Really Simple Sidi (RSS)

RSS Goes ProQuest

2013-06-18T00:35:00.000-05:00

2005- Proquest Goes RSS

2013- RSS Goes (to) ProQuest

Very excited to move from one innovative company to another.

Moving

2013-06-17T09:10:00.000-05:00

Saying so long to my friends at Guy&Gallard, best service around 26th and Park

Pre-K Graduation and Moving

2013-06-17T09:06:00.002-05:00

Alon's principal quoted Churchill at the graduation (no clue why there is a graduation for pre-k, however that's another story) and it may apply to my situation too
"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning"

.

Keep Calm and Carry On providing solutions

2013-04-18T21:33:00.000-05:00

After spending last week with Mendeley team and reading all the comments about the acquisition, my summary of this strategic move is just carry on delivering solutions which will improve researchers workflows and help them in their daily life.

This ain't a new strategy for Elsevier, we have been executing this strategy for many years, and we'll continue doing it.

Once more congratulations to Mendeley team (rock on) and welcome to Elsevier (another rock on company where people are good)

Connecting Reference Managers

2013-03-29T14:44:00.000-05:00

Martin Fenner's states that "that scientific infrastructure needs to be interoperable first and decentralized second" on his latest post "Some Thoughts on Beyond the Paper". Thinking about it, would not be great to create interoperability within reference managers (Zotero, EndNote, RefWorks, Mendeley, etc) i.e. match the same content in Zotero to Endnote and leverage usage data for recommendation and connecting/following researchers.
It might be time to create something similar to tomahawk for reference manager solutions to bring the next level of "social" and "smartness" into scholarly communication.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mfenner/3720748795/

Purim 2013 @Sullivan Street

2013-02-27T17:33:00.004-05:00

Researchers SolutionS

2013-02-24T18:57:00.000-05:00

While chatting with a good colleague over dinner he asked why I have stopped posting. I told him that posting for me was always like a "post-it" notes of what I was thinking, and most of my posts were few lines or a paragraph at best thanks to a great engineering education. With tweets I was able to do the same.

I just checked the last post that I had 8 months ago, and with the recent announcements , today the importance of building Researcher SolutionS (think of this the new RSS) becomes more crucial.

The Implementa,on of Clinical Genomics: Ethical, Societal and Regulatory Considerations http://bit.ly/MHinQA

2012-07-17T22:43:00.001-05:00

http://twitter.com/rafaelsidi

Platforms and Research Solutions will be key for STM

2012-06-25T22:49:00.002-05:00

This article from MIT Sloan Management was worth of breaking a long silence on this blog.

Today there are plenty of similarities in the STM market from young start-up companies.

When we started Elsevier Applications and Developer Network initiative, we envisioned that

"The newest era of the Information Age could very well be called the Age of Platforms, given the explosion of markets defined by platform competition. Increasing numbers of companies big and small, whether providing hardware devices, traditional software or software in the cloud [for researchers], are attempting to become platform masters by releasing application programming interfaces that allow others to build software and hardware products or complementary services on top of their technology offerings. Platform competition is expanding into many markets and can be found today in a variety of industries [including STM] and on different scales: from the nearly universal platforms of the Internet, credit cards and the telephone to newer Internet-enabled platforms such as Facebook, Skype, Google Maps and PayPal.

If you are in STM and have not started to open up your platform and invited developers to build solutions to improve researchers efficiency, you are in trouble.

The "genius": Gunter Grass

2012-04-07T12:08:00.000-05:00

Here is another genius this time "Nobel" winner Gunter Grass. Anshel Pfeffer at Haaretz puts it nicely :

Logic and reason are useless when a highly intelligent man, a Nobel laureate no less, does not understand that his membership in an organization that planned and carried out the wholesale genocide of millions of Jews disqualifies him from criticizing the descendants of those Jews for developing a weapon of last resort that is the insurance policy against someone finishing the job his organization began. What could be more self-evident?

Having served in the organization that tried, with a fair amount of success, to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth he should keep his views to himself when it comes to the Jews' doomsday weapon.

Pass the app

2012-04-06T15:46:00.002-05:00

This year unfortunately I won't be with the kids and the prime minister for Passover to say pass the matzah, I needed to stay in NY for few meetings...
While we are at Passover interesting article by Samuel Arbesman arbesman.

CodeForScience Turkey

2012-04-05T22:38:00.002-05:00

Glad to host the first CodeforScience event in Turkey.

If you haven't seen yet, checked the new Lipid Structure App at ScienceDirect and Scopus. It's a great example how an "open platform" can create domain specific solutions collaborating with scientific community. These are still first steps for what we are creating for a new scholarly communication and discovery platform...

How to ruin a culture

2012-04-05T22:18:00.003-05:00

It seems some geniuses decided to replace the horse and carriages in Buyukada (Princes Islands) with battery powered vehicles... The same way they ruined the whole architecture of the city now they will do it with the Islands. My kids answer to the news was "what the hell, we'll stop going there anymore"
Apparently there is a report that claims that horse and carriages are dangerous for bicycle riders and pedestrians. This is ridiculous....

Economy is crashing, apps are smashing

2012-01-02T22:23:00.006-05:00

Just believe in the process....a brief summary of 2011

Knowledge Discovery Solutions & STM research products

2011-12-31T18:05:00.011-05:00

What a year, 100+ solutions "built by researchers for researchers" in an STM platform and what an effort in the last two months of our team and the developers creating these solutions.
Many thanks to everyone -students, librarians, developers, researchers, scientists- in participating in this new ecosystem and bringing your innovations and solutions.
Happy 2012.

