Slashdot Mirror

There is a list of a lot of "open access" repositories at:

http://roarmap.eprints.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROARMAP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Open_access_archives
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv

In addition to funding agencies with open access requirements for research they fund, some fairly "big name" institutions in the US maintain documents produced by their faculty:

Harvard Arts and Science - http://roarmap.eprints.org/75/
University of California - http://roarmap.eprints.org/55/
MIT - http://roarmap.eprints.org/122/

There is a list of a lot of "open access" repositories at:

http://roarmap.eprints.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROARMAP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Open_access_archives
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv

In addition to funding agencies with open access requirements for research they fund, some fairly "big name" institutions in the US maintain documents produced by their faculty:

Harvard Arts and Science - http://roarmap.eprints.org/75/
University of California - http://roarmap.eprints.org/55/
MIT - http://roarmap.eprints.org/122/

There is a list of a lot of "open access" repositories at:

http://roarmap.eprints.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROARMAP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Open_access_archives
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv

In addition to funding agencies with open access requirements for research they fund, some fairly "big name" institutions in the US maintain documents produced by their faculty:

Harvard Arts and Science - http://roarmap.eprints.org/75/
University of California - http://roarmap.eprints.org/55/
MIT - http://roarmap.eprints.org/122/

There is a list of a lot of "open access" repositories at:

http://roarmap.eprints.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROARMAP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Open_access_archives
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv

In addition to funding agencies with open access requirements for research they fund, some fairly "big name" institutions in the US maintain documents produced by their faculty:

Harvard Arts and Science - http://roarmap.eprints.org/75/
University of California - http://roarmap.eprints.org/55/
MIT - http://roarmap.eprints.org/122/

From the fine article, it looks like Harvard is already among those supporting Open Access. So it's not just Princeton. I think there are quite a few others now. It's time for a list to be made, to show which universities are the leaders.

However, open access may be going more discipline by discipline rather than institution by institution. Arxiv and PLoS have been big for years for certain fields.

Our institution uses something called ePrints - I'm not sure if it's entirely what you're looking for but it does support different Subjects (headings?) and you can upload the documents using it.

You could always Self-Archive your papers...

Where to start, first try http://pisdcoalition.org/
as the 'alternative' site to prism (they forgot that wanting to share you knowledge is the work of communists).

Background:
Researchers at Universities do research.
They are paid by the University, and they (well the University) may have received a grant to carry out the research (from nsf in the US or the research councils in the UK for example).

Once they have done their research they write it up, normally in a paper (in the arts it can be a dance!).

They send the paper to our journal. The journal's editorial board receive it and will the have it peer reviewed by other researchers in the same field to ensure it meets a level of quality and is suitable for the journal. This is the crucial part of the process. But the peer reviews do not get paid for this, and the VAST majority of editors do not get paid either.

The publishers then sell the journal to the very Universities who supplied the articles for free and allowed their academics to peer review and edit for free (on university time normally).

The publisher will normally demand they own the copyright.

The price they sell journals to Universities have gone up far more than inflation year after year after year, which means unis cancel journal subs. Plus the contracts are complex with huge tie-ins and 'if you buy x you must by z' clauses.

All publishers to is take the work of the academic (for free), get the editors and peers to review (for free) and then demand they own it, all for basically doing little more than formatting the document, proof reading and putting on a website (and, rarer now-a-days, in print). These are basic clerical jobs, not something which means they should own the copyright.

As noted, Universities and academics often do not have access to their own work.

There are changes afoot.

The Open Access movement is taking off (either through freely available journals, or by making the articles available on University websites). The latter are referred to as Institutional Repositories (unsexy name!) and I happen to run one. The software they use is either http://www.dspace.org/ or http://www.eprints.org/ both are free and open source.

Chris

...EPrints but more geared towards the video aspect. It's great to see more and more ways for Scientists to get their research out there and in the public sphere!

This is as good of a reason as any why research information and data should be made publicly avialable and redistributable, for redundancacy purposes and also to further innovation.

Coincidentally, The School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton is at the forefront of the worldwide movement towards institutional archiving of research with their EPrints Project.

Assumption "2) To rotate an object one needs to give it angular velocity, " is wrong. For an explanation, see e.g. "H. Essén
The Cat Landing on its Feet Revisited or Angular Momentum Conservation and Torque-free Rotations of Non-rigid Mechanical Systems
American Journal of Physics 49 (1981) pp.756-758." The "Cat problem" is also mentioned in ch.3 in http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/fulltext?forma t=application/pdf&identifier=oai%3AarXiv.org%3Aphy sics%2F0401146

You can actually get an idea of this on an ordinary office swivel(sp?) chair. Sit on it, stick your arms straight out-left and right, as quick as you can move one arm forward and the other backwards. Your body will turn in the opposite direction as a reaction. Now slowly lower your arms-still pointing forward and backward. When they are back along your body (front and back) move them slowly so they are along your side. Now your body posture should be the same as you startet with, but rotated a small angle. Repeat as many times you want to e.g. rotate 360.

