First Author*

GroupSpaces, an Oxford-based Web company which provides online tools for real-world groups has recently arrived back from Silicon Valley after being selected to attend WebMission 2008, a week-long trade mission for the UK’s twenty most promising Web companies

Founded by two Oxford students GroupSpaces.com arose from frustration at the multitude of different websites which clubs and societies at Oxford University were using to organise themselves online. GroupSpaces CEO David Langer said: ‘As a former president of two University societies I became increasingly annoyed with the mash-up of disconnected tools groups were using to manage themselves online – mailing lists on Yahoo! Groups, spreadsheets in Excel, events on Facebook, ancient websites – people were spending a disproportionate amount of time organising their groups across multiple platforms. There was a clear need to connect everything up and that’s what inspired us to create GroupSpaces.’

Chief Technical Officer Andrew Young, Vice President of Oxford Entrepreneurs and an experienced Web developer, added: ‘We both thought there must be a better way for groups to communicate with and manage their members’.

Young explained the unique solution provided by the Company: ‘GroupSpaces has created a free web-based service that solves all the problems of group managers with a combination of powerful, easy-to-use tools and an integrated portal. The online toolset is designed to fit in with each groups’ existing conventions, helping to establish efficient, robust procedures and facilitating collaboration between group members, managers and the wider world. Most groups have a common set of needs - communication channels, membership and database management, website provision and event organisation and promotion – GroupSpaces is designed to help with all of these.’

The team developed their initial ideas with the help of the Saïd Business School’s entrepreneurship activities including the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation’s flagship Building a Business course for science and technology entrepreneurship, and the annual Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford event where valuable contacts were made.

During Web Mission week in April this year they were able to take advantage of these contacts to set up meetings with some of the top Silicon Valley start-ups, from whom they received useful feedback. In addition, David and Andrew were invited for sessions with some leading venture capitalists in Silicon Valley including a meeting with Oxford alum Michael Mortiz at Sequoia Capital where they were able to share the wisdom of the man who invested in and sat on the boards of Google and Yahoo!

In January 2008, GroupSpaces completed a 6-figure round of investment funding from a syndicate of experienced Angel Investors including London-based Avonmore Development - which made them the youngest Oxford University entrepreneurs to receive venture funding.

A pilot of GroupSpaces is currently in operation with 40,000 users and the product is being developed with the benefit of their live feedback. As well as large societies such as The Oxford Union, Oxford Entrepreneurs and Imperial Entrepreneurs, many of the Junior Common Rooms at Oxford Colleges are adopting GroupSpaces’ mailing list facilities. Oxford University Careers Service also benefits from the service. Former Director, Terry Dray said: ‘The innovative website offered by GroupSpaces has helped even more students to find out about our events and services. They are bridging the gap between university societies and graduate recruiters in a revolutionary manner.’

Adam O’Boyle, Sabbatical Officer for The Oxford Hub, an umbrella organisation for all the charities in Oxford, commented: ‘GroupSpaces have created all, and more, that we could have wanted for us and our member charities. Our students can now get on with actually running their groups.’

With more than 6,000 unique visits to the website every month, GroupSpaces has secured advertising contracts with over 50 blue-chip clients including IBM, BP, McKinsey & Company, Bain Capital, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and JPMorgan.

GroupSpaces is currently focused on rolling its online tools out to the 25,000 UK-based university clubs and societies, and will also be commencing a pilot with local groups outside the student market over the summer months.

US-based Nexo Systems estimates there to be over 100 million groups in the US alone, and GroupSpaces’ mission is to become the essential provider of online tools for real-world groups.

For further details about GroupSpaces visit www.groupspaces.com

Nature.com was recognized this week as the Best Science Website of 2008 in the annual Webby awards. Nature Publishing Group’s website will receive its ‘Oscar of the Internet’ at the 12th Annual Webby Awards gala on 10 June in New York City.

The Webby Award winners are chosen by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), a global organization of industry experts and technology innovators. The winners were announced on the 6 May on the Webby Award website.
“Everyone at NPG is delighted that nature.com has been awarded a Webby, it’s a real validation of our efforts,” said Timo Hannay, Publishing Director of nature.com. “Our purpose as a publisher is to enable scientific and medical communication. If we can’t help researchers to make the most of the web - the most powerful communication medium ever - then we wouldn’t be doing our jobs. That’s why nature.com is central to NPG’s mission, and this welcome recognition will spur us on to try and achieve even more.”

