E-Lert # 296 / Cyberavis no. 296

Friday September26, 2008 / le vendredi 26 septembre 2008

NEWS / NOUVELLES

Elias A. Zerhouni to End Tenure as Director of the National Institutes of Health
NIH News, September 24, 2008

Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., the director of the National Institutes of Health, today announced his plans to step down at the end of October 2008 to pursue writing projects and explore other professional opportunities. Dr. Zerhouni, a physician scientist and world-renowned leader in radiology research, has served as NIH director since May 2002. He led the agency through a challenging period that required innovative solutions to transform basic and clinical research into tangible benefits for patients and their families. One of the hallmarks of his tenure is the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, launched in 2003, after extensive consultations with the scientific community.
http://www.nih.gov/news/health/sep2008/od-24.htm

Canada missing out on open access momentum
Michael Geist
Toronto Star, September 22, 2008

Political leaders have not addressed the issue, while few Canadian universities have emerged as global leaders. Indeed, only Athabasca University and Capilano University have joined the MIT Open Courseware Consortium and the University of Calgary stands as the only institution to allocate specific financial support for faculty open access publishing. Even the success of BioLine International is in jeopardy as the University of Toronto inexplicably recently reneged on an earlier commitment to provide ongoing support. As it happens, Oct. 14 is both the date of the federal election and the first international open access day. While open access is not a ballot box issue, Canada's approach says much about how it views its future as a research and innovation leader.
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/503401

hakia Issues Open Call to Librarians and Information Professionals: Help Us Guide Web Searchers to Credible Web Sites
September 22, 2008

Semantic search engine hakia today announced an open call to librarians and information professionals to participate in a new program to unlock credible and free Web resources to Web searchers. Currently, hakia is generating credibility-stamped results for health and medical searches to guide users towards credible Web content. These results come from credible Web sites vetted by the Medical Library Association. Now, hakia is aiming to further its coverage to all topics, with the participation of librarians and information professionals.
http://company.hakia.com/pr-092208.html

Canada's graduate students call on parties to step up funding to basic research
September 19, 2008

Canada's graduate students issued their expectations from the federal parties today. According to the National Graduate Caucus of the Canadian Federation of Students, direct funding for
graduate students, increased non-targeted support of the granting councils, and balanced copyright laws are essential to making Canada's graduate students global leaders in research.
"Graduate students are tomorrow's professional researchers and a major component of a high-skill workforce," said Graham Cox, Chairperson of the National Graduate Caucus. "Graduate students are looking for a party that replaces rhetoric with a plan to support knowledge development."
http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/September2008/19/c6407.html

Update on plans for the Canadian PMC
Kumiko Vezina
OA Librarian, September 19, 2008

Over the summer, NRC-CISTI and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) finalized the first step in the partnership for the PubMed Central Canada agreement process, a national digital repository of peer-reviewed health science research. With CIHR funding now in place, CISTI plans to contribute its technological expertise to build & host the infrastructure and manage & develop the e-repository.
http://oalibrarian.blogspot.com/2008/09/pubmed-central-canada-pmc-canada.html

Susan Baldwin appointed executive director of Compute Canada
RE$EARCH MONEY, Volume 22, Number 14, September 19, 2008

Susan Baldwin has been appointed executive director of Compute Canada, the organization that coordinates and promotes high-performance computing in Canadian research. Baldwin joins Compute Canada from CANARIE Inc where she was chief administrative officer. She has previously held senior executive positions in the federal government including the CRTC, Canadian Heritage and Industry Canada. Baldwin holds an MA from the University of Toronto. The appointment is effective September 1st.

Christian Sylvain appointed director of policy and international affairs at CIHR
RE$EARCH MONEY, Volume 22, Number 14, September 19, 2008

Christian Sylvain has been appointed director of policy and international affairs at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Sylvain held the same position at the Social Science and Humanities Research Council for five years.

