Open-Access on Jean-Etienne's blog

Open Access week: October 24-31, 2011

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 21:18:16 +0000

For once, I won’t write about a day here but about a week: this week is the Open Access week (OA week). In this fourth edition, it’s not time anymore to explain one more time what is Open Access (but if you still want to read about it, read the Wikipedia article or Peter Suber’s overview). This year, this week is defined as " an opportunity […] to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research".

An update on JoVE

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 22:34:55 +0000

Three years ago, I wrote about JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments. JoVE was a peer reviewed, open access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format. I recently discovered that since 2009, JoVE is now just a peer reviewed, open access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format. You can debate at length on whether JoVE was Open Access (as I thought) or not. I just think it’s sad although I understand their motives: in a recent exchange with them, they wrote they “handle most production of our content [themselves] and it is a very very costly operation”.

Aaron Swartz versus JSTOR

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:18:22 +0000

Aaron Swartz, a 24-year old hacker, was recently indicted on data theft charges for downloading over 4 million documents from JSTOR, a US-based online system for archiving academic journals. Mainstream media ( Reuters, Guardian, NYT, Time, …) reported this with a mix of facts and fiction. I guess that the recent attacks of hacking groups on well-known websites and the release of data they stole on the internet gave to this story some spice.

About file formats accepted by BioMed Central

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 21:32:48 +0000

BioMed Central is one of the main Open Access publishers in the world of Science, Technology and Medicine. On a side note, that’s where I published my two articles (in Proteome Science and the Journal of Circadian Rhythms). One might think that, given their support to Open Access, they would also support Open Source software and Open Format documents.

For the software side, it’s not very clear. Although they ask authors to consider releasing software described in publications under a free (or at least open source) license, they also support and advertise for a bunch of proprietary software. While it’s not a bad thing per se (it enlarges the number of potential authors), it’s sad to see they don’t cite popular free software like OpenOffice.org (to write your article), Gimp (to edit your figures) or Zotero (for reference management). These are the three main software in each category but the free software world has many more of them!

JoVE and (self-)archiving?

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:35:40 +0000

In my previous post, I was glad to see that the Journal of Visualized Experiments ( JoVE) was now indexed by PubMed. I then spent some time watching some very interesting videos. And I realized that something is missing …

In my mind, I thought that third-party archiving (like arXiv or self-archiving) was one of the mandatory requirements for Open Access journals … and I was wrong. It seems JoVE is not giving the (technical) possibility to download the publication from their website (all what you can download is the abstract in text version). Now that this publication is a video and not a text/PDF version, it’s a problem for me (who cares?) and the Open Access movement (imho).

JoVE on PubMed

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:52:03 +0000

JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments is a peer reviewed, open access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format. Think of a YouTube-like service for the life-science community, add a quality control before publication and you’ll get the picture. As many other Open Access scientific journal, JoVE is now indexed in PubMed, the life-science publications directory. It’s nice to see interesting, open and innovative initiatives getting a “recognition” like this.

AEL-NG?

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:00:14 +0000

A few days ago, I was sad to see that the Association Electronique Libre (AEL) website was down and only replaced by two measly tags. For those who didn’t know it:

The Association Electronique Libre is a belgian association protecting the fundamental rights in the information society.

The Association Electronique Libre supports the freedoms of speech, press, and association on the Internet and any electronical mediums, the right to use encryption software for private communication, the right to write software unimpeded by private monopolies, the right to access and preserve public domain and free digital information.
(from an old copy of the AEL website)

One more Open Source software at ULg

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:47:29 +0000

After the promotion of Open Access (see Bernard Rentier’s blog) and a history of publications in Open Access journals (see this last article from the Cyclotron Research Center in PLoS), the University of Liege is slowly slowly publishing Open Source software too.

The last free software published is exams, an assessment management system (for on-line exams, …). They chose the GNU GPL 2, apparently without the possibility to upgrade to version 3 (I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not). And you can download the source code here.

Microsoft Research to sponsor Open Access awards

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:34:14 +0000

In a somewhat strange move, Microsoft Research is going to sponsor BioMed Central 2007 Research Awards.

Lee Dirks, director, scholarly communications, Microsoft Research: “We are very supportive of the open science movement and recognize that open access publication is an important component of overall scholarly communications.”

I hope the other Microsoft divisions are going to follow this move and sponsor (or release their products as) Open Source and free software projects … More details on the announcement here.

