Ex-BMJ editor calls for Reed Elsevier boycott to end arms fairs

Reed Elsevier may have thought that by keeping its head down controversy over its involvement in arms fairs would go away, but not so. Richard Smith, formerly editor of the British Medical Journal has written a strongly worded attack on the STM publisher calling for scientists to boycott their titles.

His article Reed Elsevier's hypocrisy in selling arms and health is to be published in the March edition of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRMS). Smith calls for scientists to find other homes for their research papers in an effort that he hopes will push Reed to stop organising arms fairs in Brazil, Britain, the Middle East and the US.

Smith calls for a boycott focussed on The Lancet in particular, "The Lancet itself has told us how the fairs have in the past included cluster bombs, which are especially dangerous to civilians because they fail to explode and create minefields."

"What might be the actions of the editors, authors and readers of not only The Lancet, but also the other 2000 medical and scientific journals published Reed Elsevier? Alone they might achieve little, but together they might force the company to change, not by appealing to its non-existent conscience, but through threatening its business," he says in a rallying call for a boycott. Adding, "The scientific and medical part of the business is so profitable because of the extraordinary value of the science it publishes. This is where Reed Elsevier is vulnerable – were those researchers to go elsewhere, the company would promptly pull out of arms exhibitions."

JRSM's editor, Dr Kamran Abbasi, editor added, "The editors of The Lancet have in the past taken a brave stance against Reed Elsevier's involvement in promoting arms sales. But it seems that larger profits matter more to the company than its reputation among the scientific community. It is unlikely that the editorial team of The Lancet will be able to change Reed Elsevier's behaviour alone. The wider scientific community that it relies on to make those profits, however, can form a powerful lobby."

Thomson Learning backs open source partnership with the Sakai Foundation

Thomson Learning, currently a division of the Thomson Corporation has announced that it will be partnering with the Sakai, an open source learning organisation. The deal will see the Sakai open source collaboration and learning environment integrated by Thomson Learning. By supporting the foundation and becoming a commercial affiliate the Sakai Foundation can expect a series of software investments and support for the needs of the higher education learning in an online framework; writes Daniel Griffin.

The Sakai foundation is a collaborative online community, which works towards the support of online learning, teaching and research. The free service is an open source product and is also maintained and developed by its community of users.

“Thomson Learning is truly breaking new ground in its industry. The company’s commitment to making significant software investments in the open source community is the first in the publishing industry” said Chuck Severance, Sakai Foundation Executive Director.

Even though the Thomson Corporations’ Learning division is currently up for sale, that hasn’t prevented it from taking the move to plant its flag in the sand and show open support for open source in education. Severance said; “We hope that all members of the higher education learning environment recognise the benefits of adopting open source and contributing to the greater good of the community and follow Thomson Learning’s commitment.”

Hospitals to take up e-charts?

After successful trials at one of the North West’s best performing hospitals, an Intel and Motion Computing designed electronic clipboard has been unveiled, writes Daniel Griffin.

The portable device, known as a mobile clinical assistant (MCA) is the fusion of a tablet PC with traditional clipboard, but is also packed full of useful features for medical professionals including a barcode reader to scan for medicine labels, patient records, and wrist bands and a radio frequency identification scanner (RFID), to track and ensure secure login of staff. The unit also houses a digital camera to take images of wounds and connect and upload all this information back to a central database.

Its greatest strength is that medical practitioners will be able to call up patient records, order and receive test results, as well as making notes – all in real time.

Commenting on the healthcare hardware, Dr Mike Bainbridge, a senior clinical architect for the NHS has hailed it as “one of the most exciting developments in my 25 years in medicine.” Although there is no official confirmation, timeframe or further details, the BBC reported that Dr Bainbridge hinted the NHS may well be placing an order for the devices. At £1,199 per unit they are not cheap, although as the NHS is currently engaging in a £12bn IT infrastructure implementation that price seems like a drop in the ocean.

There are however a number of issues that will need to be addressed, first of all, for the MCS to be truly effective it will need to be used in a hospital with a Wifi network so that each device can communicate with the hospitals central database and various departments. Secondly there is real concern from GP’s about patient confidentiality being at risk if their records are put on an NHS national database, with over half who took part in a Guardian survey last year saying they would consider refusing to upload patient information at the moment.

