The CONSORT 2010 statement – a “service history” for clinical trials
(openaccesscentral.com): The CONSORT 2010 statement was co-published by eight journals. Like the original statement published in 1996, the revised guidelines are intended to improve the reporting of randomized controlled trials by providing a checklist of essential items for use by authors, reviewers and editors. The latest revision draws on new… Read More
IPad could be Kindle’s first big threat in e-books
(cellular-news.com): Amazon.com, which has dominated the young but fast-growing electronic book market for the past few years with the Kindle, could get its biggest threat Saturday, when Apple releases its iPad multimedia tablet. The Kindle starts at $259 and is designed mainly for reading text on a gray-and-black screen. The… Read More
In E-Book Era, You Can’t Even Judge a Cover
(nytimes.com): With a growing number of people turning to Kindles and other electronic readers, and with the Apple iPad arriving on Saturday, it is not always possible to see what others are reading or to project your own literary tastes. You can’t tell a book by its cover if it… Read More
Institutional Repositories at Cross Purposes
(openaccess.eprints.org): many traditionalists still believe in the post-print driven approach. Stevan Harnad, the “archivangelist,” recently argued that the “main raison d’etre” of the IR is to capture the institution’s own “institutional refereed research journal article output” (Harnad, 2009). To solve the engagement problem, these traditionalists espouse mandates as the only… Read More
University and Google Books move forward with digitization
(dailyprincetonian.com): Around 70 percent of the 1 million books that will eventually be included in the Google Books digital archive have already been digitized. The initiative for digitization began in early 2007, when the University Library and Google agreed to a six-year contract to make less than one-tenth of the… Read More
US seeks to make science free for all
(nature.com): The push to open up scientific knowledge to all looks set to go into overdrive. Over the past decade, the accessibility offered by the Internet has transformed science publishing. Several efforts have already tried to harness the web's power to make research papers available for free. Now two parallel… Read More
Search is far more profitable than publishing
(huffingtonpost.com): Why would Google spend all that money -- millions to digitize, more millions to litigate the case it had to know would come, and more millions to settle that case -- for what will amount to a library lending and ebook business? Keep in mind that Google's revenue alone… Read More
Economics of Scholarly Information
(liveserials.blogspot.com): Currently there's a big discrepancy between the average cost of a non-profit and for-profit article. The competition prediction suggests that if users pay, it would drive down prices to just over cost-price. There could be limited role of central purchase, where libraries could subscribe to journals which cost no… Read More
New project for scientists to share information and deepen understanding of diseases
(wsj.com): In the age of Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia, it is hard to believe there is still one group that prefers to be more circumspect about sharing: scientists. Scientists worry that if they share data before publishing their findings, someone else might claim credit for a discovery they made. And… Read More
BitTorrenting biology, getting the big picture in search
(arstechnica.com): The biosciences, like other branches of research, are being dragged into the digital era. This is in part because traditional mediums of communications, including journal articles, are migrating online, and in part because high-throughput approaches to biological research are producing staggering amounts of data that can only be stored… Read More
