Transitions

Bevin P Engelward and Richard J Roberts
PLoS Biol. 2007 February; 5(2): e48. Published online 2007 February 13. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0050048.

Excerpt:
With very little fanfare, American science will make a sizeable leap forward in the coming year—if Congress and the National Institutes of Health deliver on their promise for public access to medical research. As scientists—one of us a Nobel researcher in biomedical science and one of us a recently tenured faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—we may have much to celebrate for scientists of all generations.

As scientists, scientific literature is our lifeblood, because only by reading our colleagues’ work can we know where the cutting edge of knowledge currently lies and hence where our work should be directed.

Yet increasingly, subscriptions to the very journals that we must read are becoming too expensive—often in the thousands of dollars. The availability of the information vital to our research is needlessly restricted by the publishers of the scientific literature, who are mainly large commercial entities for whom maximizing profits is their priority. Fortunately, help is at hand. The big “if” remains whether this will happen.

read the full article: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1796937

Last Wednesday, Michael Wesch was one of thousands of Internet users to add material to the video-sharing site YouTube. He posted a five-minute clip, set to techno music, that helps explain Web 2.0 — the so-called second wave of Web-based services that enables people to network and aggregate information online.

The next morning, Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, sent the link to 10 colleagues and friends. It was a second draft. He mostly wanted their feedback. And they responded positively by forwarding the link to a few of their friends. Within hours, the video had more than 100 hits on YouTube.

“I was elated,” Wesch said. “By that time I was already satisfied that I generated a viral video.”

Eventually, a popular blogger discovered the video and posted it onto his site, which helped send the hits into the thousands. Scores of people saw the clip through the Internet blog search engine Technorati, and a number of them promoted it to the front page of the news aggregate site digg. By then, the blogosphere was all over Wesch’s project, and some were calling it a must-see video for anyone wanting to understand the hottest features of the Web.

The video page had been viewed 19,000 times by early Monday, 30,000 times by the afternoon and 91,000 times by early Tuesday.

Wesch’s experience of quick Web exposure is hardly rare in an age of hyperlinks, blogs and constant content sharing. And it has helped illustrate the power of Web 2.0 to his class on “digital ethnography.” Students, who have been discussing what makes a video popular on sites such as YouTube, viewed the video on Thursday, before it became an Internet hit. Wesch said the class is researching the social and cultural phenomena of the Internet and how the technology has spawned new language (HTML-speak, for instance).

Read the full article: http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/07/web

Inside Higher Ed News, Feb. 7, 2007

Michael Wesch graduated from the Kansas State’s undergraduate anthropology program 10 years ago, received his doctorate from the University of Virginia and returned to Kansas State as a faculty member in 2004. He said he created his first Web page in 1998 and has been looking at ways of presenting ethnographies in a more visual way. (Much of his research has focused on cultural practices in Papua New Guinea.)

As part of an article on Web 2.0 that is intended to appear in a journal of anthropology, Wesch created the video to appear on the publication’s Web site.

“I was trying to explain this stuff in the traditional paper format, and I thought, ‘This is ironic,’” he said. “I can illustrate this much better in a video.”

The difference between HTML and XML, the formation of blogs and the nonlinear quality of digital text are topics addressed in Wesch’s piece. The title, “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” is a reference to a point made in the video — that we are teaching our computer new ideas every time we click on a link. As Wesch says: “The more we are aware of the machine, the better we can make it serve us.”

And as he writes in the video, “Digital text is no longer just linking information. The Web is no longer just linking information. The Web is linking people.”

YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

What a difference a decade makes. In 2007, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) celebrates its tenth anniversary, now with an expansive mission to work not only on behalf of libraries but for the welfare of the higher education community at large, and for individual researchers and the public. “It’s pretty amazing to me to look back and see how far we’ve come to with the organization,” SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph, who replaced Rick Johnson in 2005, told the LJ Academic Newswire. “We began with real community-based, grass-roots efforts, like alternative journals. We still do that kind of work but we’ve branched out more into things like our advocacy program. Today, we spend so much more time talking with policy makers about how to create an overall better climate. The day-to-day work very little resembles what we were doing when SPARC first started.”

Back on the eve of SPARC’s five-year anniversary, then executive-director Johnson playfully told the LJ Academic Newswire he’d be quite happy to see the next five years bring an end to the problems plaguing libraries and scholarly communication to the point where SPARC was no longer needed. Of course no one, including Johnson, expected that to happen and, accordingly, SPARC has continued to grow, both in terms of its agenda, as well as its presence, with new organizations now launched both in the UK and Japan. “We’re still at our heart a library membership organization,” Joseph said, operating under the Association of Research Libraries umbrella, with primary funding coming from membership dues. “But we’re now much more coalition-driven.” That “coalition-driven” approach, Joseph says, has been successful in getting the message out. Membership is up 15 percent over the last two years, now numbering more than 200 institutions in North America, Asia, and Australia, with an additional 100 institutions belonging to SPARC Europe.

