Preambolo:  I partecipanti riconoscono l'Accesso Aperto come una attività strategica da cui la ricerca dipenderà a livello internazionale, nazionale, universitario, di gruppo e individuale.

Strategie: Perciò i partecipanti  decidono quanto segue, come ricapitolazione delle strategie fondamentali che l' Australia deve adottare:

1. Ogni cittadino deve avere un accesso libero e aperto alla ricerca, ai dati e alla conoscenza pubblicamente finanziata. [grassetto mio]

2. Ogni  università australiana deve aver accesso a un archivio digitale che raccolga, a questo scopo, i suoi risultati di ricerca.

3. Questo archivio deve contenere come minimo tutti i materiali  segnalati nell'Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC).

4. Il deposito dei materiali deve aver luogo al più presto possibile, e nel caso di articoli di ricerca editi  deve essere la versione finale dell'autore al momento dell'accettazione, in modo da massimizzare l'accesso aperto ad essi.

Per dirlo all'australiana, uno degli argomenti più forti a favore della pubblicazione ad accesso aperto è quello secondo cui chi finanzia la ricerca con le sue imposte ha ben diritto a ricevere qualcosa in cambio senza doverlo pagare di nuovo, perché si è messo in mezzo un editore commerciale.

Se le università italiane diventassero fondazioni finanziate privatamente, questo argomento cadrebbe d'incanto. Chi "mette i soldi" potrebbe trovare vantaggioso ottenere un lucro collaterale associandosi a un editore che preferisce l'accesso chiuso.  Come si potrebbe esigere quanto pretendiamo collettivamente da un sistema pubblico, nei confronti del quale siamo cittadini, da un privato di cui siamo soltanto clienti?

Il cittadino che vuole che l'università pubblica renda accessibili i suoi testi pretende quello che,  come contribuente, ha già collettivamente pagato  - anche quando, come singolo, non ha pagato  affatto. Il cliente di un ente privato, che è solo,  non  può chiedere  nulla più di quanto è in grado di pagare.

Questo colpo di mercato conferma un atteggiamento di Springer più coraggioso e antiveggente rispetto ai suoi principali concorrenti, anche alla luce dei contratti recentemente siglati in Italia.

D'altra parte il correttore automatico di Word ogni volta che scrivo il marchio tedesco me lo corregge in Sprinter.

There is more information on the library website.

There is more information on the library website.

Open Access Day will help to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public.

History: Open Access Day was inspired by the National Day of Action on February 15th, 2007, led by Students for FreeCulture with support from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. This year, the same partners have joined forces with the Public Library of Science, the open-access scientific and medical online publisher.

In Vorträgen, Workshops, einer Podiumsdiskussion und auf der Open-Access-Messe werden die Möglichkeiten des Open-Access-Publizierens und der freie Zugang zu Forschungsergebnissen umfassend thematisiert. Ziel der Veranstaltung ist, Open Access weiter in der deutschsprachigen Wissenschaftslandschaft zu verankern.

 

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="114" caption="der freie Zugang zu wissenschaftlicher Information"][/caption]

 

Zeilgruppe sind die Wissenschaftler und Autoren ebenso wie die Open-Access-Community, auch aus dem Bibliotheksbereich. Ich hab schon ein paar bekannte Gesichter erspäht, StudentINNEN unseres Studiengangs an der FH-Potsdam, BibliothekarINNEN und alte Bekannte von der dc2008 Konferenz. Wer genau Wissen will wer alles dabei ist schaue hier mal nach. Der Hörssal ist gut gefüllt, allerdings kaum Laptops.

Nebenbei findet auch noch eine  "Open-Access-Messe" im Foyer des Hörsaals statt. Viele interessante Angebote dort, und es giebt auch wieder viel Giveaways zum mitnehmen wie z.B. Bleistifte vom Bildungsserver, Radiergummi von HBZ, viele Kugelschreiber und Gummibären von Copernicus.org.

