The AIR is now available on line as an open access journal. This paragon of scientific publishing has been central in shaping our view of the world for a long time, and it is now finally available to all to enjoy, lean from, and …. Continue reading New Open Access Journal →

Yesterday, President Bush signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764) which, among else, mandates the repository of all NIH-funded research into PubMedCentral within at most 12 months after publication….

Read all about it at Blog around the Clock

PLoS ONE is One Year Old Today!

Reminder: NY to pick between ODF and OOXML:

“In August of 2007, the State of New York passed legislation requiring its CIO, Melodie Mayberry-Stewart, to gather information on the advantages and disadvantages of adopting either ODF or OOXML as a document standard, and to report her findings by 15 January 2008. As part of her duties under that legislation, the CIO issued a Request For Public Comment to get feedback on the topic. The deadline for that public comment is 28 December 2007

New Creative Commons License

CC+ is a protocol providing a simple way for users to get rights beyond the rights granted by a CC license. For example, a work’s Creative Commons license might offer noncommercial rights. With CC+, the license can also provide a link by which a user might secure rights beyond noncommercial rights — most obviously commercial rights, but also additional permissions or services such as warranty, permission to use without attribution, or even access to performance or physical media.The CC+ architecture gives businesses a simple way to move between the sharing and commercial economies. CC+ provides a lightweight standard around these best practices and is available for implementation immediately.

“After going premium and suffering some community fragmentation, the OpenOffice.org open source office suite is being taken in a new direction by a company named Ulteo. A brainchild of Gael Duval, founder of Mandriva Linux, Ulteo’s mission is to serve as a platform for putting applications onto the web. Using this approach, Ulteo has released a public beta of Online OpenOffice.org, which quite literally puts OpenOffice.org inside a browser.”[source]

Continue reading A New OpenSource Online Office →

Today, in conjunction with the Creative Commons 5th Birthday celebration, Science Commons announces the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data (“the Protocol”).The Protocol is a method for ensuring that scientific databases can be legally integrated with one another. The Protocol is built on the public domain status of data in many countries (including the United States) and provides legal certainty to both data deposit and data use. The protocol is not a license or legal tool in itself, but instead a methodology for a) creating such legal tools and b) marking data already in the public domain for machine-assisted discovery.

Read all about it here.

I must say, that when I was asked to be a Scibling, one of the “cons” was switching from an open source platform that I was very familiar with (WordPress) to a non-Open Source platform (Movable Type). But when I looked into it, I found out that there was a plan to switch Movable Type to open source. Well, the day has arrived.

As of [Dec 12th 2007] and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose….Like many of us on the team, some of you have been waiting for this moment for years. For a business, an open source license affects boring things like how a product is created, updated, and distributed. But the open source movement has always been about something more important: Freedom. With a name like “Movable Type”, we’ve always been keenly aware of the importance of freedom, as that name echoes both the birth of the printing press and the creation of independent media that an individual can control….Our goal has always been to create the best blogging platform in the world and to put that power in the hands of as many people as possible. …

Read all the details here.

The conflict between Microsoft and the Rest of the World, this time represented by the widely loved if somewhat cultish Opera Browser, is being played out int the EU. Opera Software ASA has filed a complaint with the European Commission asking regulators to force Microsoft to allow users a choice of Internet software to use with it’s operating system.Oper also alleges that MS was stifling developing efforts in the area of interooperability by not following accepted web standards. Microsoft did not comment.

Norway-based Opera said it was asking EU regulators to apply the principles of their landmark antitrust ruling against Microsoft – upheld by an EU court in September – to Internet software.That ruling required Microsoft to market a version of Windows without its media player program, even though there were few takers when it went on sale a year after the antitrust order.Opera claimed Microsoft was abusing its monopoly power as the supplier of software to most of the world’s personal computers by giving away its Internet Explorer with Windows and not offering alternative programs.It “requests the Commission to obligate Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and/or carry alternative browsers preinstalled on the desktop,” it said in a statement.[source]

Ten things you can do to help open source

If you’re happy just using open source, then no problem. But if you want to contribute, because you have a problem that nobody else is fixing — or simply because you want to do your bit in exchange — it can be difficult to know where to start. The following suggestions might just inspire you to join in.

Then this post goes on to give some suggestions. Most important two: use OpenSource software, and note that you don’t need to run Linux to use OpenSource software … there is lots available for the Mac and that other system as well.

I want to point out an interesting opinion piece about the threat of black boxes and the roll of OpenSource software in math.A key part of the message:

Increasingly, proprietary software and the algorithms used are an essential part of mathematical proofs. To quote J. Neubüser, “with this situation two of the most basic rules of conduct in mathematics are violated: In mathematics information is passed on free of charge and everything is laid open for checking.”

Continue reading Is There a Black Box in your Research Methodology? →