According to the press release on Nature.com, the site serves almost 12 million visitors a month and is the gateway to NPG’s broad offering of publications and services, including access to all NPG publications including its flagship title Nature. Gateways and databases include the Nature Reports series. Through Nature.com, users can access news and features from Nature News and visit Naturejobs, NPG’s careers information and science recruitment website. Nature Network, NPG’s social networking service, is connecting scientists at a global and local level. The success of the weekly Nature Podcast has led to the construction of NPG’s own in-house podcast studio. Nature.com also hosts a number of NPG blogs, the preprint service Nature Precedings, and country-focussed portals such as Nature China and Nature India. Nature.com links to scientific experiments and conferences hosted on Second Nature, NPG’s three virtual islands in Second Life.

Hailed as the “Oscars of the Internet” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, Interactive Advertising, Online Film & Video, and Mobile Websites. The 12th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 10,000 entries from over 60 countries.

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, has been outspoken about his view that his creation, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, should not be used in academic settings, especially by students writing papers. One reason is that any given entry “could change instantly and not have a final vetting process,” said Mr. Wales in an interview Thursday at a conference on the future of the Internet, held at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

But the popular encyclopedia may soon add a new feature that would allow Wikipedia entries to be “cited more comfortably” by students and professors, he said. The feature would allow a version of a Wikipedia article to be frozen and approved by experts.

The German-language edition of Wikipedia has recently been experimenting with a similar feature, though so far it has only used to flag entries as being free from vandalism rather than certified by content specialists. “Later, it could have a flag that says ‘This version is one that a committee has actually vetted,’” he said. “We’d still allow further editing, but if you really wanted a version that as of three months ago we had three Ph.D.‘s look at it, and they checked it off as being good, we may move in that direction.”

Mr. Wales stressed that no final decision has been made on whether or not to create such expert-approved versions of Wikipedia pages. “The software is evolving in a direction that would allow the community to come up with ways of doing that,” he said. Even so, he said, in most cases even an improved Wikipedia won’t be as appropriate for students as other sources. “What I always encourage students to do especially, is don’t think of Wikipedia as a source, think of Wikipedia as background knowledge.”

Steve Harnad’s American Scientist Open Access Forum recently gave an excellent review of Peter Suber’s talk, and the audience discussion, entitled “What Can Universities Do To Promote Open Access?” at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Harnad outlined 8 key points of Suber’s lecture, as described below, and proceeded to add his own extended commentary. First author highly recommends visiting Harnad’s original posting, but below is a summary of the summary!

1) Journals versus Books: Suber described the varied application of OA mandates to journal articles and to scholarly book chapters. As expected OA at the moment only applies to journal articles that authors are entitled to give away.
2) Versions and Citability: Here, Suber pointed out that although the publisher’s final and official PDF is always what is cited, the ‘postprint’, in the form of the final, post-peer review, accepted version, is equally useful to researchers.
3) First OA Self-Archiving Mandate: Suber alluded to the Queensland University of Technology’s first institution wide OA mandate, though Harnad pointed out that Southampton University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science actually declared the earliest OA mandate.
4) Probability of Author Compliance with OA Self-Archiving Mandates: Suber discussed the Swan & Brown’s author surveys, which found that 95% of authors would comply with an OA self-archiving mandate, including over 80% willingly. The same was true of Arthur Sale’s data on actual mandate compliance rates.
(5) Deposit Mandates vs. Copyright-Retention Mandates: Suber discussed the technical differences between these two descriptions. NIH’s is not a copyright-retention mandate. It is a no-opt-out deposit mandate plus a no-opt-out requirement to negotiate with the 38% of journals who don’t endorse immediate OA, so as to be able to make the deposit OA within a year. Harvard’s is a copyright-retention mandate, with opt-out.
(6) Mandate Implementation Mechanisms: Peter noted that there are currently no sanctions on deposit mandates, only administrative incentives and contingencies. The open access repositoryhas beens made the official locus for submitting publications to be assessed for performance review.
(7) Peer Review, Journals and Repositories: Peter discussed the differences between much OA lingo. Journals provide peer review; IRs provide access to peer-reviewed postprints. The issue of IRs providing peer review is a red herring (raised by others, not Peter).
(8) Journal Weighting in Researcher Performance Evaluation: Finally, Suber made the point that the credit and weight accorded for publishing in a given journal in a researcher’s performance evaluation should not be changed due to new OA regulation. Performance evaluation should still depend only on the journal’s track-record for quality, not on its OA policy or status.

On the recent Nature blog Gobbledygook, Martin Fenner’s blog on scientific publishing in the internet age, Fenner addresses the topic Should Peer Review be Confidential?