Nothing new on the Open Access front

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:03:30 +0000

Cambridge University Peter Murray Rust discovered he cannot have access to his article he paid for an Open Access publication in an Oxford University Press journal. This caused some discussions on /. but, as usual, it’s better to first have a look at Peter Suber blog to have an objective view on this.

Dasher: where do you want to write today?

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 23:14:34 +0000

Hannah Wallash put their slides about Dasher on the web (quite the same as these ones from her mentor). Dasher is an “information-efficient text-entry interface”.

What made me interested in Dasher is her introduction about the way we communicate with computers and how they help us to communicate with them. There are keyboards (even reduced ones), gesture alphabets, text entry prediction, etc. I am interested in the ways people can enter text on a touch-screen, without physical keyboard. Usually, people use a virtual keyboard (like in kiosks for tourists or in handheld devices). But they are apparently not the best solutions.

"A closed mind about an open world"

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 23:26:01 +0000

Under this title, James Boyle, professor of law at Duke Law School (USA), wrote a comment article in the Financial Times [1]. For him, we all have a cognitive bias regarding intellectual property and the internet: the openness aversion. The openness aversion is the fact that we undervalue the importance and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production. With three examples (internet, free software and Wikipedia), he somehow shows the evolution of mentalities towards theses “open things”. In 1991, scholars, businessmen and bureaucrats (and even us, maybe) would have scoffed at the internet as a business product. At that moment, control and ownership seemed the right way to go.

Goodiff monitors (changes in legal documents of) service providers

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 23:29:37 +0000

GooDiff began its work a week ago and I didn’t see much news/blog posts about it. If I correctly understood, the idea behind GooDiff is to monitor changes in legal documents of (internet) service providers (like Google or Yahoo!). Indeed, service providers are often trying to change on the fly their legal documents, especially in some critical sections like privacy, copyright and alike. With GooDiff, consumers and users are now able to keep track of these changes. Thanks Alexandre!

Open Access publication message

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 09:18:44 +0000

We, scientists, create, provide and judge the science presented to journals. While we are not paid by the publishers, we pay to get access to this science.

Publishers who concentrate more and more journals within a few companies use their oligopoly to charge more and more and earn tremendous amounts of money. They use a snobbism about impact factors and the tyranny this exerts on the career of young scientists.

A step further "simple" Open Access to scientific litterature

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 12:11:36 +0000

Combining a trend from the free software world and a reaction to increasing subscription costs, the last decade saw the emergence of the “Open Access” movement in the scientific litterature. Instead of transfering all your rights (and copyrights) to an editor that will sell your work to other scientists, you can choose to publish your work in Open Access journals. In this case, you retain your rights (and copyrights) on the article you wrote. Moreover, your work is freely available to other scientists (at least in electronic format) while still being of some quality since the reviewing process is still there. As an article writer, you only risk to be cited more often (since your article is freely available). As an article reader, you only risk to gain more knowledge (since more and more interesting articles are published with various Open Access publishers like BioMed Central, the Public Library of Science, etc.).

Quaero and the quest for alternatives

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 14:03:10 +0000

An article in the French newspaper Le Monde presents Quaero ( to seek, in Latin) as the future “European Google”. Comments on this article are divided between supporters of this alternative and denigrors that predict another bureaucratic, bloated, ineffective project. My point here is not to argue pro or against this project. But I would like to dwell on American databases and search engines that serve the entire world.

When you need to look at some information on the internet (mainly, the web), I am sure you are using (American) tools like Google, Yahoo! or Altavista. In the life sciences domain, we have a wonderful database, PubMed, a service of the (American) National Library of Medicine that includes over 16 million citations of biomedical articles. When you are preparing a presentation or an experiment on a subject, it’s a great tool to do the bibliography.

Protocole non propriétaire =? absence de contrôle =? attention à l'extrème-droite

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 11:42:14 +0000

Soit je suis parano, soit j’ai raison de peu apprécier le raccourci suivant : Protocole non propriétaire = absence de contrôle = attention à l’extrême-droite …

Résumé : le Vlaams Belang, parti politique d’extrême-droite flamand / belge, émet une émission sur les ondes AM, via le système DRM ( Digital Radio Mondiale, une sorte d’équivalent au DAB ou RSN), à partir de l’étranger. Cette émission de 2 heures est apparemment “captable” (“écoutable”) en Belgique, avec le récepteur ad hoc. Le problème est que cette émission / radio / parti n’a pas d’autorisation pour émettre en Belgique.