First Author*

It’s worth drawing attention to this guest blog on BioMed Central. Barbara Kirsop of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development spoke at last week’s 5th Berlin open access conference, and has written a report about the Developing Country session.

Here are a few excerpts:

…a 2003 WHO survey of medical institutes [shows] the dire pre-OA position of access to essential literature in the poorest countries. In countries with a GDP/capita/year< $1000, 56% of medical institutes surveyed had been unable to purchase any subscriptions to journals over the previous 5 years, and the situation was little better in the next economic band of countries. I went on to show what improvements have taken place since the advent of OA...

…~20% of all OA journals are published in Devloping Countries. None of these journals make author charges, all provide full text access. It is clear from these figures that the research community in low-economy countries values incorporation into the international knowledge pool above the income that could be gained from closed access…

…usage comes both from the developing and developed world, indicating a powerful usage of free research findings by scientific communities in the otherwise information-deprived countries, and a parallel interest from international research communities for information generated in the developing regions. This is a very healthy trend, since the resolution of climate change problems and the containment and treatment of infectious pandemics requires access to local knowledge if appropriate programmes are to be devised…

…It is difficult to see how many of the Millennium Development Goals can be reached without free access to the world’s research findings and it seems to be widely accepted now that OA alone can significantly accelerate scientific progress and benefit the poorer 80% of the world…

Preservation of digital content is an increasingly important concern, with companies such as Google and Microsoft, as well as major publishers, engaged in large-scale digitization projects.

CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) has published a white paper [pdf] examining this issue, and is seeking public comments on it.

The paper examines the motivations behind some high-profile commercial and non-profit digitization initiatives, and makes thirteen recommendations. These recommendations tend to emphasize the importance of collaboration between cultural institutions. Interestingly, author Oya Rieger draws a parallel with the past example of successful cooperation in preservation microfilming.

Details of how to make comments can be found on the CLIR website. The deadline is Friday 5th October.

An interesting press release from eIFL.net:

Ezra Shiloba Gbaje has been awarded the Dr. James O. Daniel prize for the Most Innovative Library-based ICT project by the Nigerian Library Association (NLA) for his Open Access work. Ezra installed and configured Dspace for his university, Ahmadu Bello University. During the award presentation at the NLA meeting this September, Ezra demonstrated the role of an institutional repository and there was great interest from the 400 participants to learn more. eIFL is working with Ezra to organize an open access workshop in Nigeria next year which will build upon this enthusiasm.

eIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) is a non-profit organisation that supports and advocates the wide availability of electronic resources by library users in transitional and developing countries.

DSpace is an open-source solution for accessing, managing and preserving scholarly works. You can read an excellent interview with Michele Kimpton, executive director of the DSpace Foundation, in the current issue of Campus Technology magazine.

Nature Publishing has announced an interesting new online forum called Ask the Nature Editor. Six editors have agreed to take part, and over the next few months they will be answering questions on scientific publishing and online communication.

To put a question to them, simply join the online group at Nature Network and post on the forum.

The first Question & Answer session will focus on the peer review and publishing process. The deadline for questions on this topic is October 10, 2007.

The Biosciences Federation - which represents nearly 50 Learned Societies and bioscience organisations in the UK - has stated its support for Open Access publishing, “provided it is adequately funded”.

A Position Statement [pdf] released yesterday concentrated mainly on the idea that if Open Access publishing was adopted, “the problems and risks currently surrounding self-archiving would disappear”. This refers to concerns such as multiple archived versions of the same article, and falling subscriptions for journals sticking to the paid access model.

According to the press release [pdf]:

Maximising access to research articles is entirely in line with the mission statements of the Federation’s members. Open Access publishing is a workable way of achieving this, provided it is adequately funded so that the viability both of journals, and of the various activities which are made possible by journals income – conferences, meetings and other educational events as well as grants, bursaries and research funding – are not threatened.

The results of the research studies will be published early in 2008.

An excellent response to many of the Federation’s concerns has been made on Peter Suber’s blog Open Access News. He argues that many financial concerns appear to be unfounded, while it’s far from clear that persisting with the subscription model is sustainable.

In addition, societies may discover that most of their membership considers removing access barriers to research more important than other society activities, which could be funded by sources other than journal subscriptions.

The 2007 ALPSP/Charlesworth Award for Publishing Innovation has been won by RSC Project Prospect, the Royal Society of Chemistry’s project to enhance online research articles.

The Award is recognition for what could be a pioneering step towards the “semantic Web“. Semantic enrichment of article content makes it possible for search engines or a desktop computer to identify articles of interest without having to read each article and judge its relevance. RSC Project Prospect is the first project of its kind in the chemical sciences.