Donald Kennedy, the edior-in-chief of Science, yesterday wrote an editorial about a legal dispute between the New England Journal of Medicine and the drug company Pfizer. Pfizer wants the NEJM to provide the reviewer comments on submitted papers about the two Pfizer products celecoxib (Celebrex) and valdecoxib (Bextra). Both drugs are used to treat pain and belong to the COX-2 inhibitor class of drugs. Rofecoxib (Vioxx) is another COX-2 inhibitor produced by Merck. Rofecoxib and valdecoxib, but not celecoxib were withdrawn from the market about three years ago because of an increased risk of cardiovascular side effects, including heart attacks.

Research findings about cardiovascular side effects of COX-2 inhibitors are at the center of the dispute and Pfizer is now seeking arguments for their case not just from published papers but also in confidential peer reviews and manuscripts that were rejected. This legal dispute is important because it touches central aspects of the peer review process.

As Fenner pointed out, with increasingly high stakes riding on the outcome of peer review, from grants and jobs for the authors, treatment of patients, government policy, and huge profits for drug companies, there is increasing temptation to utilize the scientific argument resulting from peer review as public legal testimony. However, as stated by Kennedy, “The process of scientific publication depends on the volunteer services of thousands of experts all over the world who willingly provide, without compensation, confidential and candid evaluations of the work of others. Because all of us in scientific publishing depend on reviewers, we’d better try to keep them at it, happy, and secure.”

Fenner reached the same conclusion, one that may be echoed across the academic science community: publication of the proceedings of peer review would forever alter our system of communicating science.

Each week, the Oxford Science news blog features a ‘Did you miss?’ section, to highlight some important publications and events occurring during the previous week. This is a great resource to keep up to date with the range of science being conducted every day in Oxford. For example, recent posts have included discovery of the world’s stretchiest material, by physicist David Keen, the OxSciBlog’s celebrations for Darwin’s birthday with the tale of his neglected crabs, potential implantation of insulin-producing beta cells as a treatment for Type 1 diabetics, and a discussion of the possibility of development of a vaccine for HIV.

The Oxford Science Blog can be found here.

As discussed in the New York Times, the Harvard Crimson and BioMed Central, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences has just considered, and approved, the adoption of a new policy designed to ensure that the results of work published by members of the Faculty remain openly accessible. The policy is the first of its kind in the US, though similar institutional open access mandates are becoming increasingly common around the world.

A new Office for Scholarly Communication will be responsible for implementing the policy, and for addressing the broader issues to ensure that the results of research carried out at Harvard are made universally accessible. Here is the official announcement from Harvard.

Harvard University’s strong move to encourage open access is not an isolated instance. It is hugely encouraging to note the rapid pace of change in the United States on open access issues since the passing of the bill late last year, which made mandatory the National Institutes of Health’s Public Access Policy.

For example, the University of Berkeley recently announced the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative, which sets up a central open access fund to assist Berkeley researchers who wish to publish in open access journals. Later this month, Berkeley will also play host to the inaugural US meeting in relation to the SCOAP3 initiative in particle physics. SCOAP3 is a consortium of the world’s major particle physics laboratories which has set itself the ambitious yet achievable aim of switching the whole particle physics literature to an open access model.

According to BioMed Central, what is clear is that the need for open access, and the failure of the traditional model of scientific publishing to make full use of the internet’s potential in this respect, are no longer issues of interest only to librarians or to activists These issues are now recognized to be important ones that all serious research institutions need to consider. The recent steps taken by Harvard and Berkeley show that universities are just as willing as research funders to take a stand on this issue. Open access is no longer just a nice idea, but is a concrete objective and over the course of 2008, the key focus will be not on rhetoric, but on the practical issues necessary to make wide-scale open access a reality.

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) announced the launch of Nature India on February 1, a new website highlighting the best scientific research from researchers based in India. Nature India aims to be the one-stop site for information on Indian science, and is the first multi-disciplinary website dedicated to covering the best research from India. NPG’s second country-specific portal, Nature India follows the successful launch of Nature China in 2007.

“We are delighted to be launching Nature India,” comments David Swinbanks, Publishing Director for NPG. “The quantity and quality of scientific output from Asia has been rising dramatically in recent years and India is a major contributor. But it is
still hard to find information on where the best research is being done and by whom. Nature India, like Nature China, addresses this by providing timely information on some of India’s best research.”

