Thursday, October 19, 2000

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Wired News The Science of E-Publishing
""Publishers are reluctant to give away content because they are concerned that advertisers may go away," said Jerome Kassirer, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. "Advertisers pay more attention to the number of subscriptions to paper journals than to the number of eyeballs on any given website."

"There's a lot of anxiety that if (print journals) have an electronic offering, people will migrate online and they will lose their paper subscription revenues," agreed Tony Delamothe, editor of BMJ Online, a medical association journal that, unlike most journals, does not charge to access its electronic content.

Some insist that simply publishing electronically is not enough --and that open, free access is necessary to disseminate global research."

redux [09.20.00]
BioMedCentral Freedom of Information Conference: The impact of open access on biomedical research
"How should biomedical research be communicated? How should research be assessed and validated?"

"Below are abstracts, transcripts, and biographies from the conference. Some presentations did not lend themselves to transcription. Where possible we have supplemented them with editorials from the speakers.

We have also commissioned editorial articles from several speakers and delagates at the meeting.

All thoughts, comments, and suggestions are welcome on our email discussion list"

Advogato Open[Source]ing the Doors for Contributor-Run Digital Libraries
"What if you could wave a wand, in this very Harry Potter decade, and make libraries - at least digital libraries - more open, more easy to manage, cheaper, and even more eclectic and democratic? What if content contributors could submit, catalog, index, manage, rate and rank materials in large collections themselves? I believe that, thanks to the innovations from the Open Source community and perhaps more importantly the Free Software community, that we can have a contributor-run library at this very moment.

In fact, there are several very successful examples from which we can draw not only best practices, but also - that grail of the programmer - working code. But better still, these projects are also examples of vibrant, lively, noisy, democratic communities. "

Council on Library and Information Resources Systems of Knowledge Organization for Digital Libraries: Beyond Traditional Authority Files
"Librarians are increasingly called upon not only to collect information in electronic form but also to organize it into digital libraries. The materials may be created and held locally, or they may be created and accessed in a distributed fashion as a virtual library. Digital libraries can provide material on a variety of topics, from children's games to high-energy physics. Their scope may be local, national, or even international; the audience may be a small group with specialized interests or the broader public. Essential to the successful implementation and use of any digital library is the organization of that library, either directly or indirectly, by one or more knowledge organization systems (KOS).

The term knowledge organization systems is intended to encompass all types of schemes for organizing information and promoting knowledge management. Knowledge organization systems include classification and categorization schemes that organize materials at a general level, subject headings that provide more detailed access, and authority files that control variant versions of key information such as geographic names and personal names. Knowledge organization systems also include highly structured vocabularies, such as thesauri, and less traditional schemes, such as semantic networks and ontologies. Because knowledge organization systems are mechanisms for organizing information, they are at the heart of every library, museum, and archive. "