With its partners, SPARC’s agenda has included some high-profile battles on behalf of open access and public access initiatives, such as the 2005 effort to support the National Institutes of Health’s public access policy. While SPARC has concentrated recently on such activities, Joseph says SPARC remains committed to three program areas: education, such as its Create Change and Author’s Rights campaigns; incubation and business development, such as its involvement with BioOne and Project Euclid; and advocacy campaigns, such as the NIH effort. “Advocacy in 2005 took a lead, and in 2006, we reinvigorated our education campaign,” Joseph said. “Incubation has lagged behind,” she conceded, but asserted that the three-prong commitment, implemented by Johnson and the SPARC steering committee, remains “fantastically stable and productive.”

Much more remains to be done, she adds. “I do think SPARC has made an impact. We don’t really talk about the serials crisis any more, for example, it’s sort of a given. What [constituents are] interested now is what tools we can give them to work with.” Where would Joseph like to see SPARC be in five years? “I’d like us to be positioned as an organization that facilitates new opportunities,” she says, “rather than addressing a crisis.”

Library Journal Academic Newswire, Jan. 18, 2007

Press Release
Washington, DC (January 18, 2007)

BioOne (www.bioone.org) is delighted to announce the return of Systematic Botany, published by The American Society of Plant Taxonomists, to the BioOne.1 Collection in 2007.

ASTP ceased depositing current issues in BioOne at the end of the 2003 volume year. Their concern at that time was that the existing BioOne business model could not provide sufficient revenue to sustain the publication as print subscriptions decreased.

Over the last three years, the ASTP leadership has paid close attention to industry trends and BioOne’s response to the changing market. Between 2004 and 2005 BioOne realigned its business model to better support participating publishers, both by providing additional revenue and increased services. Encouraged by this positive trend, ASTP voted in late 2006 to rejoin BioOne.

The 2007 subscription to BioOne.1 will include Systematic Botany issues published in 2007, with archival content back to 2000. The gap year issues published between 2004 and 2006 will be posted early in the year to ensure a seamless user experience.

“We could not be happier to welcome the American Society of Plant Taxonomists back to the BioOne family,” said BioOne Executive Director Susan Skomal. “Systematic Botany’s return is an important milestone for BioOne and a testament to our continued growth and commitment to improving our services.”

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About BioOne

Established in 2000, BioOne is the product of innovative collaboration between scientific societies, libraries, academe, and the private sector, who seek a sustainable, mission-driven alternative to commercial publishing. BioOne brings to the Web a uniquely valuable aggregation of the full-texts of high-impact bioscience research journals. Most of BioOne’s titles are published by small societies and non-commercial publishers. BioOne provides integrated, cost-effective access to a thoroughly linked information resource of interrelated journals focused on the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences.

About the American Society of Plant Taxonomists

The American Society of Plant Taxonomists (www.aspt.net) promotes research and training in the taxonomy, systematics, and phylogeny of vascular and nonvascular plants. Organized in 1935, the Society has a membership of over 1,300. In addition to publishing Systematic Botany, the official quarterly journal of the ASPT, the Society produces an electronic ASPT Newsletter and the Systematic Botany Monographs. The Society also supports funds for a variety of honorary and charitable activities.

Dear SPARC Members and Friends, [University of Iowa Libraries is a member of SPARC, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition]

Please join SPARC, SPARC Europe, and the sponsors of the petition below in support of free and open access to research in Europe. Signatures from around the world are invited and, in fact, needed to demonstrate the breadth of support and collaborative nature of research.

In the wake of the publication of the report from the “EU Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe” a consortium of organisations working in the scholarly communication arena is sponsoring a petition to the European Commission to demonstrate support for Open Access and for the recommendations in the report. Signatures may be added on behalf of individuals or institutions.

Please register your support for Open Access in this way. To sign the petition, please go to http://www.ec-petition.eu/

The sponsoring organisations are JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), SURF (Netherlands), SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark).
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Jennifer McLennan
Director of Communications
SPARC
(202) 296-2296 ext. 121
(202) 872-0884 Fax
http://www.arl.org/sparc

The European Commission Petition and the EC Poll Indicate Strong Support

The European research and academic community has demonstrated overwhelming support for the European Commission’s proposed Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate (A1). A petition, launched jointly on January 14th 2007 by research organisations in a number of European countries, has drawn over 20,000 signatures from Europe and worldwide in support of the EC’s proposal. The response includes almost 1,000 institutional signatories from National Academies of Sciences, Universities, Rectors’ conferences, Learned Societies, national and private research funding councils, and industries that apply research.)

In conjunction with the petition, a separate poll has been conducted of the EC Open Access Mandate’s specific target constituency. The administrators of currently active EU FP6 projects were asked to register a vote FOR or AGAINST open access to research results. The result was overwhelming: 85.8% in favour of open access, 14.2% against (based on a healthy 8.22% response rate from 2652 email invitations to vote).

Previous research has demonstrated the increased impact that Open Access to Research Results offers the research industry.

The petition and the poll demonstrate that Open Access now receives broad-based and popular support as a mainstream requirement of the European research industry.

[Les Carr, posted to American Scientist Open Access Forum, 14 Feb 2007]