The Breadth and Basis of the Need for Open Access
I am forwarding the press release below concerning an excellent new
alliance of tax-payers for open access spear-headed by SPARC. This
alliance is focused on biomedical research that is funded by NIH and is
based on its potential direct interest and usefulness to the tax-payer.
This direct lay interest in and benefit from biomedical research is an
extremely important and valid aspect of some forms of research -- not just
biomedical research, but also other areas of research that might be
of direct relevance to the tax-paying public that supports it: general
public access to the research output in certain areas of biology,
physical sciences, engineering and technology, social sciences, and even
some forms of humanities research could confer great direct benefits.
But let us not forget that most research is highly specialized and often
technical, and written for the use of other specialized researchers. This
of course does not mean that it should not all be openly accessible to
the general public as well! But the benefits -- to the tax-payer --
of making that research open access go far, far beyond the benefits from
the tax-payer's being able to consult it directly:
For the reason the tax-payer funds research is in order to generate
research progress. Most research doesn't turn into something that can
be applied and used for public benefit immediately after it is done
and reported! Research progress is cumulative and collaborative, and
often slow, and it is *researchers* who most need immediate access to
one another's output. It is the tax-payer who benefits if researchers
do have this access to one another's research output, and the tax-payer
(and research progress itself) that loses if researchers do not have
that access to one another's research output.
If research were funded only to be performed, written up, and then put
into a desk drawer aftwerward, then there would be nothing to show for
the tax-payer's investment. That is why we have the mandate to "publish
or perish." It is not enough to fund research, conduct the research and
write it up. The write-up then has to be peer-reviewed by a journal,
and then be made *public* though *publication* in that journal, so that
other researchers (and, when it is of direct relevance and interest, also
the general public) can access and use its findings. Tax-payers use
some funded research directly in order to improve their lives; but
researchers can use even funded research that does not directly improve our
lives to build on that research and eventually advance it to where it
does improve our lives.
So in weighing the purpose and importance of open access, it is critical
to realize that most research needs to be made openly accessible for
reasons *other* than those in the special case where it might be of direct
interest and relevance to the tax-payer to access, read and use it. Open
access is needed not just for biomedical research, but for all research --
all 2,500,000 yearly articles published in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed
journals, across all fields -- biomedical and nonbiomedical, scientific
and scholarly, pure and applied.
So in reading the press release below, please do not conclude that open
access is needed only for biomedical research, let alone only for biomedical
research funded only by NIH! The urgency of having access to research that
might be relevant to our health and that we have paid to have conducted
is a dramatic example of one rationale for open access, for one (small)
portion of the world's scientific and scholarly research output. But it
is only the tip of the iceberg!
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399…http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=o31
Stevan Harnad
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 13:06:47 -0400
From: Rick Johnson <rick(a)arl.org>
To: SPARC Institutional Repositories Discussion List <SPARC-IR(a)arl.org>
For Immediate Release
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
SPARC Contact:
John D'Ignazio, 202-296-2296 x121
TAXPAYERS SUPPORT OPEN ACCESS TO NIH RESEARCH
Public Interest Advocates Join Forces to Support Congress and NIH
Leadership
Washington, DC (August 24, 2004) An unprecedented coalition of public
interest groups today announced the formation of the Alliance for
Taxpayer Access. The Alliance will urge the National Institutes of
Health as well as Congress to ensure that peer-reviewed articles on
taxpayer-funded research at NIH become fully accessible and available
on line and at no extra cost to the American public.
The Alliance formation precedes the public interest meeting slated for
Tuesday, August 31 where NIH will receive input on how to improve
public access to the results of NIH-funded biomedical research.
The Alliance is an informal coalition of libraries, patient and health
policy advocates, and other stakeholders who support reforms that will
make publicly funded biomedical research accessible to the public.
Details and FAQs on the Alliance may be found at
http://www.taxpayeraccess.org
Today the vast majority of research funded with public dollars is
available only through increasingly costly journal subscriptions (often
costing thousands of dollars annually for a single journal),
institutional licenses (more than a million dollars annually for many
universities), or per article purchases (as much as $30 per article).
Alliance supporters believe the current system of subscription-based
access to scientific research is economically unsustainable and
effectively impedes the dissemination and use of research that has been
paid for with public dollars.
Alliance supporter Sharon Terry, President and CEO of the Genetic
Alliance, said, "This consumer-centered approach is a long-overdue
means by which to enhance public health education, speed the
translation of genetic advances into quality, affordable health care,
and inform and empower patients in their health care decisions."