Outsourcing outcomes differ for TSH and LexisNexis

The issue of outsourcing jobs from the UK and Ireland to up-and-coming economic powerhouses like India continues to remain a thorny problem for the UK's trade unions, who see high-paid (by global standards) UK workers being axed in favour of lower paid staff overseas.

In the past month the issue has become more worrying for the information industry, as subsidiaries of the bigger companies grapple with balancing their primary goal of generating greater profits for shareholders with the need to keep the customers satisfied.

This month Thomson Scientific & Health (TSH) embarked on a 30-day consultation with staff in Glasgow, Limerick, Manchester and London with the view to moving operations to India and savagely cutting back operations here. Reports suggest 200 research jobs are for the axe in Limerick, 50 in Glasgow and a further 140 in England.

But what may be worrying bosses at TSH is the spin that trade union Amicus is putting on the proposals. A report in Glasgow-based paper, The Herald, quotes Amicus assistant general secretary Tony Burke as saying: "Thomson is prepared to take risks with quality standards in their desperation to slash labour costs in order to retain a market presence."

It'd be interesting to hear from Thomson what it is doing to ensure quality standards are not compromised by these proposals. Burke sees the impact as far wider than just UK jobs, having a potential detrimental impact on the whole pharmaceutical and biotech sectors, who are heavy users of Thomson information.

Over at Thomson rival Reed Elsevier, its LexisNexis subsidiary has also bitten into the outsourcing apple. But it may have taken the sting out of this by choosing HCL BPO, an Indian-owned outsourcing company that is taking advantage of the currently friendly business climate in Northern Ireland by opening a Belfast-based office. The LexisNexis deal has been able to generate much warmer headlines for LexisNexis, as 100 jobs are being created in Belfast.

How long HCL plans to keep them there is another matter. But at least no one's raising the issue of quality-degradation, for which LexisNexis spinmeisters will be no doubt extremely grateful.

Let ThemeReader do the heavy lifting

How often have you read a report and scribbled (or typed) all the key points into an outline or mind-map? Or maybe just scribbled notes. Then you want to go back and re-read important bits of the original document. It all takes time. And you still have this nagging feeling that you might have missed something important.

Well, for years Cirilab has been producing search, retrieval and categorization software that most effectively finds and pre-digests textual information on your behalf. It calls the core technology its Knowledge Generation Engine. Vice-president Arnold Villeneuve says, "Our technology helps people cope with information overload by allowing them to use information triage techniques to locate only the information they need and avoid the rest."

A few weeks ago, it announced the adoption of its core technology by information management and visual thinking solutions company Mindsystems Pty Ltd for use in its ThemeReader product. You can right click on a document - pdf, doc, html etc - and see it summarised as a mind-map. The software handles 26 different file formats at the time of writing.

Here is an extract from a map created by pointing at pdf of Jevon MacDonald's "New Enterprise Software" report.

Additionally, the results include: a synopsis of the original document based on its major themes; a detailed summary based on major and minor themes; a document navigator which finds all occurrences of a given theme; plus a link to open the original document.

Each synopsis has theme terms hyperlinked to the appropriate point on the map. When a map link or a text link are clicked, the source material relating to that term is thrown up a new text window.

For anyone whose job involves a lot of reading and research, this software bears investigation. It does need Mindjet MindManager, although the resulting maps can be shared with people who have the free Mindjet MindManager Viewer. You can try ThemeReader and MindManager free for 21 days.

Thomson Financial puts SEC friendly services online

Thomson Financial, the financial services wing of the Thomson Corporation has announced improved functionality and enhancements to its services in the wake of a Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) ruling. The new SEC regulation is primarily concerned with the availability of financial information that is made available online to investors.

Rather than rely on mailing hardcopy reports to investors, corporations are now allowed to post proxy statements and annual reports online, whilst the recommendations also promote the process of financial information providers making their online information more accessible and user-friendly.    

The improvements to Thomson Financial now mean that users can benefit from several enhancements such as the new Executive & Director Compensation Highlights page, which emphasises the transparency of a company’s compensation practices online whilst also linking to the relevant SEC filings for greater clarity for the researcher. Other features include Interactive Event Charts that permit users to view stock information on a variety of corporate events such as earnings and media coverage and are aimed at showing a greater insight into company performance. 

