The State of the E-Textbook
(pcworld.com): Students have not yet ditched heavy textbooks, but the options for getting course materials digitally are growing. Shopping-savvy students increasingly are avoiding the traffic jam and lessening the sticker shock by choosing to rent or purchase used textbooks online. But as a generation heads to school armed with multiple… Read More
Can community-minded Web developers fix scientific publishing?
(technologyreview.in): Cutthroat competition for funding and positions has turned peer review, the traditional method for deciding what gets published in scientific journals, into an adversarial system that is fundamentally broken, according to those who study it. The solution, say an increasingly vocal chorus of gadflies, is to supplement peer review… Read More
Opening the Open Door: Adopt the Least Demanding Open Access Mandate First
(openaccess.eprints.org): Deposit mandates certainly are useful for institutions to retain the knowledge and scholarship of its faculty members. Indeed, some journals already permit institutional depositories. But such permissions do not address the increasing loss of knowledge in the academic community caused by the ever- increasing costs of journal subscriptions and… Read More
Balance-bias battle of climate science coverage
(abc.net.au): A recent study identified the 1,372 scientists around the world with expertise in climate science, measured by their track records of publication in a relevant field. It concluded that there is 'striking agreement' among climate scientists, with 97-98 per cent of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the… Read More
Examining the economics of bloc payments for e-journals – new report now available
(jisc-collections.ac.uk): This report is based on an analysis of the practicability and the effect of different models for allocating costs of journal and other digital information licences between HEIs where journal collections or other information products have been licensed by a "bloc" of institutions for a single all-in price –… Read More
E-readers: Getting down to content
(business-standard.com): Home-grown manufacturers are luring consumers with an enviable content library to market the hardware. E-books are gaining momentum worldwide. But Indians are yet to join the wave — all things connected to this new world of authors and the Internet. However, that has not come as a damper to… Read More
Will researchers go elsewhere if US stemcell money dries up?
(energypublisher.com): Imagine you’re a scientist. You spend ten years of you life reading about your topic, going to conferences, working long hours in the lab, thinking about your chosen puzzle from every angle imaginable. Finally, you think you’re within a stone’s throw of a solution and… your funding is cut,… Read More
Strong medicine for China’s journals
(nature.com): Few Chinese scientists would be surprised to hear that many of the country's scientific journals are filled with incremental work, read by virtually no one and riddled with plagiarism. But the Chinese government's solution to this problem came as a surprise last week. Li Dongdong, a vice-minister of state… Read More
First rise in library borrowing for 20 years
(thebookseller.com): Book issuing has increased for the first time in more than 20 years, according to provisional figures drawn from the latest set of library statistics. But spending on books by libraries has fallen. Library campaigner Tim Coates has analysed the provisional figures for the year 2008/09 from the Chartered… Read More
Digging for data with Chemlist and ChemSpider
(eurekalert.org): Just like the rest of us, scientists today are swamped with information. As more chemical resources become freely available, text mining applications - previously focused on correctly identifying gene and protein names – are now shifting towards also correctly identifying chemical names. Now database experts have compared two chemical… Read More