"It is sometimes suggested that this information is not available to
the "homemaker in Iowa" because she is ill equipped to deal with this
information. We know, from our 600 members - disease-specific advocacy
organizations . that the homemaker has many resources to help her use
that information. This access is critical; we know first-hand that
clinicians are unable to keep up with information on 6000 rare
diseases, and patients must be the bridge to new knowledge."
Acknowledging the key role of individuals volunteering for clinical
tests, Mitchell Warren, Executive Director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy
Coalition, said that, "Open access is consistent with cornerstone
principles of respect for persons when conducting research on human
subjects and will contribute to the willingness of individuals to
participate in subsequent research because they have full, shared,
knowledge of results."
"In the digital age, with the extraordinary public benefits of
cutting-edge research, it is counter-productive for there to be costly
barriers preventing the fullest possible availability of quality
information about current research findings,' said Rick Johnson,
spokesman for the group. Johnson also serves as director of the
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), a member
of the new Alliance. 'We agree with leaders at NIH and on Capitol Hill
that the status quo is unacceptable when most American taxpayers do not
have access to the reports on biomedical research conducted with U.S.
Government funds."
Barbara Redman, Dean of the College of Nursing at Wayne State
University, echoed concerns of educators within the Alliance: "Access
to emerging NIH-funded medical research is invaluable to the transfer
of knowledge in every instructional setting. Faculty and students
alike benefit from access to biomedical reports in all fields, and we
applaud NIH leadership in furthering this initiative."
Dr. Richard Roberts, 1993 Nobel Laureate in medicine and currently with
New England Biolabs, added his support: "Open access to the scientific
literature is the single most important advance that we can make in the
distribution of research results to scientists and the public alike. I
find that a majority of my fellow scientists and Nobel Laureates agree
that this new initiative is groundbreaking, long overdue and will
ensure that we all can read about the results of our government's
support of research. I am heartened that taxpayers representing broad
stakeholders in this issue have joined forces to endorse the principle
of open access to the scientific literature we produce through our
investment of public dollars. This is good for science and good for
the American public."
Members of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, at formation (in
alphabetical order), include:
AIDS Action Baltimore
AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition
American Association of Law Libraries
American Library Association
American Medical Student Association
Arthritis Foundation
Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum
Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries
Association of College & Research Libraries
Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs
Association of Research Libraries
Association of Southeastern Research Libraries
Autosomal Recessive Polycystic Kidney Disease and Congenital Hepatic
Fibrosis Alliance
Boston College Libraries
Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation
Coalition for Heritable Disorders of Connective Tissue
Colorado State University Libraries
Conquer Fragile X Syndrome
Down Syndrome Treatment and Research Foundation
Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered
Genetic Alliance
International Mosaic Down Syndrome Association
IsoDicentric 15 Exchange, Advocacy & Support
Medical Library Association
National Alliance for Autism Research
National Coalition for PKU & Allied Disorders
National Fragile X Foundation
National Tay-Sachs & Allied Diseases Association, Inc.
New England Biolabs
Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy
Prader-Willi Syndrome Association
Public Knowledge
PXE International
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
Spina Bifida Association of America
Tourette Syndrome Association
University of Connecticut Libraries
Wayne State University College of Nursing
Kedves mindenki,
ez egy emlekezteto mindenki szamara, hogy az European Conference on
Visual Perception a het vegen tartja gyuleset vasarnap delutani
inditassal a Kozgadsasagi es Allamtudomanyi Egyetemen. A konferencia
hivatalos web-oldala www.ecvp.hu ahol a teljes program megtalalhato.
A talalkozon szigoruan szakmai eloadasokon tul a vizualis kutatas es
muszevet hatarmezsgyejerol is fogad eloadokat (foleg az elso nap), es
a programot sok kulturalis esemeny is tarkitja.
A konferenciara valo regisztralodas meg nyitva all. Azon erdeklodok,
foleg diakok, akik szeretnek megismerkedni a temaval es az ilyen
konferenciak hangulataval, lehetoseguk van kis szervezoi munka
elleneben megjelenni a konferencian a regisztracios dij kifizetese
nelkul. Akit erdekel ez a megoldas jelentkezzen nalam.
