Neuroscience
Two seemingly-unrelated articles in the New York Times in the last two days.
The first, Digital Domain: Someone Has to Pay for TV. But Who? And How?, from the Sunday Times (May 7), talks about technology that prohibits TV viewers from skipping through commercials. It's more of a personal essay than a description (pro or con) of the technology, and it raises the issue of who pays for TV. Randall Stross asserts that if he were "... violating an implicit contract that ... exists between broadcaster and viewer of ad-supported television, I take comfort in the knowledge that no such contract exists." But that is the implied contract, isn't it?
Over at the publishing debate, where there is a contract (ie, sale) of journals to permit access to scholarly articles, today's Times reports on the "Federal Research Public Access Act (ARL link) of 2006, proposed last week by Senators Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, and John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, [which] would require 11 government agencies to publish online any articles that contained research financed with federal grants. If enacted, the measure would require that the articles be accessible online without charge within six months of their initial publication in a scholarly journal."
Publishers are furious, of course, much as the television companies dislike DVRs that permit ad-skipping. A publisher whines that if journal articles were available on the free web, there would be no way of telling how many people read an article, warning that "readership may be halved". I bet the folks running Institutional Repositories would have a different response; from what I can tell, having articles available on the free web actually *increases* their usage.
Interesting issues. I'm voting against the first and for the second.
- Free Full-text Access To Sage Psychology Journals
Any Digest readers who don't enjoy the benefit of institutional access to full-text journal articles might be interested to know that, from today until the end of Sept. this year, the publishers Sage are offering free online full-text access to all...
- Find Good Research, Free
image source: FindIcons I recently spoke to Daniel Kreiss' JOMC 244 class: Talk Politics: An Introduction to Political Communication, and I created this library resource guide for further research. I wrote this post for the...
- Helping Scholars Find Material (rant)
John Dupuis, who writes the blog Confessions of a Science Librarian refers us to an interesting series of posts called "Finding Scientific Papers for Free." Written by biologist Sandra Porter on her blog Discovering Biology in a Digital World, they are...
- Good Background On Google
The August 2005 issue of Wired has lots of interesting articles about recent technology "that changed the world", including a fascinating article about the founding of Google. Talks about the scholarly reasons for its creation (citation searching) and...
- Important Cs Databases
ACM Digital Library Citations to over 400,000 articles in computer science. From the Association for Computing Machinery. 1985-present. NOTE: Create a free login & password to search the ACM. ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) Citations...
Neuroscience
Content -- TV & Scholarly Articles
Two seemingly-unrelated articles in the New York Times in the last two days.
The first, Digital Domain: Someone Has to Pay for TV. But Who? And How?, from the Sunday Times (May 7), talks about technology that prohibits TV viewers from skipping through commercials. It's more of a personal essay than a description (pro or con) of the technology, and it raises the issue of who pays for TV. Randall Stross asserts that if he were "... violating an implicit contract that ... exists between broadcaster and viewer of ad-supported television, I take comfort in the knowledge that no such contract exists." But that is the implied contract, isn't it?
Over at the publishing debate, where there is a contract (ie, sale) of journals to permit access to scholarly articles, today's Times reports on the "Federal Research Public Access Act (ARL link) of 2006, proposed last week by Senators Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, and John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, [which] would require 11 government agencies to publish online any articles that contained research financed with federal grants. If enacted, the measure would require that the articles be accessible online without charge within six months of their initial publication in a scholarly journal."
Publishers are furious, of course, much as the television companies dislike DVRs that permit ad-skipping. A publisher whines that if journal articles were available on the free web, there would be no way of telling how many people read an article, warning that "readership may be halved". I bet the folks running Institutional Repositories would have a different response; from what I can tell, having articles available on the free web actually *increases* their usage.
Interesting issues. I'm voting against the first and for the second.
- Free Full-text Access To Sage Psychology Journals
Any Digest readers who don't enjoy the benefit of institutional access to full-text journal articles might be interested to know that, from today until the end of Sept. this year, the publishers Sage are offering free online full-text access to all...
- Find Good Research, Free
image source: FindIcons I recently spoke to Daniel Kreiss' JOMC 244 class: Talk Politics: An Introduction to Political Communication, and I created this library resource guide for further research. I wrote this post for the...
- Helping Scholars Find Material (rant)
John Dupuis, who writes the blog Confessions of a Science Librarian refers us to an interesting series of posts called "Finding Scientific Papers for Free." Written by biologist Sandra Porter on her blog Discovering Biology in a Digital World, they are...
- Good Background On Google
The August 2005 issue of Wired has lots of interesting articles about recent technology "that changed the world", including a fascinating article about the founding of Google. Talks about the scholarly reasons for its creation (citation searching) and...
- Important Cs Databases
ACM Digital Library Citations to over 400,000 articles in computer science. From the Association for Computing Machinery. 1985-present. NOTE: Create a free login & password to search the ACM. ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) Citations...