Open Access to Scientific Literature

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From HubLog via Open Access News: Physiological Genomics is adopting the Prosser Method of offering open access: Pay to have your article published, leaving all text, figures, and supplementary material open access, or let the article be published under a standard subscription(including page charges too, I’d guess). It’s clearly the way to go for someone who believes “free and unfettered exchange of information” is crucial to the scientific process.

Most people at most research institutions can get a hold of an article if they want it, because the institution will have a subscription. My undergraduate institution didn’t have online access to anything but pubmed, though, so you had to schlep down to the library and copy it, if you wanted the full article. It was like the internet didn’t exist to these people, ironically called the Information Science group. Then there was the time they canceled their print subscriptions to Science, Nature, and PNAS because they were too expensive….

In the near future, when trackback enables a ubiquitous commentary system, we’ll wonder why it took so long.

High-end animated illustrations of animations of nanobots attacking Staphylococcus aureus and platelet aggregation

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Hybrid Medical Technologies makes high-end animated illustrations of animations of things such as nanobots attacking Staphylococcus aureus bacteria and platelet aggregation. I wonder if they’d let me use some of their sample images in my presentations. They’re beautiful.
Thanks to The Eyes Have It!

Online, real-time, science commentary

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Derek Lowe is dipping into the debate on online science commentary at his site at Corante, In The Pipeline. From the perspective of a graduate student, it’s a fantastic idea. Instead of waiting for the few scientific meeting and conventions a year to interact with peers and senior researchers in our field, we could potentially receive and respond to comments daily. John Vu is criticizing Eagleman & Holcombe for failing to make any mention of blogging whatsoever, despite the obvious examples, such as Hubmed. I’ve written before about the neat feature of RSS feeds of literature queries.

Kofi Annan’s commencement speech at MIT in 1997

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I recently came across the transcript of Kofi Annan’s commencement speech at MIT in 1997. It’s interesting to read his speech, especially this paragraph, in the context of current events. I liked reading this; I feel like it’s more candid than a public speech.

I begin with the struggle between reason and unreason. When the history of the twentieth century is written, this struggle will figure very prominently in it. On the plane of international affairs, the outbursts of unreason in this century surpass in horror and human tragedy any the world has seen in the entire modern era. From Flanders’ fields to the Holocaust and the aggressions that produced World War II; from the killing fields of Cambodia and Rwanda to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia; from the twenty-five million refugees who roam the world today to untold millions, many of them children, who die the slow death of starvation or are maimed for life by land-mines–our century, even this generation, has much to answer for.

Quite a nice summary, isn’t it? He toots his own horn and that of the UN quite a bit, but it’s interesting how he draws a parallel between international relations(“the project of international organization”) and the scientific process.