Erfolgreiche Tage auf der Tagung wünscht
dieter

Olimme kaikki yhtä mieltä siitä, että suurin hyöty saadaan Theseuksen jatkokehityksestä. Theseuksessa on tällä hetkellä lähinnä opinnäytteitä, mutta sinne olisi hyvä saada myös ammattikorkeakoulujen julkaisusarjat ja jopa yksittäiset artikkelit. Oppimateriaalin jakamiseen Theseus toimisi myös erinomaisesti.

Anna-Kaisa muistutti meitä siitä, että Suomen kokoisessa maassa yhteistyö on ainoa järkevä vaihtoehto kehittää ja toteuttaa julkaisuarkistoja. Hänen mukaansa usea yliopisto on jo osoittanut kiinnostusta Theseukseen, muutama on jopa tiedustellut mahdollisuutta liittyä mukaan. Laajentamalla Theseus yliopistojen ja tutkimuslaitosten suuntaan saisimme lisää volyymiä sekä sisältöön että kehitykseen. Yhteistyö tarkoittaisi myös sitä, että Theseuksen yhteisöllisyyttä tukevia työkaluja tulisi kehittää ja lisätä.

Theseus 3.0 -hanke-esitykseen listasimme seuraavanlaisia kokonaisuuksia:

• sisällön määrällinen kehittäminen (oppimateriaalit, julkaisut, e-lehdet, streamaus, kuvat jne.)
• sisällön laadullinen kehittäminen (mm. referee-palvelu)
• semanttisuus, ontologiat (aineistojen suhteet, asiasanoitus)
• OA-periaatteen tukeminen
• ammattikorkeakoulujen osaamisen jakaminen
• ammattikorkeakoulujen toiminnan näkyväksi tekeminen
• yhteisöllisyyden kehittäminen ja tukeminen (blogit, wikit)
• Theseuksen ylläpitomallin luominen.

Yhtenä haaveena on Theseuksen siirtäminen pois nykyiseltä ylläpitäjältään. Ammattikorkeakoulujen yhteisten palvelujen luonteva sijoituspaikka olisi VirtuaaliAMK, kenties jonankin päivänä amkkien ja yliopistojen yhteinen Virtuaalikorkeakoulu.

Theseuksen selvänä vahvuutena on siihen liitetty Creative Commons, joka mahdollistaa tekijänoikeuksien hallinnan yksinkertaisella ja ymmärrettävällä tavalla. Työtä kuitenkin riittää yhä ammattikorkeakoulujen CC-kasvatuksessa: siitä tiedetään yllättävän vähän ja sitä ymmärretään vielä vähemmän, mikä näkyy täysin perusteettomana vastustuksena.

Anna-Kaisan ja Tarjan kanssa laskeskelimme, että tästä tulisi noin 300.000 euron hanke, joka työllistäisi kaksi täyspäiväistä henkilöä. Vähintään toisen tulisi olla ohjelmointikykyinen henkilö.

Tarja Takaranta tekee mietiskelyistämme nyt hanke-esityspohjan kirjastonjohtajien jatkokäsittelyä varten. Saas nähdä, mitä esityksestämme on jäljellä heidän käsittelynsä jälkeen. Toivomme tietysti, että  entistä parempi hanke-esitys, jossa tulevaisuutta luodaan viisaasti ja ammattikorkeakoulujen etujen mukaisesti.

Itse jäin miettimään pääkonttorin tulevaisuutta, mikä ei nyt Theseus 3.0 -hankkeeseen luontevasti sisälly. Reiluin tapa olisi hoitaa pääkonttorin kustannukset laskuttamalla ne suoraan amk-kirjastoilta ~ ei se OPM ikuisesti tule rahoittamaan perustoiminnaksi laskettavaa työtä. Mutta jos kirjastot eivät ole tähän vielä valmiita, kaipa se pääkonttori voitaisiin sitoa myös Theseus 3.0 -hankkeeseen. Tällöin hankeväestä toinen olisi tekninen ja toinen pyörittäisi verkostoa, mukaan lukien amkit-konsortiota. Tämä olisi kuitenkin sääli, sillä kaikki konsortion puolesta tehtävä sihteerin työ (jota muuten riittää!) on pois Theseuksen kehittämisestä.

auch dazu:

• Springer & Co.: Wie viele Autoren leisten sich die Open-Access-Option?
• Springer-Open-Choice-Option für Göttinger Wissenschaftler
• Springer-Open-Choice-Option für Wissenschaftler aller Max-Planck-Institute

Si voleu saber-ne més i/o participar-hi visiteu el microblog que han creat els organitzadors a friendfeed.

