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I am staunch proponent of open access to scientific information, especially the variety that I paid for by virtue of taxation. The Research Works Act (HR3699) being proposed now will lock away taxpayer funded research from the hands of those whose hard-earned wages funded the research. It???s really a no-brainer and the NIH compromise was generous, allowing publishers to make a profit from research works for a whole year, during the crucial access time for new articles. The AAP argument that they add value by administering peer-review is disingenuous at best, but insulting to the scientists that voluntarily staff their peer reviewer army. Researchers freely add-value to for-profit institutions through providing all peer-review services and assigning copyright to publishers. As Heather Morrison writes in her thorough dissertation on scholarly communication: ???Giving exclusive copyright to any one party is arguably a disservice to all of the other parties who contributed to the research, or for whom it was conducted.??? Additionally, threats of job losses due to the NIH policy on open access are fear-mongering and taxpaying Americans should not have to bear the burden for their failure to innovate an outdated and inefficient mode of research communication.
Summary: Microsoft is preparing to launch a new persistent virtual machine feature on its Azure cloud platform, enabling customers to host Linux, SharePoint and SQL Server there.
This headline is not an error. I didn’t have one too many craft brews over the New Year’s weekend.
Microsoft is poised to enable customers to make virtual machines (VMs) persistent on Windows Azure, I’ve heard from a handful of my contacts who’ve asked not to be identified.
What does this mean? Customers who want to run Windows or Linux “durably” (i.e., without losing state) in VMs on Microsoft’s Azure platform-as-a-service platform will be able to do so.
Koha is the world’s first open source system for managing libraries (the books and periodical variety, that is), and one of the most successful. In the ten years since its first release, Koha has expanded from serving as the integrated library system (ILS) at a single public library in New Zealand to more than 1000 academic, public, and private libraries across the globe. But the past twelve months have been divisive for the Koha community, due to a familiar source of argument in open source: tensions between community developers, end users, and for-profit businesses seeking to monetize the code base. As usual, copyrights and trademarks are the legal sticks, but the real issue is sharing code contributions.
Sad
In search of “frictionless” sharing, Facebook is putting up a barrier to entry on items your friends want you to see–that is, they’re creating friction. Even if it’s just a onetime inconvenience, any barrier to sharing breaks sharing. The barriers will keep popping up as more content publishers create social apps that have to be authorized before you can view their content. For every five people who authorize an app, I’d guess five will turn away, and eventually get annoyed enough to stop clicking links at all, and maybe eventually annoyed enough to stop visiting Facebook so often, and go searching for somewhere easier and less invasive to simply post a link and have fun with your friends.
>>> There have been stories I haven’t read due to this.
According to figures out today from Gartner, more than 50 percent of all smartphones bought by consumers in Q3 were built on the Android OS. That growth has been at all other platforms??? expense: the figures indicate that every other smartphone platform has declined in marketshare over a year ago.
Juniper Networks this week said it is making the source code of its OpenFlow application accessible to developers of applications for its Junos networking operating system software.
OpenFlow is an interface that enables software-defined networks (SDN), in which multivendor switches and routers are programmable through software. OpenFlow provides a layer of abstraction from the physical network to the control element, allowing that network to be configured or manipulated through software, which then opens it up to further customization, proponents say
Mmmm.
Hamish MacEwan 