(scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org): Tools for communication are the low-hanging fruit, the obvious things to build based on Web 2.0 ventures that have worked in other areas, but so far they've failed to capture the interest of most scientists. Tools for doing science are much harder to envision and build. But these sorts of tools are much more likely to see uptake and use by the community, simply because scientists are more interested in doing science than they are in talking about science.
(imshealth.com): IMS Health, a leading provider of market intelligence to the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, has announced that its stockholders approved the proposal to adopt the merger agreement providing for its acquisition by entities created by certain affiliates of TPG Capital, L.P. ("TPG") and the CPP Investment Board ("CPPIB"). According to the final tally of shares voted, more than 75 percent of the outstanding shares of common stock of IMS Health as of the close of business on December 28, 2009 voted to approve the proposal to adopt the merger agreement.
(pcmag.com): The publishing industry was drooling over the Apple iPad long before the product was actually announced. What it saw in the rumored device was the potential for a powerful delivery platform for a new generation of books, magazines, and newspapers. Publishers hoped the color screen, speedy processor, and intuitive interface would help them innovate content and create new business models. Now that the iPad is a reality, the publishing industry has begun to gear up to create publications that integrate images, video, and audio into text, dramatically enhancing the storytelling process.
(scienceblog.com): This paper deals with the critical and ambiguous situation in the modern official science. It tries to uncover the fundamental roots of this situation and invites all those who feel themselves committed and involved to think about possible ways to escape a serious collapse of scientific research all over the world.
(nytimes.com): With the impending arrival of digital books on the Apple iPad and feverish negotiations with Amazon.com over e-book prices, publishers have managed to take some control - at least temporarily - of how much consumers pay for their content. Now, as publishers enter discussions with the Web giant Google about its plan to sell digital versions of new books direct to consumers, they have a little more leverage than just a few weeks ago - at least when it comes to determining how Google will pay publishers for those e-books and how much consumers will pay for them.
(ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk): Currently there is limited knowledge of who is using Web 2.0 and for what purposes. Even less is known about why specific tools and services are chosen, especially in situations where JISC and institutionally-provided services are available. This survey has therefore focused on the current and active users of Web 2.0 tools and services in UK Higher Education institutions and identifying what they are using and why. Although mainstream use of Web 2.0 services is growing and will continue to grow over time, no specific predictions can be made regarding the rate of take-up. An increasing proportion of new entrants to HE and FE are already familiar with and using Web 2.0 services but this does not apply to everyone and there is a need to support a range of very varied learner backgrounds and expectations.
(papers.ssrn.com): The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers would no longer be able to profit from reader charges. If these author publication fees would actually be borne by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase) - suggesting that ending academic copyright would be socially desirable in view of the broad benefits of a copyright-free world. If so, the demise of academic copyright should probably be achieved by a change in law, for the "open access" movement that effectively seeks this objective without modification of the law faces fundamental difficulties.
(oclc.org): This report examines the role of research libraries in research assessment regimes in five different countries and helps establish a new set of responsibilities that is emerging for research libraries. Commissioned by OCLC Research, the report was written by Key Perspectives Ltd, a UK library and scholarly publishing consultancy, after studying the role of research libraries in the higher education reserach assessment regimes in five countries.
(uic.edu): This paper examines the use of Web search engines by faculty and students to support learning, teaching, and research. We explore the academic tasks supported by search engine use to investigate if and how students and scholars vary in their use patterns. We also investigate the satisfaction levels with search outcomes and trust in search engines in supporting specific tasks.
(British Library): This paper by Andrew Charlesworth aims to provide an overview of the main legal and ethical issues that pertain to the collection and preservation of, and access to, personal digital archives (hereafter PDArcs), by repositories, including the legal deposit libraries, and other non-deposit organisations.
(Openaccesscentral.com): This presentation, by Matthew Cockerill, Managing Director, BioMed Central, gives a summary of some of the many significant developments in Open Access over the last 12 months. This presentation was presented at the 2009 Online Information in London.
This presentation by Lee Rainai, Director - Pew Internet Project, Wisconsin Library Assiciation, covers the Pew Internet Project's latest findings and why they suggest that libraries can play a role in people's social networks in the future. Lee describes the reasons that people rely more and more on their social networks - using old and new technology - as they seek information, share ideas, learn, solve problems, and look for social support. He examines why the internet and cell phones have changed the way people construct and operate their social networks and why this opens new - sometimes "magical" - opportunities for librarians to do what they naturally do: act as "nodes" in people's networks.
Knowledge, as published through scientific literature, is the last step in a process originating from primary scientific data. These data are analyzed, synthesized, interpreted, and the outcome of this process is published as a scientific article. Access to the original data as the foundation of knowledge has become an important issue throughout the world and different projects have started to find solutions. In this presentation Dr. Brase discusses the role that libraries can play in this new era of eScience. Dr. Jan Brase is with the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB), and is coordinator for the DOI Registration Agency for research data sets - over 600 registered since 2005.
While today's digital data has the potential to transform our work and life, the challenges of managing it, retaining it, accessing it over the long term, using it, and sustaining it constitute some of the most difficult problems of our time. Solving these problems requires strategies that make sense from a technical, policy, regulatory, economic, security, and community perspective. This presentation by Francine Berman of San Diego Supercomputer Center, California, focusses on the opportunities presented by today's and tomorrow's deluge of data along with the challenges of creating useful information from this data accessible for the foreseeable future.
Open access combined with Web 2.0 networking tools is fast changing the traditional journals' functions and framework and the publishers' role. As content is more and more available online in digital repositories and on the web an integrated, interconnected, multidisciplinary information environment is evolving and Oldenburg's model disintegrates: the journal is no more the main referring unit of the scholarly output, as it used to be mainly for STM disciplines, but scholars attention is deeply concentrated on article level. New journal models are thus evolving. In the first part of this presentation authors discuss these new experimental journal models, i.e. - overlay journals - interjournals - different levels journals In the second part of the presentation authors drive readers' attention on the role commercial publishers could play in this digital seamless writing arena. According to the authors, publishers should concentrate much more on value-added services both for authors, readers and libraries, such as navigational services, discovery services, archiving and ex-post evaluation services.