Recordar, també, que la Universitat de Barcelona està adherida a BioMed Central, un dels projectes -ja realitat- pioner en el desenvolupament del moviment Open Access.

Com ja sabeu, l'Oficina de Difusió del Coneixement del CRAI

ofereix un servei d'assessorament i d'informació als membres de la Universitat de Barcelona en tot el que fa referència a la difusió del coneixement científic que s'hi genera, així com en la utilització de materials aliens, posant èmfasi especial en les alternatives de divulgació lliure.

Across the globe, from Peru to Croatia to Korea to South Africa, a new cultural space is emerging - the digital commons. In it, users are creating culture and knowledge, be it by blogging, making videos, remixing songs, or writing software. While it may manifest itself in different ways in different places, this movement, much like the nature of the internet itself, has become a truly global one, and has served to transcend barriers across cultures.

Many of these barriers are already breaking down - the lines between "amateur" and "professional," and "user" and "creator" are becoming increasingly blurred. A little less than a year ago, I posted a mix of Brazilian Baile funk music on my blog. This style of music, while quite well known in Brazil, had just recently been getting a lot of attention in the US and Europe. As a result, it was picked up by various other blogs, and tens of thousands of downloads later, it had made its way into the best mixes of 2005 in one of the premiere electronic music magazines, The Wire. In many ways for me, it was a lesson in semiotic democracy and the grassroots, viral nature of the internet. I had merely published something to my blog, and without any further effort on my part, people around the world started listening to my mix. I had become a part of the digital cultural revolution without even realising it.

By posting my mix online and allowing others free access to it, I had entered the "cultural commons", or a common space of cultural information that is available for the public at large to share, rework, and remix. For example, old books or films (before 1923 in the US) where the copyright has expired and is now in the public domain as well as the massive amount of knowledge contained in Wikipedia, the world's largest user-created encyclopedia, would be a part of this growing pool of global information. As opposed to opting for traditional copyright, which would lock down a work and prevent such access or reworking, creators may opt for various licenses, including those of Creative Commons, to add to this knowledge space.

Brazil, despite its relatively strong copyright law on the books, has been a hotbed of commons-based activity in practice. The entire genre of Baile funk, which has emerged from Brazil's ghetto-like favelas and has begun to pervade mainstream culture there, relies almost exclusively on remixing. Go to a Funk Ball, or Baile, in the favela of Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro, and you will likely recognize samples and snippets of a good amount of the music you hear - from Prince to New Order to 50 Cent.

What's more, the music is created without any regard to copyright, and this is what allows it to flourish. Artists freely borrow and remix from others, and CDs are sold on the streets for little more than the cost of the production of the physical CD. Artists don't receive royalties from the CDs, but instead view them as promotion of their work and their performances, and some of the parties that are organised attract tens of thousands of fans. Needless to say, these Bailes can be extremely lucrative for the funk artists. Brazil has also been extremely progressive in supporting open business models (or those that do not rely on restricting access to content or culture), has been active in patent-busting, and has generally viewed culture as a space to which citizens have a right to access, as opposed to a commodity to which consumers have a right to purchase.

A creative revolution

What the digital commons recognises is that creation is not produced out of a vacuum; we inevitably build upon the works of others, be it consciously or subconsciously. Thanks to advances in digital technology and communications networks, we are entering a new era of creative production. In the mid-to-late 1990s, the internet was viewed as having unlimited, even unrealistic potential as a medium for commerce.

Now, it has increasingly become a platform for cultural communication, with everything from citizen journalism via blogging to tagged photo albums via Flickr to melding together songs or movies via mashups. Yet much like the great failed hopes for e-commerce, some question whether this new digital cultural revolution will actually affect our culture in fundamental ways. While it will clearly morph and evolve in various and perhaps unexpected ways, this cultural revolution is here to stay.

