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In the last week Elsevier, a leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information, has announced some impressive changes to their ScienceDirect access platform.

First, ScienceDirect ArticleChoice allows academic customers to access journal, handbook and book series articles that are outside their current portfolio. Articles can be purchased in bundles and are available as required. IP access ensures that articles can be downloaded multiple times within 24 hours at no additional cost.

Further, Elsevier has integrated several new features on its ScienceDirect platform from April onwards to further enhance the customer’s experience.

The latest additions include RSS feeds, Cited By in Scopus, Live Chat, and Inward linking for simplification.

RSS feeds will be available on ScienceDirect for search results, citations and new articles.  Cited By in Scopus links to specific citations in Scopus, a vast abstract and citation database of research literature and quality Web sources. Cited By in Scopus, which is included on the ScienceDirect article pages, also features a real-time citation count.

Communication with the ScienceDirect e-Helpdesk will be enabled through Live Chat, which is an online, real-time instant messaging technical support service available 24 hours a day, Monday to Friday.

Chemistry Central Journal has recently published its first research articles. A broad ranging open access chemistry journal divided into 55 subject-specific sections, Chemistry Central Journal is the first journal from Chemistry Central, BioMed Central’s chemistry platform.

Meanwhile, Biomed Central’s Physics platform, PhysMath Central, has announced the launch of its first journal and launched its website. PMC Physics A, which covers particle physics and related topics, is now open for submissions.

On April 10, 2007, Google and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum announced their Crisis in Darfur initiative in Google Earth. Located in Google Earth’s global awareness layer, Crisis in Darfur juxtaposes data, high-resolution photographs, and eyewitness testimony over the appropriate locations on Google Earth’s satellite images and maps. Imagery of Darfur in Google Earth allows you to see first-hand the extent of damage; burnt huts in villages appear as black charred rings. As Declan Butler pointed out on his blog, this initiative may help aid pioneering journalistic efforts in drawing attention to this tragedy.

The Martin Institute, headquartered at Oxford’s Said Business School, has announced a series of 6 Tuesday night lectures on the topic ‘Futures’ for the upcoming term

The first lecture, on 24 April, will feature Angela Wilkinson, the Director of Scenarios and Futures Research at the James Martin Institute. She will lecture on A brief history of Futures at the James Martin Institute Seminar Room, in the Saïd Business School, at 5 pm.

The second lecture will host Rafael Ramirez, a fellow of Saïd Business School & Templeton College. He will discuss Oxford: Scenarios and strategy from 5 pm at the same venue.

The next lecture, on May 8, will feature Betty Sue Flowers. The lecture will be at 3 pm in Said’s Lecture Theatre 5. Dr Flowers is the Federal CEO and Director LB Johnson Presidential Library, discussing Using the future to create the present.

In the fourth lecture, Bill Sharpe, CEO and co-founder of The Appliance Studio, will discuss Technology foresight: navigating with invisible islands. The lecture will be held at the James Martin Institute Seminar Room, in the Saïd Business School, at 5 pm.

The fifth lecture will feature Kees van der Heijdenn an Associate Fellow of both Templeton College and Saïd Business School, discussing Scenarios to strategy. The lecture will be held at the James Martin Institute Seminar Room, in the Saïd Business School, at 5 pm.

The sixth and final lecture will feature Gwyn Prins, the Mackinder Professor at LSE, discussing: Problems and possibilities with strategic assessment methods. The lecture will be held at the James Martin Institute Seminar Room, in the Saïd Business School, at 5 pm.

Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation recently published a series of articles on ‘Recent trends in robot-assisted therapy environments to improve real-life functional performance after stroke‘.

The series, guest-edited by Dr Michelle Johnson, consists of nine articles focusing on new developments in neuro-rehabilitation after stroke to improve the effectiveness of robot-assisted stroke rehabilitation. The series is introduced by a commentary from Dr Johnson and all articles in this series can be viewed on the journal’s website.

This year’s second report from an international scientific panel shows how climate change has already started to affect people, animals and ecosystems around the world. News@nature has published a collection of articles dealing with the past, present and future of climate change on earth. Selected content is available free online, and covers a wealth of the scientific and political information that has emerged from the growing body of research on climate change. Topics discussed include, but are not limited to, the socioeconomic effects of climate change in industry and the third world, adaptation strategies to cope with a changing climate, international energy legislation and proposed solutions to limit climate change, and effects of deforestation.

