FWIW, while Cell and Nature are both owned by private companies, Science is run by a non-profit (the American Association for the Advancement of Science), and articles in science are made freely available two years after publication.
This free access requires registration and only includes content from 1997 forward While something is better than nothing, locking down the first 117 years of content unless you pay for the backfile isnt exactly researcher friendly
I wish more publishers would follow the lead of PNAS/American Heart Assoc/American Society of Microbiology All backfile content open and relatively short embargos on new content (6-12months)
"In the mean time China is rather successfully countering the growth of its population"
Right, you mean that large country that has been trampling over the freedom of its people for decades and carrying out a state sponsored, gender selective campaign of coerced abortion? Great example, really great.
Chesterton was a great observer and used great wit to comment on society
The fault in the analogy is that the two options provided (give a raise or restrict spending options) are only a small subset of the potential scenarios
owner goes out of business by paying more in salaries than the labor produces in profits
employer forgoes 4pence raise, and instead provides employees with a healthy lunch every day
owner fires employee and hires two children who will work for 1pence each
employee leaves owner for a job that pays better
etc.
Chesterton correctly points out that it isnt ethical to deprive a person their freedom (by restricting how they can spend the salary they are paid), but the answer to the problem presented isnt as simple as inflating the salary of the employee. True freedom must encompass both parties in the work contract.
There have been a few mentions of PLoS and several pre-print servers
But a transition from a major publishing conglomerate (Elsevier, Springer, Kluwer) doesnt require building your own capability from the ground up, or dropping the more formal review structure for a pre-print/forum type arrangement
There are several very reasonable, non-profit publishing outlets available, the one that jumps to mind is HighWire Press.
http://highwire.stanford.edu/
They provide the framework and hosting, you provide the typical editorial board and reviewers
Several large societies now use them, including the American Society for Microbiology.
If you cant make your payments on a 300K mortgage with 130K income then you obviously have major issues with your budget or other financial constraints you arent revealing. Quick check of a standard mortgage calculator and it looks like if you were in a 15 year fixed at 5% (easily refinanced these days) you wouldnt be paying more than 2300/month. So you are looking at 37K/year and sure there are upkeep costs and property taxes... there also is a big fat deduction for interest you are paying.
Maybe you were previously married and have to may alimony/child support etc. Maybe you have a parent in eldercare... I dont know. But crying that you cant make your mortgage when you are still pulling in 130K isnt going to garner a lot of sympathy when there are literally thousands of people who do the same on 75% of your household income
As challenging as Imperial measurements are, it could be so much worse. We could use Slashdot units of measurement like Libraries of Congress (LoCs), Volkswagon Beetles (VWBs) and StretchToTheMoonAndBacks (SttMaBs)
The costs of obtaining scholarly journals has been a major problem for over 2 decades, it seems to be getting more press in the last 5 years as the libraries have run out of simple fixes (consolidating purchases, canceling low use journals, etc) and the major publishers are now the only remaining places to cut back.
Here are some organizations that have been working to provide alternatives to authors and libraries, the rapid success of PLOS: Biology has certainly demonstrated that the traditional publishing models can be changed
SPARC - Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
Group affiliated with the American Research Libraries organization http://www.arl.org/sparc/
Koha is a great project (another great open project is Evergreen)... but last I checked it doesnt really do document management. Outside of the librarian/information professional communities there seems to be a lack of understanding about information categorization and classification.
There are fairly large differences in how you handle the storage, metadata and retrieval options for something that could 'circulate' in a traditional library and a component piece (article/paper). Traditionally there have been specialized resources for source level objects (books/journals) and there were specialized resources for digging deeper and locating chapters/articles/papers/abstracts within source objects.
I commonly see researchers checking a library catalog for a known article title, when the OPAC only includes journal title data
Maybe this is something new with the blurring of publishing on the web? There has been a lot of work on federated searching as a a solution to this... but in most implementations my experience has been that patrons lose the ability to use the individual resources to fullest effect and get a results list that leads to further confusion.
In any case, Koha would be great for setting up a lending library, and could be used as a framework for managing the metadata (title, author, year) with a link to a file... but in terms of actually having searchable text/OCR and additional tools it would be a poor choice (something like LibraryThing would be simpler if you werent worried about checkin/checkout, patron records, late fees etc)
quickly stripped of his committee assignments?