Parking in 6th Street and Kim Jong Eun

2011-12-21T21:32:00.010-05:00

Just in case my wife took picture of this doubled parked van, so if it hits our car we know where to go

The first thing that Kim Jong Eun needs is a presidential haircut. Just stop by at Royal barber shop in East Village where all the barbers are from former Soviet Union

If you are interested in our new solutions that we've releasing continuously in Elsevier's applications marketplace check the apps gallery Thanks to all our developer community members!

Gary Hamel on Management: Management is the least efficient activity in your organization

2011-11-25T15:32:00.004-05:00

"A hierarchy of managers exacts a hefty tax on any organization. This levy comes in several forms. First, managers add overhead, and as an organization grows, the costs of management rise in both absolute and relative terms. A small organization may have one manager and 10 employees; one with 100,000 employees and the same 1:10 span of control will have 11,111 managers. That’s because an additional 1,111 managers will be needed to manage the managers. In addition, there will be hundreds of employees in management-related functions, such as finance, human resources, and planning. Their job is to keep the organization from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. Assuming that each manager earns three times the average salary of a first-level employee, direct management costs would account for 33% of the payroll. Any way you cut it, management is expensive." Via HBR

Vision in co-creation solutions and future of STM research platforms

2011-11-01T08:23:00.018-05:00

Today we've reached another milestone in our SciVerse and Application Marketplace and Developer Network initiatives.

When we started these initiative a few years ago our goal was very clear: accelerate science and help researchers do research better. We needed to create better knowledge discovery solutions (KDS) for scientists and researchers. We aimed to do this by collaborating with research and librarian community. We needed to enrich our content. We needed to connect from literature to data in a more intelligent and contextual way. We needed to make our content more interactive, more discoverable and accessible. We needed to create domain specific research tools. We wanted our users to customize the tools that they want to use. We wanted to let researchers create custom solutions. We also knew that we could not develop all these solutions ourselves. We believe in non-invented here. We needed to connect, collaborate and co-create these tools with scientific and research community. We needed to provide a flexible platform and services for the scientists who told us that they wanted to use our content their way. We needed to change how scientific research solutions were created. We needed to help research community to build solutions that they want and they need.

Hence we've built an application framework -a platform- where now we can introduce a new feature Author Wordle app in just 8 hours. (Talk about agile development in STM market and "turning products into platforms".)
We've started reaching out and collaborating with researchers and scientific community by doing hacks and challenges at New Jersey Institute of Technology , Rensselaer/Tetherless Worls Health, University of Sydney, National University of Singapore, Dalhousie and Tsinghua Uiversity.
We've reached out to librarian community with AppsforLibrary to get their input on what kind of solutions they want to see in our SciVerse platform.
With AppsforScience we've asked developers community to build search and discovery solutions using our content and APIs.

We can't thank enough to all the individuals(students, developers, researchers, librarians, corporations) who participated to these events and brought their creativity in building solutions and developed apps that are being shared in SciVerse platform with the global research community. All these individuals are the"first settlers" of what is called a distruptive platform and embraced the vision that we set for future research platforms.

Today's announcement of AppsforScience winners is a great example of co-creation of these solutions with the developers community. Congratulations to Altmetric developed by Euan Adie, Refinder developed by Leo Sauermann , iHelp developed by Mourougane Arumugam, Keyword Optimizer developed by Scott Fortmann-Roe and ChemDetect, developed by Keming Labs.

Go and use these new apps and other apps that we have in our gallery. Send your appreciation to the developers. Send us and developers your feedback
Enjoy!

A dissertation about Kuzguncuk and my father

2011-10-26T21:31:00.003-05:00

An interesting dissertation by Amy Mills "Streets of Memory:
The Kuzguncuk Mahalle in Cultural Practice and Imagination

Today's Istanbul is like a cement city, but Kuzguncuk still is a gem. One of the gems of Kuzguncuk was Bakkal Marko. The picture of my father is probably from late 50th where he is sitting behind his lakerda stand.

What needs to be done in STM publishing

2011-09-22T07:52:00.005-05:00

Philip Bourne's presentation at OOSPA conference

Ten Simple Rules for Open Access Publishers

View more presentations from Philip Bourne

Another wake up call for STM publishers

2011-09-20T21:53:00.003-05:00

e-Reader Owners Buy More Books and Netflix separates DVD business as Qwikster.

Is it time for publishers to "separate" print from their online offering?

Scenarios: Google+ and VIVO

2011-08-10T22:04:00.003-05:00

If plenty of Universities follow Brown's example and use Google Apps for Education, and if Google + gets traction within scientific community, and if VIVO is successful it can be an interesting landscape for scientific collaboration and networking.
IMG_2686, a photo by nunojmachado on Flickr.

Watermelon birthday cake for Tamar

2011-08-08T18:42:00.002-05:00

Unfortunately I missed the fun here in NY while they are all having good time in Tel-Aviv, we'll do an encore in Urla soon.

Alon waiting for the bus in Tel-Aviv

2011-08-04T18:43:00.001-05:00

From Drop Box

Personalization done right and what's with the apps?

2011-08-03T12:29:00.008-05:00

Personalization is not easy. Worth watching how Yahoo Labs scientists are tackling this issue with news content.

And if you are interested to find out how we are doing in terms apps ecosystem in SciVerse and the new Elsevier's Applications and Developer Network initiative just check out all the new solutions that are available to SciVerse users in our applications gallery; you can see one example of our collaboration with scientific community in this case NCBI with the Genome Viewer app; we initiated community driven projects AppsforScience Challenge and AppsforLibrary Idea Challenge, hackathons at NJIT and Tetherless World Health and Life Sciences Hackathon and coming soon Singapore Code Jam.

Overall we are doing "jolie" good...

Here is the Genome Viewer app that was developed by our Content Innovation team and NCBI:

Genome viewer app elsevier application & developer network

View more presentations from Rafael Sidi

Here is a video put together by NJIT hack participants