The very heart of this revolution rests on a simple concept: semiotic democracy, or the ability of users to produce and disseminate new creations and to take part in public cultural discourse. You've all probably seen a YouTube video where someone is lip synching to a song or heard a mashup of two popular tracks, yet this new form of cultural creation goes far beyond faddish remixes or home videos. Users are by and large developing and posting their own "original" creations as well. (Original may be a misnomer, but let's suffice it to say that examples such as blog posts, photographs, and songs written by a band are not blatant remixes.)

Anyone can now become a creator, a publisher, an author via this new form of cultural discourse, a platform to publish to the world at large that grants near instant publication and access. While the concept of, say, being able to post or comment on one's blog may seem mundane at this point, if I had told you fifty years ago that you'd be able to publish something so that almost anyone, anywhere could read it instantly, it would have sounded like something out of a science fiction model.

Individual artists, producers, and musicians need no longer depend on the power of major corporations as producers or distributors. Take MySpace, where many new and up and coming bands have posted their music. Instead of relying on a record label, they can now gain exposure and disseminate their music via the site, where some bands have had sold-out tours or sold countless CDs thanks to their MySpace page.

Despite the increasing ease of doing so, though, we see that many professional creators are still relying on the publisher-centric business models of the 20th century. This will not last. We will see massive disintermediation in the next decade or so. More artists and creators will self-publish, and they will find ways to do so in a sustainable way, perhaps by selling mp3s on their website, opportunities for production work, or touring to a greater number of fans.

That's not to say that everyone will become a professional, or that there won't be a space for those who merely wish to create as a hobby. Yet the age of the superstar is set to decline. As more people have more access to culture that interests them, coupled with the proper tools to get them there, it is highly likely that they will not all gravitate toward the same megastars. Throughout the last fifty years, culture in the western world has primarily been filtered by a few major corporate entities, sometimes looking for the next best thing, and increasingly trying just to recreate it. The digital cultural revolution, if it materialises, will enable us to forgo those filters and seek out more of what we like, or perhaps enable us to discover something we love, but would have never known it otherwise.

Threats to progress

Yet as we enter this era of democratic cultural production, the law is increasingly out of touch with reality. There's a complete lack of congruence between what is on the books and what is actually happening in the real (or digital) world. The vast majority of the remixes out there, believe it or not, are illegal. Ranging from video lip synching to recreating film trailers, they infringe the copyright law that has been harmonized throughout most of the modern world.

In fact, just last week the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced that it would start tackling the "problem" of users creating videos that infringed on their copyrighted works. (Bands sign away the copyright to their recorded works in virtually all major label contracts, leaving it in control of the labels.) As a result, they have sent "cease and desist" letters to those who have made the videos, and they are working with YouTube to develop technologies to identify their music in such videos so that it can be taken down.

It's quite interesting, then, that these are the same record companies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and marketing, and yet when such users are arguably doing so for free, they immediately seek to put a stop to it under the guise of "intellectual property" violations. Music videos are primarily utilized for the promotion of CD sales to begin with, and it is completely conceivable that such videos would serve as a benefit to the owners of the music as an albeit unintentional yet effective tool of marketing and advertising.

Further, digital rights management (DRM), or technologies that restrict access to a particular digital work, such as not allowing users to print pages of eBooks or make a copy of a digital music file, poses a serious threat to the development of the digital commons.

Laws have traditionally allowed for fair uses of copyrighted works, whereby an author can, for example, take a clip or excerpt of a work for artistic, critical, or educational use, or record a copy of a TV programme for later viewing. Technologies such as DRM stand to prohibit such legally granted rights, and laws that prohibit the circumvention of these access control measures can even stand to criminalise what would otherwise be a completely legal use (for example, getting around the technological access controls in an eBook of a public domain work would be a violation of such laws).

The increasingly burdensome application of copyright law to uses that were previously given a blind eye, such as quick clips of other videos in documentaries or songs with 3-second samples from others, stands to pose serious burdens to creators, while the fear of potentially getting sued has resulted in the stifling of creative work that makes even legal uses of others' works. So as we have an increasing amount of culture produced that completely disregards copyright, it has been coupled with a backlash from those that view such creation as a threat to their current business models.