he has been serving on the U.S. House Small Business Committee until last month, when he announced "he will take a temporary leave from his position"
(full press release from June 5th, 2007 on his website at
http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/la02_jefferso n/pr_070605.html)
I have no love for former representative DeLay, and am glad that voters saw fit not to reelect him to the House, I only wish the people of Louisiana had sent Rep Jefferson packing as well
Just to confirm the ballpark validity of the poster's numbers on production... I highly recommend the FAO website for agricultural statistics (actually a cool website, available in 4 major languages and chock full of information)
using the FAOSTAT database (http://faostat.fao.org/)I got the following data on maize production (for reporting to the USDA/FAO (UN) maize encompasses all corn other than fresh sweet corn (reported as Green Corn), including human consumption (flour/meal) and livestock feed)
Maize Production (Mt) by year
2002 USA 228,805,088 Canada 8,998,800 World 603,163,668
2003 USA 256,904,560 Canada 9,587,300 World 642,711,958
2004 USA 299,917,120 Canada 8,835,700 World 724,515,133
2005 USA 280,228,384 Canada 8,392,000 World 694,575,552
So the figure provided above of 598 metric ton is very close (usually there are adjustments made for a couple of years afterthe initial report is released as better data becomes available and missing data is added). You can also get information on how the crops are being utilized (feed, food, etc.) as portion of production from this website... I wont go through all the numbers, but the short story is that in most of the industrialized world we feed around 2/3s or our corn to livestock, in less industrial nations it is typically less than 1/3 for feed with single digits common.
For those interested enough to read the full text of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech which the parent incorrectly quoted, related briefly enough to provide no context, and attributed incorrectly (the Jr. at the end of the name matters) you can read it online at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimet obreaksilence.htm
Here is the paragraph from which this particular line was paraphrased by the parent,
"My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."
As a librarian at a federal R&D center I have also been looking into this (our current OPAC/ILS was selected 10 yearss ago as the lowest bidder and it has delivered the value you would expect from the lowest bidder, who has been sold several times and developed the product very litte... end rant)
this topic came up on my grad school alumni BB (yes most professional librarians in the US have at least a Masters degree)
in addition to the other excellent resources already mentioned (Koha for example)... I will add Evergreen which can be found at http://www.open-ils.org/
as someone else mentioned earlier, it really depends on what kind of in house support/customization you can handle (both an issue of technical expertise and just man hours available) and the scalability required. Some of the OSX options are fine for someone tracking their personal collection of less than a 1000 items which are lent to friends and relatives, but even a small library OPAC has much higher needs and moving from simply OPAC functions (check in/out, overdue notices, catalogue searching) to a full ILS could add modules for acquisitions, interlibrary lending, multisite support, multiple user levels (staff, patron, admin) etc. You want to have a good idea where you think you might end up in 10 years and then pick an appropriate option that will provide you the basic functions you need and formats that can be imported into the next great thing down the road (add in the current maturity of the project, committment of the development team, frequency of updates/releases, etc.)
Best of luck!
As a librarian who has worked in several institutions conducting R&D I would comment on a couple of your points. First the per-reader cost is low if you consider the entire research community... but earlier in your statement you mention that the peer-review process is difficult because of the small number of researchers in the any highly specialized fields. This ultimately contradicts the per-reader argument as these expensive journals (regularly over 2000/year) are of interest to a VERY small subset of researchers at a given institution.
Also briefly speaking to the use of advertising to defray costs in consumer magazines... I find this to be more and more prevelant in scholarly publications, but without the expected reduction in price. For instance the New England Journal of Medicine regularly has 25 pages of pharmaceuticals advertising before you can find the table of contents... a similar journal (medical/weekly/# or subscribers/3 and quality of pages/etc) would be the the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which has 50% less advertising (it seems like even less but there are some ads inserted between content)... however JAMA is actually $150 cheaper per year.
There has been a lot of study in estimating the surface area and biomass of tree crowns (useful in understanding the respirative capacity and cabon sink potential of the forests), but I wasnt able to find a study that looked specifically at the number of leaves. There seems to be a common number used in lists of "interesting" tree facts... 200,000 leaves in a mature oak tree. Depending on the species you would obviously get different branching patterns and crown diameters (which will greatly affect total surface area and sunlight penetration)... but as a general rule you can say that on a mature decidous tree youa re looking at well over 100,000 leaves.
A similar lake source cooling project was implemented at Cornell while I was there. They tore up half the campus laying 36" pipe down to the nearby lake. Of course this project is much larger (with a larger lake as well), but from what I have heard the Cornell project has been a success despite the hand wringing of the radical environmentalist. The Toronto plan seems to be even better as they are not discharging the water directly back to the lake (as they do in Ithaca) but are processing it for drinking water.
more information on the Cornell LSC website http://www.utilities.cornell.edu/LSC/default.htm
Slashdot Mirror
IAAPGS
FWIW, while Cell and Nature are both owned by private companies, Science is run by a non-profit (the American Association for the Advancement of Science), and articles in science are made freely available two years after publication.