The impact of the e-Proxy ruling for Thomson Financial end-users will also mean that with the increased interactivity, their documents will benefit from improved navigation, flash animated pages that display magazine inspired pages and a table of contents that allows users to drill down further than before. Clients can also track usage and measure effectiveness of material such as event webcasts and whether new or potential investors are following a particular report.

New British Library website goes live

The British Library has today revealed its new public facing website, which dominated by a new search engine.

According to the BL the new site has been developed following research amongst users, who reported that they were finding it difficult to find content on the site. Now the simple search engine searches the site's 10,000 web pages, 13 million records from within the catalogues of the BL, the Collect Britain picture library and the pay as you go journals database.

The site is very clean in design, with a grey bar denoting the different departments of the BL that a user may need to use. Search results are delivered in a series of coloured boxes according to whether they are a web page, record from the catalogue or journal article. Overall the site appears to be an improvement.

Nature sets out the nature of networking

Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group has launched two new networking sites for scientists and the scientific information community. In the last two years Nature has trail blazed into networking to compliment its publishing activities.

Nature Network is a free online space that offers those in science a place to discover scientists working in the same fields, tag content, share information with communities and point other researchers towards their blogs and homepages.

Nature is launching two localised sites, Nature Network London and Nature Network Boston for the said cities.
http://network.nature.com

Springer to take Italian journal global

German scientific publishers Springer will take over the publishing duties for the Internal and Emergency Medicine (IEM) journal in March. IEM joins the Springer scientific technical and medical titles and will be available online via SpringerLink and can now offer its authors open access publishing options.

IEM is an English language Italian journal that has two sections, each with its own editorial board. The journal was set up in 1986 to improve emergency patient care and research into the subject. As a quarterly journal it publishes research, review articles, editorials and commentaries.

"Our partnership will guarantee international expose and simpler access to the journal," said Professor Giuseppe Licata of Italian Society of Internal Medicine.

Has Reed handed Thomson an Education bonus?

The rush to exit the Education publishing market - once so lucrative but now so uncertain and volatile - has turned into a stampede.

The board at Reed Elsevier has certainly chosen its moment to throw its Harcourt division into the ring – the "for sale" sign went up yesterday as the company announced full year results, in which Harcourt was the only division to show a drop in profits. Reed now considers Harcourt a drag on its overall performance and out of step with the other divisions, which are steaming ahead with digitisation, embedded workflow solutions, and booming subscription revenues.

You'd think that the timing of the announcement didn't please execs at the Thomson Corporation, who are currently talking to potential buyers of its Education division. It put the division up for sale last year, and expects to finalise a deal (or deals, if it sells parts off separately) by the end of Q2. Wolters Kluwer has indicated its education business, concentrated on European markets, is open to offers as well.

Crispin Davis, Reed Elsevier's wily CEO, knows that with three big businesses on the market, buyers have more negotiating power. It could mean that, while analysts estimate that the Harcourt business is valued in a range of £1.6bn to £2bn, Reed may see a return at the low end of that range.

But Reed won't mind that one little bit if, in turn, it dampens down buyers' enthusiasm to pay high for Thomson Education. Is Reed gambling that Thomson will suffer, too? That would be the corporate game in its most naked form.

According to the Financial Times, Davis has said the amount of money recently raised by private equity groups made it "a very positive environment" in which to sell, and private equity is now regarded as short-hand for City money being used to get the quickest short-term gain from a bunch of assets in declining or "mature" sectors.

Davis is reported to have said: "It's possible there may even be a synergy play here if you get Thomson Learning [as well]." But such a statement can be read two ways – anyone thinking of buying one division, may now be tempted by the other, and thereby be looking for a good price for both.

On the other hand, maybe Davis is inadvertently putting around an idea that will have great appeal to private equity firms – two significant players in the same market will have lots of potential overhead overlap. Bring the two assets together, ruthlessly strip out overhead costs, and sweat the business for the two or three good years it has ahead of it (by Davis' own calculations, by the way).

Such a scenario could have the effect of driving the price back up for both businesses by bringing in potential new buyers. So, by entering the market now, Reed Elsevier may have, in effect, helped drive up the price of the Thomson Learning business.

Unless, of course, insiders at Reed know that Thomson is too advanced with negotiations to benefit from the latest development. Then, Davis' words would be like daggers.