The implications of the backlash can be seen in the example of a song called Amen Brother released by a soul band called The Winstons. It contained an irresistible drum riff, one that would later capture the minds and ears of producers and the listening public at large. A multi-second portion of the song, what has become to be known as the Amen Break, was discovered by hip-hop artists in the 1980s and utilised to produce the underlying beat that has been in countless songs since.

In fact, an entire genre of music, known primarily as drum'n'bass, is almost completely reliant on this portion of the song that lasts less than 20 seconds. Luckily for us, this music developed in a culture where sampling was a new art aided by the development of samplers, or machines that allowed the replaying and modifications of portions of audio tracks, and where artists were able to essentially freely sample and borrow from others.

A remixed future?

In the last several years, this golden era of sampling has come to a close, with courts in the US declaring that a mere three-second sample is sufficient to constitute a copyright violation, and that any sample of a digital recording whatsoever, even lasting a millisecond, would be an infringement of copyright. If the laws of today had been exercised twenty-five years ago, hip-hop, among other genres, may very well not exist today as we know it.

While the legal threats to the digital commons are often the expression of business or corporate interest, different concerns arise. Some worry about the dangers of having such an explosion of available culture and knowledge, and these concerns are not without merit. We are increasingly entering an age where we have too much information and too little time, perpetual multitasking with shortened attention spans.

Sifting through the information and the culture, especially when there may be a lot of stuff out there that is just plain bad, is not an easy task. There is thus an ever-increasing role for aggregators, or ways of sifting through and recommending various forms of culture, be it a cool, new band, or an interesting article. Such filtering mechanisms, which could range from a blog that readers trust to provide quality links to articles (i.e. BoingBoing) to a website that users rely on to provide reliable critical music reviews (a la Pitchfork) may serve a critical role as the amount of available content out there increases.

Others stay awake at night fretting about the decline of a "common culture", a common space, be it one of political events or popular TV shows, that can bind a society together. It is true that the net may enable us to increasingly fragment as, say, territorial border-based societies, yet the need for trusted sources - be it aggregators, recommendations of friends, or major news media outlets - will continue to serve to bind societies together to an extent. Further, the ability for citizens to better specialise in particular areas (say, I'm an electronic music expert, and you are a connoisseur of jazz), may serve to enable greater interaction across societies and cultures.

The movement does not solely touch on a small, tech savvy elite. Instead, such new forms of cultural discourse are reshaping the way that we view our environment, media, and society. It can affect us on a micro-level (even if 20 people read one's blog, that's still 20 people more than before), or a macro-level (how many people saw the JibJab or BusUncle videos?), yet it is here to stay. Our culture, be it global or local - or more likely a rich, uncategorisable mixture of both - will never be the same.

Please note the article is published by Elizabeth Stark, and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. Additionally, you are permitted to make derivative works from this article, on condition that you release any resulting work under similar terms. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Commercial media must contact openDemocracy for permission and fees.

Articolo di riferimento:
H. Christina Fan, Yair J. Blumenfeld, Usha Chitkara, Louanne Hudgins, and Stephen R. Quake, Noninvasive diagnosis of fetal aneuploidy by shotgun sequencing DNA from maternal blood, PNAS, 2008, ottobre, epub ahead of print (articolo Open Access)
Leggi l'articolo completo

Fonte: Adnkronos

Fonte: Lista di discussione OA-Italia

Ayer martes, 7 de octubre de 2008, dio inicio el Congreso Interno 2008 del Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas de la UNAM. En este evento se celebra, por una parte, los 35 años de vida del Instituto y, por el otro, un reconocimiento al arduo trabajo académico y humano que el fallecido Jaime Litvak King llevó a cabo durante su paso por el IIA y la UNAM.

Sin duda este tipo de espacios han servido para la presentación de trabajos y proyectos de investigación que académicos e investigadores del Instituto vienen realizando desde hace ya algún tiempo. Y en esta ocasión no fue la excepción. Particularmente me refiero al hecho de que la biblioteca Juan Comas, a través de Alicia Cervantes, Silvia Abdalá y el que suscribe este post, presentó ante la comunidad de este recinto la liberación del Repositorio Universitario IIA bajo la modalidad de Open Access, mismo que forma parte del Proyecto 3R de la UNAM.