This free access requires registration and only includes content from 1997 forward
While something is better than nothing, locking down the first 117 years of content unless you pay for the backfile isnt exactly researcher friendly
I wish more publishers would follow the lead of PNAS/American Heart Assoc/American Society of Microbiology
All backfile content open and relatively short embargos on new content (6-12months)
your daughter keeps her cigarettes in her toy bag?
"In the mean time China is rather successfully countering the growth of its population"
Right, you mean that large country that has been trampling over the freedom of its people for decades and carrying out a state sponsored, gender selective campaign of coerced abortion? Great example, really great.
Chesterton was a great observer and used great wit to comment on society The fault in the analogy is that the two options provided (give a raise or restrict spending options) are only a small subset of the potential scenarios owner goes out of business by paying more in salaries than the labor produces in profits employer forgoes 4pence raise, and instead provides employees with a healthy lunch every day owner fires employee and hires two children who will work for 1pence each employee leaves owner for a job that pays better etc. Chesterton correctly points out that it isnt ethical to deprive a person their freedom (by restricting how they can spend the salary they are paid), but the answer to the problem presented isnt as simple as inflating the salary of the employee. True freedom must encompass both parties in the work contract.
There have been a few mentions of PLoS and several pre-print servers But a transition from a major publishing conglomerate (Elsevier, Springer, Kluwer) doesnt require building your own capability from the ground up, or dropping the more formal review structure for a pre-print/forum type arrangement There are several very reasonable, non-profit publishing outlets available, the one that jumps to mind is HighWire Press. http://highwire.stanford.edu/ They provide the framework and hosting, you provide the typical editorial board and reviewers Several large societies now use them, including the American Society for Microbiology.
If you cant make your payments on a 300K mortgage with 130K income then you obviously have major issues with your budget or other financial constraints you arent revealing. Quick check of a standard mortgage calculator and it looks like if you were in a 15 year fixed at 5% (easily refinanced these days) you wouldnt be paying more than 2300/month. So you are looking at 37K/year and sure there are upkeep costs and property taxes... there also is a big fat deduction for interest you are paying. Maybe you were previously married and have to may alimony/child support etc. Maybe you have a parent in eldercare... I dont know. But crying that you cant make your mortgage when you are still pulling in 130K isnt going to garner a lot of sympathy when there are literally thousands of people who do the same on 75% of your household income
As challenging as Imperial measurements are, it could be so much worse. We could use Slashdot units of measurement like Libraries of Congress (LoCs), Volkswagon Beetles (VWBs) and StretchToTheMoonAndBacks (SttMaBs)
Here are some organizations that have been working to provide alternatives to authors and libraries, the rapid success of PLOS: Biology has certainly demonstrated that the traditional publishing models can be changed
SPARC - Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition Group affiliated with the American Research Libraries organization
http://www.arl.org/sparc/
Highwire Press A major non-profit publishing initiative linked to Stanford University
http://highwire.stanford.edu/
Create Change Organization working to inform authors/researchers about their options in publishing
http://www.createchange.org/
it's all fun and games until you catch THE KRAKEN !!!
Koha is a great project (another great open project is Evergreen)... but last I checked it doesnt really do document management. Outside of the librarian/information professional communities there seems to be a lack of understanding about information categorization and classification. There are fairly large differences in how you handle the storage, metadata and retrieval options for something that could 'circulate' in a traditional library and a component piece (article/paper). Traditionally there have been specialized resources for source level objects (books/journals) and there were specialized resources for digging deeper and locating chapters/articles/papers/abstracts within source objects. I commonly see researchers checking a library catalog for a known article title, when the OPAC only includes journal title data Maybe this is something new with the blurring of publishing on the web? There has been a lot of work on federated searching as a a solution to this... but in most implementations my experience has been that patrons lose the ability to use the individual resources to fullest effect and get a results list that leads to further confusion. In any case, Koha would be great for setting up a lending library, and could be used as a framework for managing the metadata (title, author, year) with a link to a file... but in terms of actually having searchable text/OCR and additional tools it would be a poor choice (something like LibraryThing would be simpler if you werent worried about checkin/checkout, patron records, late fees etc)
I was sure this was going to examine voter participation among gamers given the proximity of the release of WotLK to the US elections in November...
quickly stripped of his committee assignments? he has been serving on the U.S. House Small Business Committee until last month, when he announced "he will take a temporary leave from his position" (full press release from June 5th, 2007 on his website at http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/la02_jefferso n/pr_070605.html)
I have no love for former representative DeLay, and am glad that voters saw fit not to reelect him to the House, I only wish the people of Louisiana had sent Rep Jefferson packing as well
http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.html?article=1104
and if you have the chops to read the study, here is a link to the abstract7 030
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/103/45/1
looks like the full text is free (unless my institution's IP range has a subscriptionn and it would otherwise be locked down)
Just to confirm the ballpark validity of the poster's numbers on production...