Encyclopedia Britannica: Modernization in Moderation
Angelo Fernando
E-Commerce Times, September 19, 2008

Information might want to be free, but that doesn't mean the editors at Encyclopedia Britannica plan to let it run roughshod. While acknowledging its need to step into modern times, Britannica also is holding fast to the idea that experts make it better.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/Encyclopedia-Britannica-Modernization-in-Moderation-64525.html?wlc=1222091656&wlc=1222178613

Researchers Hope 'Smart Desks' Will Improve Classroom Interaction
David DeBolt
The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 19, 2008

Move over, smart classrooms. Researchers at Durham University in England are working on an interactive desk they hope will move education away from its “teacher-centric environment,” the university announced Wednesday. The new desk’s screen will function somewhat like a whiteboard: An instructor can assign small sections of the desk to different students, and he or she can then send a specific task to each piece of the screen.
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3331/researchers-aim-to-improve-classroom-interaction?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Australia ups the ante on global access to research
Zoë Corbyn
Times Higher Education, September 18, 2008

A pioneering move by the Australian Government to allow open access to all of the nation's publicly funded research could "set all the dominoes falling worldwide", it was predicted this week. Kim Carr, the Australian Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, said he intended to implement reforms aimed at "unlocking public information and content, including the results of publicly funded research", following a review of the country's innovation.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403598&c=1

University of Michigan at forefront of new era in publishing
September 17, 2008

With the installation of a state-of-the-art book-printing machine at one of its libraries, the University of Michigan stands at the new frontier of 21st-century publishing, offering printed and bound reprints of out-of-copyright books from its digitized collection of nearly 2 million books, as well as thousands of books from the Open Content Alliance and other digital sources.
http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=6735

Smithsonian to put its 137 million-object collection online
The Associated Press, September 16, 2008

The Smithsonian Institution will work to digitize its collections to make science, history and cultural artifacts accessible online and dramatically expand its outreach to schools, the museum complex's new chief said Monday. "I worry about museums becoming less relevant to society," said Secretary G. Wayne Clough in his first interviews since taking the Smithsonian's helm in July.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/16/smithsonian.online.ap/index.html

Droits d'auteurs: la plate-forme de vidéos Dailymotion signe avec trois sociétés
La Tribune, 15 septembre 2008

Avec l'accord que vient de signer Dailymotion, le site Internet français de partage de vidéos, avec trois sociétés d'auteurs françaises, ces dernières pourront ainsi percevoir des droits pour les oeuvres de leur répertoire proposées sur ce site. Dailymotion vient de signer avec trois sociétés d'auteurs françaises un accord afin que le trio puisse ainsi percevoir des droits pour les oeuvres de leur répertoire diffusés sur ce site. Ces trois sociétés sont la SACD (Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques), la SCAM (Société civile des auteurs multimédia) et l'ADAGP qui regroupe les auteurs dans les arts graphiques et plastiques (Retrouvez le communiqué de Sacd sur la signature de cet accord en cliquant ci-contre à droite dans la rubrique : "pour aller plus loin").

ARTICLES

Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds.
Damon Darlin
The New York Times, September 20, 2008

Everyone has been talking about an article in The Atlantic magazine called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Some subset of that group has actually read the 4,175-word article, by Nicholas Carr. It is hard to think of a technology that wasn’t feared when it was introduced. In his Atlantic article, Mr. Carr says that Socrates feared the impact that writing would have on man’s ability to think. The advent of the printing press summoned similar fears. It wouldn’t be the last time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/technology/21ping.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

The other North American election
Nature, Volume 455, Issue 7211, September 18, 2008

Canadians go to the polls to elect a new government on 14 October. Although the initial stages of the campaign focused on the environment, the two major parties, Conservative and Liberal, have said little or nothing about science policy in general. This is a shame. Canada saw big boosts to its research funding from the late 1990s to 2000, including the creation of Canada Research Chairs, which brought good people into the country, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, which pumped billions into infrastructure. Those investments have been maintained, and science funding is still on the rise. But the gains are vulnerable in a competitive international market, warns the prime minister's former science adviser, Arthur Carty.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v455/n7211/pdf/455263a.pdf

Data on display: Two researchers explain why they're posting their experimental results online
Katherine Sanderson
Nature, Nature, Volume 455, Issue 7211, September 15, 2008

