Clearing up the confusion around citations of internet sources

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.

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Nature Publishing Group distances themselves from PRISM.

Dog WhistleThe 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]

Where do we go to find answers to the kind of questions you don’t get taught?

      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.

Open Access to Scientific Literature

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.

Online, real-time, science commentary

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.

Are Scientific Journals Self-censoring?

Lagniappe is sounding off on the decision of the major scientific journals to self-censor material which could be used by terrorists. All kinds of things are being done now, that we normally wouldn’t do, due to fears about terrorism. There are reasons why we don’t normally do these things. We don’t normally keep a database of information about where foreign nationals are going, what they’re doing, and what they’re buying. Our government doesn’t normally provide us a number to call in case our neighbors look like they’re doing something suspicious. We don’t normally do anything to infringe on the freedom of the press. It’s the same issue underlying all three issues: respect of individual liberty. In the extreme case we need to take one of these measures, it should be understood that serious oversight and openness must be part of the process.

The way the journals are handling the issue is a great example of the way to handle an issue like this. For the tiny number of cases that require it, they work with the author to get them to focus their article on the things necessary to make their point, but not to give anyone any unrelated ideas. If additional information is desired by someone, well…any responsible researcher knows how to handle requests for additional information. They are familiar with the people in their field, so they can handle requests for information such as, “Exactly which conditions most greatly contributed to pathogenicity” in somewhat similiar fashion to the way you would handle a request to borrow your axe. You might loan it to your neighbor willingly, but if somebody you don’t know shows up wearing a hockey mask and asks to borrow it, you’re gonna be a little more careful.
Thanks for the blogroll, Derek!