La presentación de este Repositorio causó, como era de esperarse, diversos comentarios y críticas, pero sobre todo una expectativa en cuanto a las posibilidades de divulgación de información académica que el personal del IIA puede llegar a obtener por medio de esta herramienta. Cabe mencionar que la presentación de este Repositorio es la culminación de un trabajo emprendido desde el año 2006 en la biblioteca, donde se ha trabajado de manera muy cercana con gente del proyecto de 3R, en especial Clara López, Pablo Miranda y Alberto Arriaga, cuya ayuda y asesoría ha sido de vital importancia para que el Repositorio del IIA sea una realidad para la biblioteca y el Instituto.

De esta manera el Instituto se adhiere al movimiento Open Access, con el único objetivo de mantenerse a la vanguardia en la generación de conocimiento antropológico tanto a nivel nacional como internacional, pero sobre todo de compartirlo de manera pública y abierta. De algún modo con este Repositorio se viene a llenar un hueco importante en la difusión de información científica en México, como así lo demuestran dos artículos de reciente manufactura:

An Overview of The Development of Open Access Journals and Repositories in Mexico
Repositorios documentales y la iniciativa de archivos abiertos en Latinoamérica

Así que confiamos en que este proyecto pronto se consolide y comience a rendir frutos, sobre todo cuando la documentación que produce de la comunidad científica del IIA empiece a ser recuperada a través de diversos motores de búsqueda de carácter académico, a saber: Oaister, Scientific Commons, Google Scholar, entre otros.

San Jose, CA--Moderated by Frank Bernhard of OMNI Consulting Group, the panel included Andrew Shikiar of the LiMo Foundation, Sagar Golla of AppVoyage, Faraz Syed of DeviceAnywhere and Michael Kurtzman of Sybase 365.

The LiMo Foundation was launched in February 2007 by six leaders in the mobile industry; three key goals are centered around creating a mobile platform centered around Linux. "There are three key areas we've had our eye on," he said. "The first is to engage with the mobile industry, and our organization now has 50 active members. Secondly, the platform itself has been developed, with the first version finished and second version ready by end of this year. The third goal has been to distribute devices into the marketplace. We've quietly introduced 23 LiMo handsets to different markets, now in the hands of tens of thousands of consumers. We've been expanding the LiMo ecosystem, and now see interest from mobile content providers and many others."

Golla described AppVoyage as a mobile web application gateway to simplify and personalize complex
web applications for mobile use, providing an ecosystem with personalization so that people can engage in mobile applications. DeviceAnywhere, said Syed, enables remote testing of mobile content on 1,500 devices. "We see an increasing surge of interest in the mobile Internet," he added. "It started with the iPhone and now with all the other similar phones coming out. It's encouraging people to browse, whereas in the past it was mainly downloadable media."

Sybase 365, the mobile subsidiary of Sybase, has a primary focus on a couple of areas: one of them is inter-carrier messaging, mobile banking and connecting content providers to carriers. Kurtzman related that he works in the mobile marketing group.

Bernhard made a pitch for OMNI's publication, slated for release in January 2009. Mobility and Factors Driving the Broadband Economy will show how consumers are using the devices. "The work we do is based around econometrics," he explained. "It's important to get the historical perspective as well as looking forward. We look at subscriber profiles, service provider scales and where voice, data and mobile content is going."

Convergence of platforms was the first topic addressed. "What we're seeing is that while handset manufacturers are still trying to differentiate themselves, there's also convergence," said Syed. "More developers are focusing on limited sets of platforms or operating systems. At the same time, we're also seeing increasing fragmentation. When Apple comes out with iPhone and Android and LiMo...all these smart phone platforms are gaining ground. The other proprietary platforms are still there and growing. From what I can tell, I don't see the market collapsing into a few standard platforms, but more developers are focusing on the smart platforms."