Az ECVP-n valo talalkozas remenyeben:
------------- FJ
*********************
István A. Aranyosi
Department of Philosophy
Central European University
Zrinyi u. 14, 1051 Budapest, Hungary
Tel: +3(0)670-576-1081
Fax: (36-1) 327-3072
Homepage: http://www.personal.ceu.hu/students/03/Istvan_Aranyosi/
>>> "Administrador del Nodo" <postmaster(a)neurobiol.cyt.edu.ar> 7/1/2004 9:34:53 PM >>>
Dear Dr. Istvan Aranyosi,
I wish to find some Hungarian colleague with an interest in the
topic I deal with in my paper "Effects ..." at
<http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/index2.htm> and who might
volunteer to put its abstract in proper Hungarian language.
I visited your website and doubt that my summary paper might
really interest you up to that point, but thinking that perhaps you
may find another person I decided writing you, so as to present
my purposes. My chief interest is communicating it to college and
pregraduate Hungarian students, caring for a simple and
colloquial language as much as possible. If feasible, I hope later
to procure translation of the two short ensuing sections, down to
include "2. Synopsis of the Major Themes". Of course here there
is no money to pay for it. So let me thank in advance for any
collaboration you may lend.
Yours sincerely,
Prof. Mariela Szirko
NB: The text to be translated is the following one:
Effects of Relativistic Motions in the Brain and Their
Physiological Relevance
On scales small enough, cerebral biophysics is not an exception to established
laws of physics applicable to all other occurrences of condensed matter:
Brains, too, include microphysical components in their tissue that move close
to light-speed. Does this motion bring biological effects about? Does it create
any mental characteristic? The critical question, if and how such motions
bring about physiological effects and how this relates to psychological realms,
has come to noteworthy results: extended research in our neurobiological
tradition suggests an affirmative answer and also describes the formation of
psychological features. Neurobiology in Argentine has started in the second
half of the eighteenth century and specially focused on electroneurobiology.
The angle has proven to be specially suitable for revealing any such effects
and, along with older results, this tradition developed more than three decades
ago a scientific view about brain-mind issues involved in recovery from
swoon, coma, vegetative states, hibernation, general anesthesia, or ordinary
sleep. This view assumes that the uncoupling pathologies which disconnect
persons from their circumstances share with sleep and the variations of
inattention a common mechanism, namely changes in a physiological time-
dilation, which is a relativistic effect of motions from the tissue's
microphysical components, and is physiologically operated through coupling
with the electroneurobiological states of that tissue. This explanatory model
from neurobiology is also of special interest to physicists, since the coupling
that operates such a mechanism instances a mass-variation in some action
carriers of a force-field brought forth by way of overlapping variation in the
intensity of another force-field. Supported by clinical and neurobiological
facts, research related to these findings has been taught in Argentine for many
decades; it is only recently that this research comes to the attention of the
international scientific community. Valuable for neurobiologists,
psychophysiologists, and humanists working on brain-mind issues, also
scientists investigating the sources of inertial mass, biological dynamical
systems, biophysics, mathematical biology, computer biology, or molecular
biology can recognize these findings and their clinical applications as relevant
data for comprehensive research in their area of specialization.
**** Deadline Extension *****
The deadline of paper submission to the P2PKM'04 workshop is extended to
July 5th.
[Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement]
**** CALL FOR PAPERS *****
International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Management (P2PKM)
-- www.p2pkm.org --
August 22, 2004 - Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Collocated with MobiQuitous 2004 (www.mobiquitous.org)
Scope of workshop
-----------------
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing has received significant attention from the
side of research labs and academia, largely due to the popularity of
commercialized P2P file sharing applications such as Napster, Morpheus and
KaZaa. In the P2P model, peers exchange data and/or services in completely
decentralized distributed manner. Peers are autonomous, and are free to
choose what other peers to interact with, and, in this point-to-point
interaction, peers possess equal functional capabilities.
On the other hand, Knowledge Management (KM) is increasingly viewed as a
core capacity in order to compete in the modern social and economic
environment. Researchers and practitioners agree that those intellectual
assets that are embedded in working practices, social relationships, and
technological artefacts constitute the only source of value that can sustain
long term differentiation, quality of services, innovation, and
adaptability. Nonetheless, even due to a debatable success of current KM
implementations, still unclear is how such matter should be managed in
highly complex, distributed, and heterogeneous settings.
