They sent me a survey and asked me some simple questions, but I don’t think they asked me the right ones, so I’m going to give a free-form review here. I think it’s a great idea, and presents some features not available anywhere else, but it’s missing some important content, and like everything Thompson does, it suffers from some useability issues.
Continue reading ‘Thompson Scientific has a closed science search engine.’
Tag Archive for 'publishing'
Via BBGM, I hear of WebCite, an on-demand Wayback Machine for web content cited within academic publications. It’s important to make sure that links to web content in academic publications don’t fail to resolve to their intended content over time, but how valuable is it, and whose responsibility is it?
If the citing author feels it’s important, they should make a local copy. They have the same right to make a local copy as a repository does. If the cited author feels the link is important, he should take steps to maintain accessibility of his content. If neither of these things happen, this raises the question whether the value of the potentially inaccessible content is greater than the cost of a high-availability mirror of the web whose funding will come from as yet unspecified publishing partners.
These things aside, there are some important technical flaws with the project:
Of course, it’s much easier to find flaws in a solution than to come up with a solution in the first place, but it seems to me that a DOI-like system where semantic permalinks could be used that would always point to content wherever it moved around the web would work better, lead to a more complete index, and be much cheaper to run, as well. I know they chose archiving as opposed to redirecting because they wanted to link to the version of the page on the day it was cited, and that’s a good idea, but if having a copy of the page as it was is important, the author needs to make a local copy, rather than hope some third-party will do it for him.
John Udell likes it, but I’m feeling like it needs a little work.
Last week, Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting announced a post-aggregation system for posts discussing peer-reviewed research only. They didn’t give any details of exactly how the aggregation system would work, so I bugged the people behind it via email.
Continue reading ‘More info on Blogging Peer-reviewed Research Reporting’
Since I wrote that last post, it has become apparent that there’s a lot of confusion regarding citing material on the internet, which isn’t surprising given that there’s a lot of confusion surrounding the internet itself. Put your mind at ease, gentle reader, for clarity awaits.
Continue reading ‘Clearing up the confusion around citations of internet sources’
Open Medicine. Because access to medical information shouldn’t be limited to wealthy people and those who live near a library or work at a university. From Health vs. Medicine.
The PRISM Coalition is a fairly unsubtle attempt at obfuscating the issues behind Open Access in scientific publishing, using an approach similar to that employed by the cable and phone companies arguing against net neutrality. Needless to say, it has prompted some rather unsubtle responses. Nature is distancing themselves from PRISM and trying to refocus the attention on the rather complex issues underlying Open Access. All the relevant linkage is in the post, just be sure to not miss J.C. Bradley’s comment.
[tags]open science, prism, scientific publishing, nature, npg, politics[/tags]
It used to be that people would wander in the dusty stacks of the library or old bookstores in search for arcane lore. More recently, it’s been indie artists who seed obscure references into their music, and even more recently, independent films or TV series such as Twin Peaks. The most difficult thing has always been that it takes a certain amount of commercial success to get your work seen by a large number of people. Writers have always struggled to find publishers, musicians have always wrestled with how to get a recording contract without sacrificing artistic integrity, and TV shows have had much the same problem. The problem has gotten successively worse as the cost of producing a single work has gone up from print to film. In all media, pulp has been the predominant output, be it trashy romance novels, boy bands, game/reality shows and soap operas. But now there’s a new game in town.
For less than it costs a publishing company to run a small pressing of books, anyone can share lessons learned from life experiences. Any kind of arcane or abstruse discovery now has an unlimited production run, in almost any language, too, thanks to text translation tools such as Babelfish(itself an arcane reference to THE answer) or Google’s Language Tools. I’m talking mostly about blogs.
Here’s my bit of arcane lore: This is why we as a nation have become increasingly shallow through the last half of this decade. We’re predominantly exposed to more and more shallow media just due to the economics of the situation. Information we receive about “how life is” comes from more shallow sources. There’s been a resurgence of the nerd, a person deep in at least some respects, precisely due to the fact that blogging about “how life is” isn’t subject to nearly as strong of economic forces. (This revival of the nerd started before blogging became a phenomenon, but it does closely parallel the development of computing.) Instead of “Everyone Loves Raymond” for everyone, there’s millions of different ways people can see other people getting through life, making mistakes and learning from them. I think this is so big, it has the potential to restore my faith in the human race.
Of course, the primary output of internet media is still pulp, too.
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