Modified newtonian dynamics (MOND) is an effort to revise gravity (a failed one, it looks to me).

It'll be interesting to see if TeVeS can recover from this paper.

The alternative to complicating the universe with dark mattter, dark energy, and multiple dimensions is replacing General Relativity with a more complicated theory. Which we know needs to be done on the quantum scale at least, but which hasn't been successfully done yet.

So, right now, we have GR. Which needs undiscovered "dark" matter to explain why galaxies are rotating faster than expected. And extra dimensions to solve the problem of different-sized galaxies. And "dark" energy to explain why these galaxies are separating from each other than they should given our estimates of their mass.

The most serious alternative to that is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), which assumes that at very low accelerations (lower than any body in the Solar System experiences, because of solar gravitational acceleration), F=ma is wrong. This explains away dark mattter easily, and there's even been a suggestion that the TeVeS version of MOND can explain away dark energy, too.

Now, if somebody can come up with a successful model of quantum gravity that also reduces to MOND on a galactic scale . . . well, he'll get a Nobel, and probably replace "Einstein" as a synonym for "genius".

One of the big things in Universities at the moment are Institutional Repositories. Bascially a web accessible database containg records and FULL TEXT of all articles published by academics at the organisation.

Have a look at a list of a few here (from the eprints website). Many of them are in there early days, but in a few years will have grown to be quite a collection. The next step will be to cross search them, perhaps using Z39.50.

There are two software applications to run these sites. eprints from Southampton University (UK) and dspace from MIT/HP.

Some other links can be found here.

Chris
--

One of the big things in Universities at the moment are Institutional Repositories. Bascially a web accessible database containg records and FULL TEXT of all articles published by academics at the organisation.

Have a look at a list of a few here (from the eprints website). Many of them are in there early days, but in a few years will have grown to be quite a collection. The next step will be to cross search them, perhaps using Z39.50.

There are two software applications to run these sites. eprints from Southampton University (UK) and dspace from MIT/HP.

Some other links can be found here.

Chris
--

It's already happening; thus all the eprints installations, the RDN and so on. There's a lot of this stuff going on throughout Europe. No scientist particularly enjoys being behind a subscription-only system, so it generally catches on to some extent.

The major problem is a) that it's often hard to find somebody willing to put in the time to populate archives like these, and b) several of the arsier publishers won't agree with the online distribution of preprint papers.

I think the question to ask is not so much how long it will take before the rest of the EU follows suit, since there are parallel efforts going on all over the place, most of which use the same basic technology set (OAI - open archives initiative). There's a paper about DAREnet that remains unslashdotted, here. If anything, the question is "How long will it take each group to get a move on and implement something?" and the answer to that is something between "how long is a piece of string?" and "How much does the group in question enjoy politics?"

I've been involved with an undergraduate journal at California State University, Monterey Bay for the past couple of years. Just this year we opted to go with an open source journal management system developed and supported by the Public Knowledge Project Open Journal Systems at the University of British Columbia. We're quite happy with it, both from a technical standpoint and the mission of the project. ePrints is another project working on similar issues.

Hopefully we will see more open access (without requiring payment from authors OR readers!) as libraries and other institutions start to use these great open source tools. It makes management and online publication/archiving really painless. There's even a distributed backup system in place and a group running archiving standards.

As a member of the American Anthropological Association I understand that the journals they publish are supported through subscriber costs which far outweigh the cost of publication. The remaining profit goes to funding the annual conference, administration costs for the association, etc. They have recently made all of the American Anthropologist journals available to members online, a pretty massive project I'm sure.

There's a decent amount of evidence that has been mounting over the past few years that a large component of redshift is in fact intrinsic, i.e. not attributed to the Doppler effect.

In some ways, it seems related to the much-glossed-over "K Effect" of a few decades ago, where it was found that bright, bright blue stars seemed to be systematically redshifted.

Researchers like M. B. Bell are of the opinion that the intrinsic redshifts are superimposed on a Big Bang flow (reducing the actual velocity we should be measuring). Others, like Arp, believe that the Hubble Flow is an illusion, and that the universe is actually relatively static once you take away the intrinsic redshifts.