In the last couple of years, P2P and KM have followed different but
converging paths. In fact, P2P technologies have left their initial
"computational", "anarchoyd", and spontaneous fashion to embrace more
service level domains and business settings. On the other hand, KM is
questioning its centralized assumption based on the implicit belief that
knowledge is managed successfully when it can be standardized and
controlled. In this sense, it seems that while P2P is looking for value
added domains to better exploit its technological potential, KM is looking
for a technological paradigm more able to fit an emerging distributed
organization of knowledge.
The convergence of P2P and KM creates new challenges for researchers to
address: new methodologies to model, design, and deploy distributed KM
solutions; theories and algorithms to represent the social and semantic
dimensions of a knowledge network; mechanisms to cope with the dynamic
autonomous nature of P2P and to provide means to support emergent network
self-organization. New technologies should be provided in order to support
full operational functioning of P2P KM systems, ensuring high extensibility
of the solutions along several dimensions, such as scalability in the number
of peers, size and kind of supported knowledge bases, level of heterogeneity
in knowledge representation, robustness, etc. Various technologies can
contribute to P2P KM solutions: Semantic Web, with new instruments for
knowledge representation, in particular ontologies, as well as with
(totally) mechanized means for locating, retrieving and processing of data;
database technology, with formal semantics for P2P data sharing; multi agent
technology, with innovation solutions of agent-mediated knowledge
management; and so on.
The P2PKM workshop is intended to serve as an active forum for researchers
and practitioners, where they will have the possibility to exchange and
discuss research results, novel ideas and experiences, laying in the
intersection of the P2P, KM and Semantic Web, database, multi agent, as well
as other related technologies. It aims at provoking a discussion around the
hypothesis of convergence of P2P and KM areas, and, in particular, at
exploring synergies among those that need to provide a distributed
technological answer to the distributed management of knowledge, and those
that are interested in exploring the substantial implications of the P2P
paradigm on important aspects of organizational life such as KM.
Topics of interest include but are not restricted to:
-----------------------------------------------------
* Distributed Knowledge Management business cases and experiences;
* P2P to support (virtual) communities of practice and interest
networks;
* Organizational impacts of P2P technologies, and social adoption of
distributed technologies;
* Methodologies to analyse, design and deploy distributed KM solutions;
* Social models to design and support knowledge intensive collaborative
processes in a P2P environment;
* Data models and distributed query languages;
* Meta-data representation and management (e.g., semantic-based
coordination mechanisms, use of ontologies in P2P KM systems, etc.);
* Algorithms to discover distributed knowledge among interacting peers;
* Protocols, algorithms and techniques to support semantic
interoperability;
* Trust and reputation as means to support knowledge acquisition;
* Semantic Web and P2P KM systems;
* Agent-mediated knowledge management;
* P2P KM system architectures, infrastructure and middleware;
* Experience with deployed systems, performance evaluation and
benchmarking;
Important dates
---------------
Submission deadline: July 5th, 2004
Acceptance notification: July 19th, 2004
Camera ready due: August 2nd, 2004
Workshop date: August 22nd, 2004
Submission instructions
-----------------------
We invite the submission of high quality technical papers. The submitted
papers should be formatted as close as possible to the Springer LNCS style
and must not exceed 12 pages including figures and references. Interested
authors should submit their papers at the EDAS site (http://edas.info/)
within the submission deadline. PDF format is preferred, but other formats
(PS, DOC) are also acceptable. Accepted papers will be published in the CEUR
workshop electronic proceedings, and hardcopies of the proceedings will be
handed out at the workshop. At least one author of each accepted paper must
attend the workshop to present their work.
Workshop Co-Chairs
------------------
Ilya Zaihrayeu
University of Trento, Italy
email: ilya(a)dit.unitn.it
Matteo Bonifacio
ITC-Irst, Italy
email: bonifacio(a)itc.it
Program Committee
-----------------
* Matteo Bonifacio, ITC-Irst, Italy
* David De Roure, University of Southampton, UK
* Stefan Decker, Information Sciences Institute at the University of
Southern California
* Dieter Fensel, University of Innsbruck, Austria
* Enrico Franconi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
* Chiara Ghidini, ITC-Irst, Italy
* Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento, Italy
* Manfred Hauswirth, EPFL, Switzerland
* Matthias Klusch, DFKI, Germany
* Manolis Koubarakis, Technical University of Crete, Greece
* Gabriel Kuper, University of Trento, Italy
* Stefanie Lindstaedt, Austria's Competence Center for Knowledge
Management
* Deborah L. McGuinness, Stanford University, USA
* Alberto Montresor, University of Bologna, Italy
* Wolfgang Nejdl, University of Hannover and Learning lab Lower Saxony,
Germany
* Munindar P. Singh, North Carolina State University, USA
* Mike Papazoglou, Tilburg University, Netherlands
* Riccardo Rosati, Università di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy
* Wee Sion NG, National University of Singapore
* Steffen Staab, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
* Igor Tatarinov, University of Washington, USA
* Bernard Traversat, SUN Microsystems, USA
Invited Talks
-----------------
Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento, Italy. "A Peer-to-Peer Approach to
Distributed Knowledge Management"
Mark Maybury, the MITRE Corporation, USA. "Exploitation of Digital Artifacts
and Interactions to Enable Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Management"
Futher Information
------------------
For further information, please send an e-mail to: ilya(a)dit.unitn.it or
visit:
http://www.p2pkm.org/
We apologize if you receive multiple copies of this e-mail.