Shikiar noted that Linux phones have been in the market for years but that the LiMo foundation is designed to standardize the operating system for all Linux-based phones. "In addition this is creating greater efficiencies inside companies," he said. "We're seeing a move towards consolidation here." Sybase 365 Kurtzman asked how we get the rest of the handset market to follow. "The demand and opportunity is to find a forum where all the parties can communicate in a fair and open way," Shikiar said. "Governance doesn't sound exciting but it's the key to collaboration and to the model itself. It's imperative that the OS reflects a number of companies and interested parties in the mobile ecosystem."

The smart phone evolution creates a new user paradigm of mobility, said Bernhard, who asked how the device itself can come to fruition. Syed said the biggest promise of the smart phone is to enable a better mobile Internet experience. "People will start shifting away from downloadable stuff," he said. "These smarter platforms are powerful enough to deliver a rich experience over a web platform. On the other side, how do you leverage their capabilities? Creating awareness in the consumer space about what's available is also needed. Most people aren't aware of what's available. Apple's app store brought awareness to all these great apps that could be downloading. Marketing channels and discovery mechanisms that are more cutting edge is needed for smart phones."

Content rights and digital rights management was another topic that the panelists addressed. The discussion quickly turned to privacy rights. Kurtzman noted that there are two schools of thought. "That if a user wants to make their information made public, their actions can be tracked to a certain degree, as long as it's relevant," he added. "There's a good case for being able to share that information." Security is an important aspect of his company's work, said Golla, who pointed out the other "case" to be made for privacy issues. "If you don't respect consumer privacy, no one will come to you," he said.

Bernhard asked what strategic role the industry plays in determining the future of application and device standards. "Very honestly, handset manufacturers wants to participate in standards bodies, but the fundamental thing they're also trying to do is differentiate themselves from one another," said Syed. "My feeling is that any kind of standardization in the hardware is far from reality. I don't see standardization taking over the industry quite yet." [As Kurtzman noted, DeviceAnywhere is predicated on that lack of standardization.]

"We tend to not see that reverse flow of information coming from subscribers telling us what they need and want," said Kurtzman. "It's from the top to the bottom."  With Google Android being launched, Bernhard asked Shikiar what will happen with competition. "Android is an example of how Linux is relevant," he said. "We think openness is a profound trend that the industry is moving towards. I believe people will begin to understand the importance of a  truly collaborative, equal forum where all companies can collaborate for a common code layer to be implemented across devices."

How change is impacting the relationship of carriers to application providers was addressed by Kurtzman. "The carriers want the garden walls to fall," he said. "They see the future. We think they're resistant to change, but it's just hard to change. The direct relationship between the app provider to the consumer is a chicken-and-egg scenario and I don't know how you fix it so it's more like a PC experience. No one calls their Internet provider if the application doesn't work. But it's a different environment. Maybe we need a consortium to help educate the consumer that he or she can get to these applications directly."

Indeed, most economists follow in the footsteps of "leaders of the field", as the article mentions in the context of medical/biological research, which is why we currently study abstruse models even in areas of economics that will never be able to answer any important economic questions. Just as Rob Gilles reminds me in every conversation we have, we have not really managed, as a profession, to understand the Causes of the Wealth of Nations truly more deeply than Adam Smith had understood them in 1776.

We still try to understand what it means for people to trust in each other, for example. This is a necessary condition for market exchange and market exchange in turn appears to be a necessary condition for economic prosperity. But in all the years since Adam Smith's big book was published, even after the development of powerful tools such as game theory, we are attempting to understand trust by studying little toy games and their equilibria. And by "we" I mean a pitifully small number of economists who try to understand the basic foundations of economic exchange.

When the economy is doing well, the great majority of economic research is oriented towards helping the rich get richer. Finance professors in particular are in this business, and will tell you over and over again that a smoothly running financial system is a tide that lifts all boats, so their work is towards everyone's welfare. The majority of economists and finance types deride economic theorists who try to understand the basics in boom times. If these theorists are so smart, why aren't they rich, or why are they not telling others how to get rich (at a suitable fee)? Let the financial system seize up, however, as in these days, and we all realize that the basic analysis of what makes it tick is perennially neglected and that research in basic economics has been consistently under-supplied and misdirected due mostly to the system of journal publication of academic research discussed in the article.