India consistently ranks in the top 20 countries for number of papers published, according to Thomson Scientific’s Essential Science Indicators (ESI). However, India falls outside ESI’s top 20 countries for both citations and citations per paper. Nature India should help to raise the visibility of high quality research from the region, bringing it to a wider audience within India and around the world.

Nature India will feature short ‘Research Highlights’ of interesting, recently-published articles by authors based in India from across the scientific and medical literature. There are more chances to interact with the site and with colleagues through an
active forum on Nature Network and via the Indigenus blog. Nature India also features jobs, events, science news, feature articles, and commentaries on contemporary issues affecting Indian science. Further, readers have free access to some
handpicked premium content from NPG journals via Nature India.

With the upcoming launch of BMC Research Notes, which will have a strong data focus, BioMed Central’s development team has been hard at work improving the handling of additional material files. According to their website, one request frequently placed by from authors is to make it possible to upload collections of files that can be conveniently navigated in the web browser - essentially a miniature website associated with the article. This functionality has now been added to the BioMed Central publication system.

The BioMed Central homepage offers instructions for uploading these ‘mini-websites’ as a ZIP file. Readers of the published article will have a choice of whether to download the ZIP file to view locally on their own machine, or alternatively they can follow a link to view the contents of the ZIP file via the BioMed Central website. The first publications with this functionality have now been published, with an excellent example available from BMC Evolutionary Biology.

On Friday, February 1, Microsoft launched an audacious $44.6bn (£22.4bn) bid for internet rival Yahoo in an attempt to create an online search and advertising group that can rival market leader Google.

The deal, which the board of Yahoo has been considering throughout the weekend, would bring together one of the internet’s largest and oldest destinations, Yahoo, with Microsoft’s MSN platform in the biggest internet merger since AOL bought Time Warner for $112bn in 2000.

As well as Microsoft’s software business, centred around its Windows operating system, the merged group would span online services from internet search and news to email and instant messaging. Yahoo also owns the popular photo sharing site Flickr and social bookmarking service del.icio.us.

Microsoft’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, telephoned his counterpart at Yahoo, co-founder Jerry Yang, late on Thursday night before going public by publishing his letter to the board yesterday. “When you combine the strengths of our two companies the result will be an incredibly efficient and competitive offering for consumers, for advertisers and for publishers,” he said.

The global online advertising market is expected to balloon from $40bn last year to $80bn by the end of the decade. But Google has a commanding lead in the largest segment of that market, online search. In the UK, for instance, Google accounts for 81% of all online searches compared with 6% for second placed Yahoo and 5% for MSN, according to the online data group Comscore.

According to Vic Keegan at the Guardian, Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo is a public confession of failure: an admission that despite the company’s resources Microsoft has failed to build up an effective presence on its own in key areas such as search, web advertising and services that Google has been so spectacularly successful at. Instead it is trying to buy its way into the 21st century. Microsoft has proved very successful at preserving its 90% plus monopoly of operating systems, spreadsheets and word processing but is much less successful where it faces stiff competition.

“Today the market is increasingly dominated by one player,” said Kevin Johnson, president of the platforms and services division of Microsoft. “The fact is the industry will be better served by having a more credible alternative.” European internet executives agree that Google needs a serious competitor. “A Yahoo acquisition by Microsoft will improve competition in the European search market, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Google,” said Andrew Walmsley, co-founder of the London-based digital media agency i-level.

However, negotiations surrounding the takeover bid from Microsoft are far from complete. Today, Guardian columnist Jemima Kiss has reported that a possible business alliance between Yahoo and Google is rumoured in America, to avoid a takeover by Microsoft. According to Reuters, the Yahoo’s management is considering restarting talks held late last year with rival Google about ways of working more closely together, according to a source familiar with Yahoo’s strategy. A takeover by Google would almost certainly be rejected by industry regulators because of monopoly concerns, although the two companies have talked before about a business alliance.

Further, Google has warned that Microsoft’s $44.6bn bid for Yahoo raises “troubling questions” about the future of the internet. A takeover would also create a business with an “overwhelming share” of online communications services of web-based email and instant messaging, David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer posted on the official Google blog last night.

“This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the internet: openness and innovation,” he said.
“Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the internet that it did with the PC? While the internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies - and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.
“Could the acquisition of Yahoo allow Microsoft - despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offences - to extend unfair practices from browsers a operating systems to the internet?”

Google’s concerns are likely to add to pressure for any tie-up to be heavily scrutinized by regulatory authorities. The US justice department said on Friday it would be interested in investigating any deal on antitrust grounds. European regulators, already examining many aspects of Microsoft’s business, are likely to follow suit.