As noted by the EducationPR blog, Gary VandenBos of the American Psychological Association has recently articulated his concerns, shared by many traditional large publishers, that open access legislation in congress ‘could well kill the academic publishing industry’. He used the APA’s own network of 60 journals as an example, nine of which are currently operating at a loss. Further decreases to revenue could have a drastic effect on up to half of the APA’s journals, he claimed.

As an alternative governmental funding agencies such as the NIH mandating open access, VandenBos has suggested nominal per article fees paid by users to help offset publishing costs, like the system operated by iTunes for music downloads. As an alternative, he suggested, the NIH could produce 20 or more new journals of their own, for free public access, and demand the right of first refusal on articles written on federal funds. From the notes, which are incomplete and may not represent the entire speech, VanderBos appears not to have considered the ‘author-pays’ model which most open access publishers currently employ nor does he appear to have appreciated the distinctions between open access publishing and archiving.

Peter Suber, on his blog Open Access News, made some additional points in response to VandenBos’s concerns. For instance, Suber pointed out the open access mandates only refer to the author’s final manuscript, not the edited published version, and that publishers retain all copyright privileges, and exclusivity for six months after publication. Suber also mentioned the messy situation that would inevitably result from funding bodies involving themselves in the peer review process.

Tim O’Reilly, who coined the phrase Web 2.0 to describe the next generation of interactive communications, and Jimmy Wales, founder of the communal encyclopaedia Wikipedia have attempted to initiate a bloggers code of conduct. They have posted a seven-point programme that would attempt, they say, to address the plethora of abusive comments on the web, while preserving the free spirit of the medium. Point one of the code is that anyone signing up to it would commit themselves to a ‘civility enforced’ standard to remove unacceptable comments from their blog.

To back up the code, they propose a ‘civility enforced’ badge marking sites which subscribe to the guidelines, and an ‘anything goes’ badge to denote those that do not. The proposed guidelines can be interactively amended by web users, until a final version is agreed.

Reactions to these proposals have thus far been very mixed. Many, like Jonathon Freedland of the Guardian view O’Reilly and Wales’ suggestion as long overdue, pointing to the recent incident in which blogger Kathy Sierra had been the target of a hate campaign pursued by comments on her blog.

However, as Ed Pilkington notes, the suggestion for a code of conduct was met by a torrent of offensive and abusive comments, giving the example of the new media site 910am, which described the propositions as “weapons of mass stupidity” and carried the health warning “do not read on a full stomach”.

Some blogs that are attached to more traditional news sources, such as the Guardian’s own comment is free and the BBC’s have your say are already moderated and operate a system in which users can flag comments as ‘inappropriate’. While this system is operable on the scale of a single site, it would be harder to extent this over the whole internet to prevent comments such as those received by Sierra being posted in the first place (as she herself pointed out). It would also perhaps raise uncomfortable questions about who has the right to judge what is admissible on the web. This does not seem to have been the original intention of the proposals, however. As he reiterates here, O’Reilly’s suggestion of the introduction of ‘badges’ such as those used by the Creative Commons to announce the civility policies of the blog is not restrictive: in fact as it is already possible to monitor comments it would perhaps be more transparent to state potential reasons for not publishing them.

The pioneers of Web 2.0 will have to rely on the much-espoused concept of ‘radical trust’ for the adoption of their proposal and to hope that, in the words of O’Reilly, civility really is catching.

The controversy surrounding the Google Books project has overshadowed questions about how the data will be used. A new paper by Grogg and Ashmore addresses the issue of how libraries should integrate their copies of the digitalised texts into existing resources. The article also discusses issues of selecting content for digitalisation.

The Knowledge Communication Peer Reviewing conference takes place in Orlando, Florida  12-15 July 2007. Starting its blurb by noting that only 8%  of members of the Scientific Research Society believe peer review is worthwhile, the conference focuses on new approaches to peer review, with a focus on ‘non-linear’ models of pubishing. Call for papers is now open.