Open-Access

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. ...

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 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! ...

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. ...

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.). ...

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. ...

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. ...