Publishers fire broadside at EU open access ambitions

Major academic and scientific publishers today prepared to clash with the European Community on the day the EC policy paper Communications on Scientific Information in the Digital Age is due to be published.

It is expected that the EC will recommend that all EU funded research is to be made freely available online within six months of publication.

The publishers have signed a 10 point declaration of principals opposing the EC proposals, those signing it include Blackwell, Elsevier, Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Sage Publications, Taylor and Francis and Wiley. All of them state that it the EC recommendations were taken up it would destroy the industries business model and have a major impact on the quality of scientific research.

They believe the six month embargo expected to be set down by the EC is too short. Stephen Barr, Sage managing director told The Bookseller, ""If everything other than the past six months is freely available, why would anyone pay for new social science journals? And if no one would pay for them, why would anyone publish them?"

Reed Elsevier sells book division to invest online

Online information giant Reed Elsevier has announced that it is selling its Harcourt Education division, which produces educational text books. The Bookseller reports that the proceeds of the sale will be used to increase investment in Reed Elsevier online products, which include LexisNexis and Scopus.

"The planned sale of our Harcourt Education division announced today sharpens our strategic focus and concentrates our resources on the digital opportunities," chief executive Crispin Davis said in a statement.

Reed Elsevier announced its pre-tax profits for the year to end December this week, which were up by 5% at £1.052 billion.  Revenue for the publisher rose 4% to £5.398 billion. Predicting the year ahead Reed described the information market conditions as "generally favourable" the Bookseller reports.

Earlier this week Reed was hit with the news that two of its major investors were backing out of the Anglo-Dutch company because of its arms trade shows. Defending its exhibitions division, which organises the London Book Fair as well as defence shows in the Middle East, London and the US, Reed said it:" remained convinced that the defence industry is necessary to the preservation of freedom and national security and that these exhibitions assist in ensuring there is a licensed, regulated and open market to serve bona fide individuals and reputable companies in the sector".

UK child poverty report information is misleading

Today's headlines about Britain failing its children highlight the dangers of international reports as sources of information. The Unicef report has rocketed to the front pages of just about every newspaper, yet the report provides little background information on the real issues of poverty that still dog this country from the last century, as a result these issues are not debated properly and the problems remain.

Although useful, international comparisons can be misleading. The top 10 countries have little in common with the UK other than being in Europe. Germany is probably the closest country in the list to the UK in terms of size, population, demographics and recent history. It pulls in 11th. Like the UK it has undergone a difficult post-war history and its recent re-unification is putting the economy under similar levels of strain as the UK experienced in the last half of the 20th Century.

Reports like Child Poverty in Perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, grab headlines and make for shocking reading. To newspapers like the Daily Mail this type of report is a gift horse. The Mail takes glory in blaming any one and everyone for problems, but is too cowardly to do any hard work towards fighting a problem. Yet the causes of the problems this report rightly points out have been with this country for two generations. There is a plethora of information on poverty and alcohol problems that make good newsprint. But alas, the focus of the Mail, Express and often the better newspapers is towards the Royal Family and house prices.

IWR doesn't doubt the veracity of this report and welcomes it. One of the difficult to live with, but great attributes of this country is that everything is aired in the open and we don't live a myth pretending problems don't exist. But as experts point out, the report uses a wide range of information that is out of date in some areas, which damages the credibility of the report and diminishes the value of information. The report should be welcomed though and action should be taken.

Where Child Poverty in Perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries; and many international reports add to the problem is that they add to the perceived image of the UK being rich. Yes we are rich, when compared to Bangladesh. But to pretend that there isn't poverty, severe poverty, in this country is a major failing. In my living memory there has been rampant unemployment, severe social issues between races and a clear north/south divide that is only just beginning to be erased. Yet these issues are ignored and instead we waste information and talk up a few acceptable train and road delays because of ice and snow as if it’s a catastrophe.

Sadly the news agenda that follows reports like this are quick to blame the government of the day, despite one of the authors pointing towards child poverty from 1979. The report makes some very good points about families not eating their meals together and a number of basic problems in our social outlook. These are not problems caused by a government alone, we are all personally responsible for our daily lives and cannot blame everything on Whitehall. Listening to the Today programme this morning certainly made me consider the value of my family and how I will ensure I'm home for more meal times from now on.

