University

The October 14th, 2010 issue of Nature is obviously a good one. It had to be a good one! I usually advocate Open Access but it is always nice to reading complimentary issues of Nature which is Closed Access but is also publishing very good articles about science at the same time. In this issue, I was interested in various topics … First, there is a serie of articles about the US midterm elections and what (US) scientists feel about two years of Obama administration. Obama promised total transparency in American science, a new era of integrity and more freedom for scientists. From what I read, this isn’t the case yet. ...

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. ...