************************ CALL FOR PARTICIPATION **************************
MobiQuitous 2004
The First Annual International Conference on
Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Service
http://mobiquitous.org/
August 22-26, 200, Royal Sonesta Hotel, Cambridge, Massachusetts USA
Held in cooperation with AAAI, IEEE Computer Society, ACM SIGMOBILE
and the European Union's IST program
**************************************************************************
MobiQuitous 2004 is the first of a series of annual conferences focusing
on the latest research in the rapidly growing area of mobile and
ubiquitous computing. The combination of mobile and ubiquitous computing
is emerging as a promising new paradigm with the goal to provide computing
and communication services all the time, everywhere, transparently and
invisibly to the user, using devices embedded in the surrounding physical
environment. In this context, the communication devices, the objects with
which they interact, or both, may be mobile. The implementation of such a
paradigm requires advances in wireless networking technologies and
devices, development of infrastructures supporting cognitive environments,
and discovery and identification of ubiquitous computing applications and
services. The First Annual International Conference on Mobile and
Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Services will cover all these aspects,
representing a forum where practitioners and researchers coming from the
many areas involved in ubiquitous solutions design and deployment will be
able to interact, exchanging the cross-layer experiences needed to build
the overall ubiquitous systems. Areas addressed by the conference include:
applications, service-oriented computing, middleware, networking, agents,
knowledge management and databases.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Prof. Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Carnagie Mellon University.
TECHNICAL PROGRAM: 47 papers have been accepted for presentation and for
publication in the conference proceedings. The advance program can be
found online at the conference web page.
TUTORIALS AND PANELS: Four half-day tutorials (security in public
wireless networks, localization and tracking in ubiquitous systems, data
management aspects of mobile and ubiquitous computing, semantic web
services) and three panels (featuring topics such as the state-of-the-art
and the potential for future developments in mobile and ubiquitous
computing, and the mobile/ubiquitous computing security) will complement
the technical program.
WORKSHOPS: A-SWAN Workshop (AlgorithmS for Wireless And mobile Networks),
P2PKM 2004 Workshop (The First International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer
Knowledge Management), PSPT 2004 Workshop (First Workshop on Pervasive
Security, Privacy and Trust), SANPA 2004 Workshop (Second International
Workshop on Sensor and Actor Network Protocols and Applications) will be
held in conjunction with the main conference.
DEMOS: The demo sessions will include more than a dozen demonstrations
featuring technologies that enable the wired and wireless networking
infrastructure for ubiquitous computing along with applications that
showcase novel user experiences in environments of complex but invisible
computing infrastructure.
VENUE: A block of rooms has been reserved at the Royal Sonesta Hotel
Boston (Cambridge) at 5 Cambridge Parkway, Cambridge, MA 02142-1299 for
Conference participants. Please make your hotel arrangements early in
order to insure getting a room at the special conference rate. If making
your reservations by phone, you will need to mention that you are a
participant of the �MobiQuitous Conference� to receive the special,
discounted conference price ($139 for a single or double room).
Individuals can make their reservations by calling the Sonesta
reservations department at +1-617-806-4200.
IMPORTANT DATES:
Discounted Hotel Reservation Deadline July 24th, 2004
Early Registration Deadline July 31st, 2004
Conference Dates August 22-26, 2004
--
Stefano Basagni, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering 312 Dana Research Center
Northeastern University 360 Huntington Ave. Boston, MA 02115
Tel. 617 373 3061, Fax 617 373 8970 E-mail: basagni(a)ece.neu.edu
*** http://www.ece.neu.edu/faculty/basagni/ ***