David Russell's paper that just came out supports either view, and shows that other explanations (like Tully-Fisher Relationship errors or rotational velocities) are far too small to account for the large discrepancies.

(Some more hubbub on the topic.)

In either case, intrinsic redshifts will take a lot of pressure off researchers to find 'dark energy', because the discrepancies of speed/distance are much reduced.

Then, perhaps, we can stop looking for something that isn't there? :)

IEEE, has already gone "Green" -- i.e., it is among the 78% of publishers (publishing 92% of the 8950 journals surveyed to date) who have already given each of their authors the green light to provide open access to their own articles, if they wish, by self-archiving them in their own institutional OA archives. IEEE is now contemplating also going "Gold" -- i.e., becoming one of the 5% of publishers that are open-access publishers, making all of their articles open-access (and many of them recovering their costs by charging the author-institutions for publication by the article instead of charging the user-institutions for access by the journal or article). Going Gold is not without an element of risk, so IEEE are to be highly commended if they actually decide to try it, but let us not foget that, being already green, IEEE are already on the side of the angels! It is the authors (and their institutions and funders) -- i.e., the research community itself, the very ones for whom the benefits of open access are being sought -- who are to blame for not yet going when the going is Green, by self-archiving their own articles so as to make them open access. Relief may be on the way there too, however, in the form of a proposed new recommendation to the 55 major research institutions worldwide who have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access" that they should now implement an explicit Institutional Self-archiving Policy of providing open access to their own research article output. (A summary will appear in the March issue of D-lib magazine.) Two recent international surveys have found that whereas most authors do not yet self-archive, 79% will do so willingly, but only if and when they are required to do so by their employers and/or funders.

IEEE, has already gone "Green" -- i.e., it is among the 78% of publishers (publishing 92% of the 8950 journals surveyed to date) who have already given each of their authors the green light to provide open access to their own articles, if they wish, by self-archiving them in their own institutional OA archives. IEEE is now contemplating also going "Gold" -- i.e., becoming one of the 5% of publishers that are open-access publishers, making all of their articles open-access (and many of them recovering their costs by charging the author-institutions for publication by the article instead of charging the user-institutions for access by the journal or article). Going Gold is not without an element of risk, so IEEE are to be highly commended if they actually decide to try it, but let us not foget that, being already green, IEEE are already on the side of the angels! It is the authors (and their institutions and funders) -- i.e., the research community itself, the very ones for whom the benefits of open access are being sought -- who are to blame for not yet going when the going is Green, by self-archiving their own articles so as to make them open access. Relief may be on the way there too, however, in the form of a proposed new recommendation to the 55 major research institutions worldwide who have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access" that they should now implement an explicit Institutional Self-archiving Policy of providing open access to their own research article output. (A summary will appear in the March issue of D-lib magazine.) Two recent international surveys have found that whereas most authors do not yet self-archive, 79% will do so willingly, but only if and when they are required to do so by their employers and/or funders.

IEEE, has already gone "Green" -- i.e., it is among the 78% of publishers (publishing 92% of the 8950 journals surveyed to date) who have already given each of their authors the green light to provide open access to their own articles, if they wish, by self-archiving them in their own institutional OA archives. IEEE is now contemplating also going "Gold" -- i.e., becoming one of the 5% of publishers that are open-access publishers, making all of their articles open-access (and many of them recovering their costs by charging the author-institutions for publication by the article instead of charging the user-institutions for access by the journal or article). Going Gold is not without an element of risk, so IEEE are to be highly commended if they actually decide to try it, but let us not foget that, being already green, IEEE are already on the side of the angels! It is the authors (and their institutions and funders) -- i.e., the research community itself, the very ones for whom the benefits of open access are being sought -- who are to blame for not yet going when the going is Green, by self-archiving their own articles so as to make them open access. Relief may be on the way there too, however, in the form of a proposed new recommendation to the 55 major research institutions worldwide who have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access" that they should now implement an explicit Institutional Self-archiving Policy of providing open access to their own research article output. (A summary will appear in the March issue of D-lib magazine.) Two recent international surveys have found that whereas most authors do not yet self-archive, 79% will do so willingly, but only if and when they are required to do so by their employers and/or funders.

Libraries already pay BIG bucks for overpiced journal subscriptions from for-profit publishers. Not to mention having to build new extensions for all the shelf space.

If free online journals (aka eprints)

http://www.eprints.org/

can be hosted by the universities and their libraries, the cost will be much less than the present.

See http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.h tm

for details.