Risking being scooped and having patents refused, some scientists are posting their data online as they produce them. Organic chemist Jean-Claude Bradley of Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and biochemist Cameron Neylon of the University of Southampton, UK, describe this 'open notebook' approach.
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080915/full/455273a.html

The End
Boris Kachka
New York Magazine, September 14, 2008

The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world.
http://nymag.com/news/media/50279/

L’information sur l’information, enjeu stratégique de la construction des savoirs à l’échelle mondiale
Michel Arnaud
Distances et savoirs, Volume 61, Numéro 1, 2008

Les opérateurs des réseaux en contrôlent l’accès, les fournisseurs de contenus verrouillent leurs offres et les propriétaires des moteurs de recherche orientent les résultats des requêtes des internautes. Dans le cadre de la promotion du bien public informationnel, spécialement dans le domaine de la formation à distance, les pouvoirs publics doivent donc se donner les moyens de compenser les inconvénients de cette situation et de réguler la chaîne de production, d’indexation et de mise en ligne des contenus avec des archives ouvertes, des métadonnées interopérables, des moteurs de recherche efficaces mais conviviaux, des plates-formes de formation ouverte et à distance permettant de réutiliser les contenus afin de garantir des procédures d’apprentissage optimisées pour faciliter la construction de connaissances de tout un chacun. Le but de ce texte est d’examiner comment et à quelles conditions.
http://www.cairn.info/revue-distances-et-savoirs-2008-1-p-143.htm

RESOURCES / RESSOURCES

Why Copyright?
Michael Geist
Canadian Journal of Communication, September 15, 2008

This podcast features Michael Geist's public talk, "Why Copyright?" which took place at Concordia University (Montréal, Québec). Michael Geist is the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law, and law professor at the University of Ottawa. His name has become synonymous with Canadian copyright law. "Why Copyright?" is the central question in locating the importance of copyright within larger political debates.
http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/multimedia/view/1

Opening up education
Toru Iiyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumar eds
MIT Press, September 2008

Given the abundance of open education initiatives that aim to make educational assets freely available online, the time seems ripe to explore the potential of open education to transform the economics and ecology of education. Despite the diversity of tools and resources already available we have yet to take full advantage of shared knowledge about how these are being used, what local innovations are emerging, and how to learn from and build on the experiences of others.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11309&mlid=673

Intellectual Property Guidelines
Minerva Working Group, September 2008

This guide has been developed for the use of cultural heritage institutions which are digitising cultural material and publishing it online, or are considering doing so. The objective of the document is to provide pragmatic, concise advice to cultural heritage institutions on the topic of intellectual property rights, as it affects digitisation projects. The guide focuses in particular on the aspects of one body of intellectual property law, i.e. copyright law, which is most relevant to cultural heritage institutions involved in digitisation projects.
http://www.minervaeurope.org/publications/MINERVAeC%20IPR%20Guide_final1.pdf

Identifying Factors of Success in Institutional Repository Development
Carole L. Palmer et al
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, August 2008

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the GSLIS Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign undertook a one-year pilot study to investigate advances in institutional repository (IR) development. The aim was to learn about successes and challenges experienced by IR initiatives at university libraries that had made a substantial commitment to developing and sustaining an IR. Three sites were studied using the comparative case study method. They were purposefully selected to represent varying approaches to IR development undertaken at research libraries with similar missions and users.
https://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/handle/2142/8981

EVENTS / ÉVÉNEMENTS

Collaboration, Resource Sharing and the Knowledge Services Impact
Click University Connections, October 6 – 23, 2008

This course compares hierarchical and collaborative management techniques and provides attendees with guidelines for determining the value of resource sharing (when applicable) and for establishing the larger success of knowledge services as a management methodology in the continuing development of the knowledge culture for the larger enterprise.
http://slaconnections.typepad.com/click_university_blog/2008/09/post-18-septemb.html

4th International Digital Curation Conference: Radical Sharing: Transforming Science?
Edinburgh, Scotland, December 1-3, 2008

In partnership with the National e-Science Centre and supported by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) the Digital Curation Centre is holding its 4th International Digital Curation Conference, which will comprise a mix of peer-reviewed papers, invited presentations and international keynote speakers.
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2008/