Shareholder dump Reed Elsevier shares over arms show

Publishing and exhibitions giant Reed Elsevier has lost two major shareholders today because of its arms fairs which promote weapons and devices used for torture, according to the Telegraph newspaper today.

F&C Asset Management and charitable trust Joseph Rowntree have sold their shares in the Anglo-Dutch corporation, which is also the world's largest scientific publisher, because of their concerns about the companies who exhibit at Reed arms fairs. Katherine Griffiths, the Telegraph's City Correspondent reports that the IDEX arms fair which starts in Abu Dhabi this weekend sparked the exit strategy.

Reed also organises the Defence Systems and Equipment International (DSEi) event in London, which always courts controversy and the Shot Show in the US. Amongst the companies that the Telegraph reports have exhibited at Reed shows are Security Equipment Corporation which manufactures stun guns under the delightful marketing slogan "Making grown men cry since 1975". Stinger sells stun belts that can be operated by remote control.

Torture equipment is prohibited from export and import in the European Union, but legal in the US. The European Union describes devices like stun guns as "having no practical use other than for the purpose of capital punishment, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment," the Telegraph quotes.

Joseph Rowntree sold its £2m of Reed shares yesterday. F&C told the newspaper that its fund managers had probed Reed after last year's DSEi show and had not been satisfied that exhibitors were properly vetted.

Reed released a statement to the Telegraph stating that all its trade shows, "strictly comply with national and international laws and regulations.

This story will do nothing to bolster Reed Elsevier's tattered image following revelations by Nature and IWR of bullying PR tactics against the open access publishing model. Scientists and information users may be led to believe that Elsevier has questionable morals.

Springer enters the Creationism debate

Scientific publishing group Springer has entered into the controversial debate over the teaching of creationism versus Darwin's theory of evolution. A new scientific journal is aimed at those studying, teaching and researching science, creationism, intelligent design and the theories of biologist Charles Darwin. The new title will challenge the views of creationists.

Launched today, which would have been the English scientist's 198th birthday, Outreach and Education in Evolution mixes heavy peer-reviewed science from world leading thinkers with cartoons, competitions and useful lesson plans for educators.

"Springer stands behind evolutionary theory as a fundamental component of modern science education, especially now since the ‘intelligent design’ advocates have made worrying attempts to promote their views in public schools," said Amelia McNamara, Vice President, Publishing, Life Sciences and Biomedicine at Springer. 

Outreach and Education in Evolution is to be edited by a team that have challenged the view that creationism should be taught instead of Darwin's scientifically accurate work on evolution. Editors in chief will be father and son team Niles and Greg Eldredge who said the new scientific title will fill the gap between scientific literature and the curriculum materials currently available. 

Niles Eldridge is a paleontologist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History. He is famous for his theory of Punctuated equilibria, which he co-authored with scientist Stephen Jay Gould. Son Greg Eldredge is a teacher and author on fossils.

The two said of the fight with creationism, "Evolution remains the central unifying idea in biology and yet is still a source of contention and confusion in the classroom. In Outreach and Education in Evolution, we'll cover the gamut from molecules to ecosystems and from intelligent design to natural selection."

Outreach and Education in Evolution will be available from March 2008.

Scientific publishing conference, will it be war or peace pact?

A scientific publishing conference taking place this week couldn't come at a better time as the scientific information community teeters on the brink of all out war. At no time before has the open access publishing debate been so truculent. The decision to hire a PR attack dog has not been welcomed. 

Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area kicks off on Thursday 15 February in Brussels. All the key players from publishing and the open access movement are in attendance, including Nick Fowlers, Director of Strategy for publishing giants Elsevier, Robert Kiley, Head of E-Strategy at the Wellcome Trust, the funding body that is very pro-Open Access, Blackwell boss Bob Campbell and Ian Russell, the CEO of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP).

The conference will be opened by Janez Potocnik, EU Commissioner for Science and Research, whilst the closing speech will be by Viviane Reding, the Commissioner for Information Society and Media.

Discussions will include challenges and opportunities facing scientific publishing, new opportunities for the research community, business models and policy options.

Jan Velterop, open access champion at major STM publisher Springer is attending, but is worried that the scientific information is being divided into distinct camps and on a collision course towards war. "I hope this conference can be constructive," he said, "Sadly there is not enough desire by either side to actually get together and solve the problems of scientific information, which is a pity."