I highly recommend the FAO website for agricultural statistics (actually a cool website, available in 4 major languages and chock full of information)
using the FAOSTAT database (http://faostat.fao.org/)I got the following data on maize production (for reporting to the USDA/FAO (UN) maize encompasses all corn other than fresh sweet corn (reported as Green Corn), including human consumption (flour/meal) and livestock feed)
Maize
Production (Mt) by year
2002
USA 228,805,088
Canada 8,998,800
World 603,163,668
2003
USA 256,904,560
Canada 9,587,300
World 642,711,958
2004
USA 299,917,120
Canada 8,835,700
World 724,515,133
2005
USA 280,228,384
Canada 8,392,000
World 694,575,552
So the figure provided above of 598 metric ton is very close (usually there are adjustments made for a couple of years afterthe initial report is released as better data becomes available and missing data is added). You can also get information on how the crops are being utilized (feed, food, etc.) as portion of production from this website... I wont go through all the numbers, but the short story is that in most of the industrialized world we feed around 2/3s or our corn to livestock, in less industrial nations it is typically less than 1/3 for feed with single digits common.
ah yes, the Boston Bump, or is it the New York Nudge?
I thought Green Bay was cold like Siberia?
For those interested enough to read the full text of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech which the parent incorrectly quoted, related briefly enough to provide no context, and attributed incorrectly (the Jr. at the end of the name matters) you can read it online at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimet obreaksilence.htm
Here is the paragraph from which this particular line was paraphrased by the parent,
"My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."
As a librarian at a federal R&D center I have also been looking into this (our current OPAC/ILS was selected 10 yearss ago as the lowest bidder and it has delivered the value you would expect from the lowest bidder, who has been sold several times and developed the product very litte... end rant) this topic came up on my grad school alumni BB (yes most professional librarians in the US have at least a Masters degree) in addition to the other excellent resources already mentioned (Koha for example)... I will add Evergreen which can be found at http://www.open-ils.org/ as someone else mentioned earlier, it really depends on what kind of in house support/customization you can handle (both an issue of technical expertise and just man hours available) and the scalability required. Some of the OSX options are fine for someone tracking their personal collection of less than a 1000 items which are lent to friends and relatives, but even a small library OPAC has much higher needs and moving from simply OPAC functions (check in/out, overdue notices, catalogue searching) to a full ILS could add modules for acquisitions, interlibrary lending, multisite support, multiple user levels (staff, patron, admin) etc. You want to have a good idea where you think you might end up in 10 years and then pick an appropriate option that will provide you the basic functions you need and formats that can be imported into the next great thing down the road (add in the current maturity of the project, committment of the development team, frequency of updates/releases, etc.) Best of luck!
As a librarian who has worked in several institutions conducting R&D I would comment on a couple of your points. First the per-reader cost is low if you consider the entire research community... but earlier in your statement you mention that the peer-review process is difficult because of the small number of researchers in the any highly specialized fields. This ultimately contradicts the per-reader argument as these expensive journals (regularly over 2000/year) are of interest to a VERY small subset of researchers at a given institution. Also briefly speaking to the use of advertising to defray costs in consumer magazines... I find this to be more and more prevelant in scholarly publications, but without the expected reduction in price. For instance the New England Journal of Medicine regularly has 25 pages of pharmaceuticals advertising before you can find the table of contents... a similar journal (medical/weekly/# or subscribers/3 and quality of pages/etc) would be the the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which has 50% less advertising (it seems like even less but there are some ads inserted between content)... however JAMA is actually $150 cheaper per year.
There has been a lot of study in estimating the surface area and biomass of tree crowns (useful in understanding the respirative capacity and cabon sink potential of the forests), but I wasnt able to find a study that looked specifically at the number of leaves. There seems to be a common number used in lists of "interesting" tree facts... 200,000 leaves in a mature oak tree. Depending on the species you would obviously get different branching patterns and crown diameters (which will greatly affect total surface area and sunlight penetration)... but as a general rule you can say that on a mature decidous tree youa re looking at well over 100,000 leaves.
A similar lake source cooling project was implemented at Cornell while I was there. They tore up half the campus laying 36" pipe down to the nearby lake. Of course this project is much larger (with a larger lake as well), but from what I have heard the Cornell project has been a success despite the hand wringing of the radical environmentalist. The Toronto plan seems to be even better as they are not discharging the water directly back to the lake (as they do in Ithaca) but are processing it for drinking water. more information on the Cornell LSC website http://www.utilities.cornell.edu/LSC/default.htm