A quick update. I’ve been spending most of my time on #ami2 which is now at raw alpha (see below). Other items of note include:
- Mendeley is now owned by Elsevier. I shall blog this. If you care about Open scholarship you have to be seriously concerned.
- Open Data Workshop (http://blog.okfn.org/2013/02/27/open-data-on-the-web-workshop-april-2013/, http://www.w3.org/2013/04/odw/ ). Really exciting to see the concentration of interest. There was a pre-workshop evening run by OKFN – lightning talks (I gave a short one (3-4 mins) on #ami2 and the problems of scientific data. Many international visitors came.
- Ross and Avril got married (@rmounce) – their 2nd or 3 weddings. Great occasion – thanks all.
- Went to talk by Glyn Moody on Copyright.
- Meeting by JISC/Cameron on tools to determine openness of livcences in scholpubs.
- Opening of Materials centre at QMU (Martin Dove). CML continues to be valuable.
- Good progress on CML dictionaries for compchem.
- We keep fighting for “the right to read is the right to mine” at Brussels (Licences for Europe). Do university libraries care?? They’d rather buy things than fight.
Overall I worry seriously about Open Scholarship. The universities and their libraries don’t care and are giving it away and then buying it back. It’s getting worse not better. We should be fighting for our rights.
#ami2 is at raw alpha. That means that it can do useful stuff if you know what you are doing and know the limitations. We are not appealing for volunteers yet but if you want to be involved please let me know. You will need to be able to:
- Run Maven and Java.
- Use Bitbucket.
- Get excited about really boring stuff (like errors in fonts, pagination etc.)
- Sort problems yourself/communally.
- Want to liberate information from PDFs.
- Have a few minable papers (“Open” in some sense).
- Be patient.
- Respect copyright.
Currently there are no proper metrics but:
- Ca. 1 sec per page
- Useful compression for text-only (images can’t compress, of course).
Mail me or leave a message here or simply use Bitbucket (http://www.bitbucket.org/petermr/svg2xml-dev ) and give feedback.