Jan Hagerlin, Royal Library in Stockholm and coordinator for the development programme Open Access, gives his view in “KK-bladet” nr 2, June 2009. It is even more motivating to work with Open Peer Review Journals, when also central functions in the Swedish university world confirm how obsolete current research publication system is. The scientific publishers are very profitable on confiscating the copyright of research publicly financed. The impacts are delayed research results and huge costs for the universities to be able to have access to its own research. EU as well as the US government and researchers themselves are now demanding free file sharing of research results. “Open Access is in the interest of the researchers. They will get more citations and increased visibility. The situation is different form the music and film industry, that looses income from file sharing.”
]]>This seminar suggests that it is more useful to think about the local in terms of locus than location. Both words derive from the Latin for place. However, while location retains a strong focus on place, locus indicates the convergence of a set of relations and has scientific connotations. A location is a given, which can be stated in terms of longitude and latitude, while a locus is constituted by multiple relations and is always open to change. A location exists in three-dimensional geometric space, while a locus can be found on the curving lines of calculus, in the “space” of cyberspace or quantum physics, in the “space” of a double helix (the interaction and expression of genes), or even in the relations that constitute the social-political body.
]]>The video below is from a guest lecture Donna Haraway held at EGS 2000-09-01:
The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access.
We, the undersigned, feel obliged to address the challenges of the Internet as an emerging functional medium for distributing knowledge. Obviously, these developments will be able to significantly modify the nature of scientific publishing as well as the existing system of quality assurance.
In accordance with the spirit of the Declaration of the Budapest Open Acess Initiative, the ECHO Charter and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, we have drafted the Berlin Declaration to promote the Internet as a functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base and human reflection and to specify measures which research policy makers, research institutions, funding agencies, libraries, archives and museums need to consider.
Annually follow up conferences have since then taken place. This I learned when International Journal of Feminist Technoscience was introduced at the Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research 080123. I wonder if and how the issue of open per review has been considered in the context of these conferences. Anyone who knows?
]]>One problem is that copyright laws are national while Internet is without borders. Another problem is that a web page is an example of convergence media. A web page might contain several different instances of media, by multiple authors belonging to different countries. It is a fact that prevailing copyright laws are an obstacle in the research on world wide web.
]]>An unease with the current scientific publishing system was addressed in two open panels at last year’s EASST conference. Now, a new journal has been launched in order to tackle some of the issues discussed at EASST 2006. The Open peer review process of the International Journal of Feminist Technoscience (IJFT) makes use of ”an interactive framework to secure quality, relevance, efficiency and democracy in scientific publishing” and to foster an open dialogue between actors in the field of technoscience. Programmatically, the first issue is entitled Processes of Cooperation. At stake is the distributed knowledge production in the digital age and the challenges as to the current academic publishing system.
Published 12 June 2007 in Biomedicine on Display - a blog of Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen focusing their inquiring minds on the display of visual and material culture in the clinic, the laboratory and the museum. The aim is to promote wide public engagement with contemporary biomedicine.
]]>Research mixing human and animal eggs and sperm has garnered considerable ethical concern and been banned in several countries. The banning was started in part by fears that scientists will create animals with human genes or other ethically questionable organisms, and in part by concerns that mixing animal and human materials diminishes the sanctity of human life. But researchers say that public outcry has largely failed to distinguish between important medical research, such as therapeutic cloning, and more dubious experiments. For example, in the United Kingdom, proposals to use animal eggs for human cloning sparked outcry from an overzealous media portending half-human creatures.
Quoted from: Technology Review: Human-Animal Cybrids
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