This post is practically co-authored with Rob Gilles; I can see in my mind his words tumbling from my ears to the keyboard in front of me. Rob, feel free to post a comment or two.

1. "Netherlands Heart Journal": dal vol. 9 (2001) al vol. 16 (2008)

2. "Medical History. Supplement": dal suppl. 1 (1981) al suppl. 23 (2004)

Fonte: Pubmed Central

Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) es una publicación de investigación online, open-access, dedicada a la visualización de experimentos biológicos con el fin de incrementar la reproducibilidad y la transparencia de estos.

Como dicen en su web, desde la que animan a los investigadores a participar activamente subiendo videos, la complejidad de la investigación científica se ha incrementado exponencialmente, y la traslación de los hallazgos desde el laboratorio a las terapias clínicas, depende de una rápida trasferencia de conocimiento. Las revistas tradicionales basadas en escritos e imágenes no son suficientes para transmitir con precisión la intrincada investigación moderna.

JoVE ya ha sido indexada en  MEDLINE y en PubMed. Sirva este post para divulgar esta potente herramienta de conocimiento, donde más que estudiar un protocolo científico puede vivirse.

Fonte: Medline Plus

"The combined impact of this accelerating mobility, globalization of instant information and uniformization of mass media has lessened the contact between neighbours while increasing the impact of dominant cultures whose massive loudspeakers silence the small voices of local speech and minority cultures.  In sum, the far erodes the near and eventually drives it out."

Mackey, W.F.  (1992).  Mother tongues, other tongues and link languages: What they mean in a changing world.  Prospects, 22, 81.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 17, 2008

AAA Creates “Open Access” to Anthropological Research

In a groundbreaking move aimed at facilitating greater access for the global social science and anthropological communities to 86 years of classic, historic research articles, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association announced today that it will provide, free of charge, unrestricted content previously published in two if its flagship publications – American Anthropologist and Anthropology News.

The initiative, among the first of its kind in the humanities- and social science-based publishing environment and made in coordination with publishing partner Wiley-Blackwell, will provide access to these materials for the purposes of personal, educational and other non-commercial uses after a thirty-five year period.

Starting in 2009, content published from 1888 to 1973, will be available through AnthroSource, the premier online resource serving the research, teaching, and professional needs of anthropologists. Previously, this information was only available via AAA association membership, subscription or on a so-called “pay per view” basis.
“This historic move, initiated by the needs and desires of our worldwide constituency, is our association’s pointed answer to the call for open access to our publications. This program, I believe, is an important first step in answering the call to un-gating anthropological knowledge,” AAA Executive Director Bill Davis said in a statement issued today.

The initiative, which will be re-evaluated by internal AAA committees in the next year (the Committee on Scientific Publication as advised by the Committee for the Future of Electronic Publishing), may be expanded in the future.

“Our Association is committed to the widespread dissemination of anthropological knowledge,” notes Oona Schmid, AAA Director of Publishing “and our Executive Board is acting to support this goal in two ways: supporting the sustainability of our publishing program and facilitating access to more than eight decades of studies and content in the discipline.”

Read what Savage Minds' ckelty and rex have to say about this move: ckelty points out that

The AAA has breathlessly announced that it is going open access!! American Anthropology and Anthropology News will now be Open Access. (um, but just those issues between 1888 and 1973).

So, this is great, really, despite my snarkiness. The AAA has realized that opening up 35 year old scholarship is not a threat to their publishing revenue...

and rex speculates:

My guess is that the AAA has discussed the issue with Wiley-Blackwell (WB) and WB has told them what the OA community has told them—their revenue does not come from selling content, or at least not huge chunks of old content.

--L.L.Wynn

Click here to read a press release about this meeting (9/30/08 ).

One of the featured reports was commissioned by BLC, written by Richard K. Johnson, an advisor to Association of Research Libraries and former chair of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition). It is available online (at no cost) from this link: "Free Our Libraries! Why We Need a New Approach to Putting Library Collections Online".

University of Connecticut is one of 20 consortium member libraries. Brinley Franklin, Vice Provost of the University of Connecticut Libraries, is the current president of BLC.