On the Deep Disanalogy
Between Text and Software and
Between Text and Data
Insofar as Free/Open Access is Concerned

Stevan Harnad
Moderator,
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Am sci/index.html To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Sci entist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-forum@amsci.org

<my guess>
Space has dimensionality; a plane has 2 dimensions, a cube exists in 3, hypercube 4... the numbers here are positive. Mandelbrot said he was using negative dimensions to measure "emptiness". He mentions that only one set is considered "empty" (I presume the null set). My guess (and I only minored in math so don't go betting on this) is that a negative dimension is to a positive dimension what a negative number is to a positive one. I'm thinking that if an object existed in -2 dimensions, it would be capable of having negative area. If you could add that object to an object with positive area, you'd reduce the second object's area.
</my guess>

Here's Mandelbrot's homepage at Yale.

Here's more links.

It's been proven here:

http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/fulltext?forma t=application/pdf&identifier=oai%3AarXiv.org%3Amat h%2F9306213

But from what I understand, this guy came up with most of his best work with only a vague idea of what a mathematical proof was.

He did get invited to England, was decorated academically but did die of disease brought on by an intense dislike of the food and he was not aware of how to properly sleep under covers, and the cold nights caused his health to deteriorate along with malnutrition.

This is not a joke, I've read somewhere reliable that he was never told how to properly put himself to bed - he slept without the covers never knowing (or being shown for that matter) how the bed was to be used.

Apparently, the first 3-4 letters received in England were thought of as hoaxes because he had his own notation for everything, but it was (luckily) discovered that he was no hoax.

The fact that blisters are observed after another doesn't make it causation. Like you pointed out earlier, they could be both caused by a third, independent cause. The reason we assume Sun causes, and not merely corellates with skin damage is because of our prior knowledge, and subjective interpretation of data.

Here's another example -- you observe that every time a fox enters the chicken shed, you find some slain chickens the next day. Now, the observation is merely a corellation. Perhaps fox is just attracted to noise made by some unseen animal slaying the chickens. Despite that, the farmer will probably conclude fox did slay the chickens.

It's true that there could be 3rd cause, or even the causality goes the other way. But that's true of almost everything. We don't even know if the causality is local. For instance, here are some experiments which suggest that events in the future can cause events in the past -- http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?id=o ai:arXiv.org:quant-ph/9801061

The question here is not whether they prove causality (because you can't), but how plausible their hypothesis is.

I'll see your karma whoring, and raise you, umm... several:
dotLRN, built on the OpenACS toolkit.
The Future Learning Environment, built on Zope.
The Open Archives Initiative is also interesting for academic information archival projects. Also eprints.org for GPL software for creating archives.

A lot of so-called "distance learning" projects focus their efforts on multimedia transmission - so that a picture of a person talking on screen can be transmitted... big whoop. The projects listed above focus on discussion and content sharing, which is where I think online education will really thrive.

I've already used GNU EPrints for two projects here at work and it almost exactly fits your description. It's 100% perl based and can be extended or shrunk as much as your perl skils allow. It's initially subscriber based, but there are some areas which are accessible to non-subscribers. The system doesn't come with support for payments because it is written in the spirit of free peer2peer review tradition and the only requirement to being a subscriber is the ability to create an account. I would imagine though that it'd be relatively easy to adapt it to have a fee-based access mode.

Don't know if this is what you need but it sounds pretty close.

chepati

For some related information have a look at
www.eprints.org
which is aimed at making research freely available. I am developing a system called GNU EPrints which is currently an online research archive but may well get peer review functionality in the next year or so.

See also Stevan's page at Southampton (his current home - the Department of Electronic and Computer Science) and some of the projects which he is involved with, particularly the ePrints project, which is building an infrastructure for facilitating the self-archiving of academic papers in the way that Stevan suggests.

(yes, I'm a researcher at Soton)

translates to:

These outlets will compete with the quasi-monopolies held by the journal industry and provide publication credits to researchers whose articles aren't good enough to be published in normal periodicals

I read more than the article and discovered this page: EPrints 2.0 Documentation - Introduction

At the bottom it read:

A 2.0 and than this ? I dont know ...

Firstly the eprints.org author/institution self-archiving software: eprints.org
It's been designed "to be as flexible and adaptable as possible so that universities can adopt and configure it with minimal effort for all disciplines".
An exapmple of its use is at the: Cognitive Sciences eprint Archive

It's also got other noble principles behind it:"The generic version of eprints is fully interoperable with all other OAI-Compliant Open Archives. This means that it no longer matters where papers are archived; the papers in all registered OAI-compliant Archives can be harvested using the OAI protocol into one global "virtual archive" by Open Archives Service Providers".
See the Open Archives Initiative for more info.

Oh, and our department's publication database isn't bad either.