funeral.