Some believe the conference will focus on the news in recent weeks that the Association of American Publishers (AAP) along with its members Elsevier and John Wiley & Sons has hired a notorious PR attack expert to rubbish the claims of open access supporters. "It is not very helpful, it is drawing this into a battle, when a constructive dialog would be better for everyone," Velterop said.

Thomson's 2006 results spin a healthy story

Thomson Corporation is set for a cash windfall this year, and a possible acquisition spree, after it finalises the sale of the Learning division in Q2. The full-year financials released yesterday illuminated once again a company grappling with momentous changes in the information industry.

Is Thomson in good shape? You'd think so. The headline numbers stated revenues up 8% in 2006, to $6.6 billion, while operating profit increased 7%, to $1.3 billion. Those are US dollars, by the way, not Canadian.

CEO Dick Harrington said he'd continued to "reap benefits" from the "efficiency" programme, dubbed ThomsonPlus, which aims to maximise infrastructure usage and best practice crossover to get more out of the whole organisation.

The organic growth was driven by its workflow solutions and services in the professional sectors – such as Westlaw Litigator in US legal markets, Thomson ONE in financial markets and Checkpoint in the tax and accounting markets.

Digging deeper into the figures, organic growth isn't necessarily in utterly rude health. Take the Scientific & Healthcare division, which saw revenues grow 13% in Q4 – but that was made up of 10% growth through acquisitions, just 2% in organic growth, and 1% from foreign exchange. Yes, the weakening US dollar contributed around $3.26 million "growth" to the division in the last three months.

Harrington was buoyantly optimistic for the year ahead (well, that's his job really) - mainly because the sale of the Learning division should release a lot of value for further investment. That will continue to transform the company as it accommodates the internet and the decline of the print market.

British Library user wins Costa award and avoids travel

An author who suffered from agoraphobia has won the prestigious Costa Book of the Year Award for a story set in Canada, which she researched entirely at the British Library.

Stef Penney has suffered from agoraphobia and never travelled to Canada to research her novel the Tenderness of Wolves, her debut novel.

The book is set in 19th Century Canada and is about a Scottish family relocating to Canada during the Highland Clearances. She won the prize ahead of William Boyd's Restless, a spy story.

Penney told the BBC after picking up the award, "Just because you go somewhere it doesn't mean that you have a peculiar or vivid or insightful take on the place. "Every story takes place in the landscape of the imagination. "Regarding this wide, open landscape which I find quite alarming, maybe it's even more vivid because I couldn't go and look at it and see how mundane it really is."

Ingenta merges with US' Vista

Publishing and information access software developers Ingenta of Oxford have merged Whit US publishing software provider Vista, the two companies will now trade as Publishing Technology. The new venture will be listed on London's AIM stock market and they claim to be the world's largest provider of publishing specific software.

As a combined company its clients will include STM publishing giant Elsevier and 1000 academic and corporate research library centres, including the likes of Glaxo SmithKline, the pharmaceutical giants.

Ingenta has always focused on electronic publishing, with this merger it now has a footprint in the print publishing industry as the Vista author2reader application is used by major publishers like Random House and Penguin.

American Society for Cell Biology goes open access

The American Society for Cell Biology is the latest scientific institution to set out its stall on wide scale access to its research and content. In its position paper on Public Access to Scientific Literature, the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) has announced that all research findings from the ACB will be made freely available online six months after publication.

Articles from ASCB's journal Molecular Biology of the Cell will be freely available on the title's website and also deposited on the PubMed Central service. "The ASCB believes strongly that barriers to scientific communication slow scientific progress. The more widely scientific results are disseminated, the more readily they can be understood, applied, and built upon. The sooner findings are shared, the faster they will lead to new scientific insights and breakthroughs," its position paper states. 

The paper also fires a salvo at publishing companies like Elsevier and Wiley which have hired a dirty tricks PR campaigner to destroy the reputation of open access publishing. "Some publishers argue that providing free access to their journal’s content will catastrophically erode their revenue base. The experience of many successful research journals demonstrates otherwise," it states boldly, adding that journals have remained financially sound and profitable. "The data clearly show that free access and profitability are not mutually exclusive."