In his 1999 book, Weaving the Web, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee described a semantic Web as the eventual future of the internet:

“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

According to the judges:

“The clear winner of this year’s award was RSC Project Prospect from the Royal Society of Chemistry. This project sees the introduction of semantics into chemical science publishing. RSC Project Prospect journals incorporate standard metadata within the full text of their articles and combine this with an elegant and intuitive on screen manifestation of the advantages of including this metadata.

“As a result, sophisticated and effective searching of the literature is greatly improved and the value gained from reading each article is significantly enhanced. RSC Project Prospect is delightfully simple to use and its benefits to authors and readers are immediately obvious.”

Several other Awards were announced on the night - including one for Portland Press’s Biochemical Journal as Best Online Journal. You can find the full list of winners on the ALPSP website (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers).

Back in February, the First Author article Virtual Public Networks discussed how virtual networks, such as Second Life, could be used for collaboration and visualization in science. And this raised a question - with ever improving performance, is Second Life now a viable medium for virtual poster sessions and conferences?

A few months later, we’ve had opportunity to go back and look at how Second Life (SL) is actually being used.

As might be expected, examples of educational use far outnumber examples of research collaboration. There are hundreds of science exhibits, including a Gene Island and several planetaria. And there are some great attempts at innovation in distance learning - for example quizzes where students can meet each other and discuss the science while they solve the problems.

Cynics still have cause to argue that because it takes time for new users to orient themselves in the virtual world, SL will struggle to break out of the student demographic. But small groups are already taking the plunge, and as Linden Lab’s John Lester says, “Second Life is no more a game than the Web is a game. It’s a platform.”

Voice enabling technology is still at the development stage, but ultimately could surely bring in a wider community of users. The potential is clear for scientists wanting to “meet” other scientists without spending money on flights and conference hotels, and without the coldness of some online forums.

But why not judge the quality of the platform for yourself? Below are a few links we suggest as a good starting point for those new to SL:

• Google Calendar of upcoming science-related events in SL.
• Second Nature [SL registration required] is a virtual island, set up as a speculative venture by Nature. Here you will find helpful lists of events, plus multimedia presentations discussing the advantages of SL as a collaborative medium.
• Second Nature’s most recent event was a talk by Dr Phil Holliger about ancient DNA. You can read the transcript, slides and discussion on Joanna Scott’s blog for Nature.
  
• SciFoo Lives On is an online continuation of the SciFoo conference, meeting weekly in SL. Here you can find notes and transcripts from past sessions, and details of upcoming sessions.
• An interesting recent SciFoo session, Communicating Science with Video, discussed the emergence of sites such as JoVE, Bioscreencast, SciVee and SciTalks. The event was live blogged by ScienceRoll.

BONDplus (Biomolecular Network Databank plus) is a new web-based life science data management platform, integrating public and proprietary data, to address the information and analytic needs of biological researchers.

According to Thomson Scientific VP Jon Brett-Harris, the advantage of the new platform is that it allows scientists “not only to access public domain data, but also to integrate their own proprietary data and value-added Thomson Scientific data in a consistent and user-friendly format”, and so overcoming the problem of “years of fragmented and non-standardized production of biological data” from various niche areas.

The service is available by subscription and provides information from over 15 assembled resources including BINDplus, GENESEQ, GenBank, RefSeq, Entrez Gene, and UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot. It is hoped that the BONDplus will unite the genomic, proteomic and metabolomic research communities around one comprehensive platform.

Thomson Scientific will continue to provide an open access version of BOND, as they have since their March 2007 acquisition of Unleashed Informatics.

The second annual O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) Conference will take place February 11-13, 2008 at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York.

The conference explores how innovation - in technology and in business - is changing the publishing landscape. You can read about last year’s conference and see many of the presentations on the TOC 2007 website.

Proposals for the 2008 conference are due by October 1, 2007. Details of how to submit a proposal - for tutorials, discussions, or “lightning demos” of new technologies - are also available from O’Reilly.

Risk-taking is essential to scientific innovation. However, fears that negative results might jeopardize future funding have placed pressure on many Chinese researchers to avoid high-risk projects.

Now China’s Ministry of Science and Technology has proposed a new law to encourage the reporting of ‘failed’ research, in the hope of promoting innovation and curbing fraud.

The draft law states that failure of research projects would not have any professional bearing on researchers, as long as experiments were well conceived and conducted.

However, an article published in Nature explores the idea that only more radical reform would address the root causes of malpractice, and improve China’s innovation capacity.