"Our goal should be to make research articles freely available as soon as feasible so that science and the public benefit from their expanded use and application. At the same time, it is important that nonprofit societies and other publishers generate sufficient revenues to sustain the costs of reviewing and publishing articles. We believe that a six-month embargo period represents a reasonable compromise between the financial requirements of supporting a journal and the need for access to current research."

The ASCB has 11,000 members and its journal Molecular Biology of the Cell has a high impact factor. Since 2001 the ASCB has provided free access to its research after a two month embargo and claims to have experienced no "adverse impact on its finances."

Moves like this by influential groups like ASCB and the angry reaction of the scientific community when it discovered that Elsevier and Wiley were using negative PR has given the open access movement a renewed vigour.

Penguins use Wiki to tell their story

Penguin the famous publishing house is taking the wiki experiment a bit further with the launch of A Million Penguins, a collaborative attempt for a crowd to create a novel, whereby anyone can log on and contribute.

Penguin's argues the project is not a pure piece of marketing spin, but a social experiment to see if a novel can be created in a team atmosphere. Visit the About page of the project's site and they point out that open source software is "rarely written in a vacuum" and that most scientific research takes place as a collaborative exercise, including peer review. The novel though, has always been a very individual effort, coining the term "everyone has a novel in them." And masters of the art like Roald Dahl have crafted their works on their own in the garden shed, and as Penguin point out, James Joyce famously said the artist forges in the "smithy of [his] soul".

A Million Penguins will discover whether a collective voice can create a "believable fictional voice" and will the plot have a coherent threat. They also cite the fact that just getting the ball rolling. 

So far the initial chapters seem to be a story about the story of a novel being collaboratively created, all well and good for a wiki, not the sort of thing you'd pick up even in a three for two offer at the large bookstores.

It is great to see traditional publishers experimenting with Web 2.0 technology and looking to create new content in new ways. Have a read yourselves at: http://www.amillionpenguins.com/wiki/index.php/Welcome

Win gadgets in the IWR Survey

It’s survey time again. The IWR reader survey is your chance to have your say about Information World Review and the general state of the information industry. Oh, and you can could win anything from a Creative Zen MP3 player (pictured) for downloading digital music and podcasts to a Nintendo DS games console (we all need to relax) or a DAB radio, thanks to our sponsors business information specialists Bureau van Dijk, providers of the Mint service.

We’ve split this year’s survey into areas to make it easier to understand and faster to fill out. As well as letting us know how you see the state of the information industry, we want to know more about you, the reader. We are not profiling readers to sell their personal details to a credit card
company, but the more we know about you as people as well as professionals the better we can make IWR. Questions range from associations you are members of, salary ranges, the size of team you work with and type of organisation.

We want to know what information management issues are of most concern to you, whether it’s free information or document management.

We also want to know more about how you use IWR, both the print publication, as well as our online titles iwr.co.uk and the IWR blog. No company or product can successfully develop without the input of its users and the more you let us know, the more we can do to make the product better for you.
You can fill out the survey and enter the prize draw by logging on to: http://www.cdsonline1.co.uk/vnu_online/IWR/iwr_2007-01-29.aspx.

Going down the YouTubes?

YouTube has always made clear, in the terms and conditions (that people rarely read), that infringement of other peoples' copyright will result in their account being suspended, the content removed and the member being exposed to legal action.

The sole exception to this is 'fair use' which YouTube doesn't try to explain. It refers readers to third party sources.

It urges people to create completely original material to avoid any accusation of copyright infringement. Which is all very well but it fails to take into account the reality that many people with the urge to put something on line lack the talent to create original material.

Today, Viacom failed to reach an accommodation with YouTube and asked it to take down 100,000 videos containing copyright material.

The row has been rumbling on for months. Since before Google bought YouTube and well before YouTube announced that it planned to share advertising revenues with uploaders.

Viacom claims that its main concern is that it doesn't want inappropriate ads running against its content. Some kids' stuff really shouldn't be exposed to the risk of an adult advertisement appearing.

This strikes me as a worthy but somewhat dull explanation of its concerns. If I were a content company, I'd be more concerned about the damage to my properties caused by alteration of the content or its contextual setting. I would also be mad as hell that people could so freely steal my material and use it for their own financial gain.

However, let's hope that Viacom has taken into account the fact that a short YouTube movie might well drive viewers to authentic Viacom products for a taste of the real thing.