Category Archives: Uncategorized

I am supporting the Boycott against Elsevier (http://thecostofknowledge.com/ ) not only for the reasons given there (exorbitant prices, bundles of unwanted journals, support for SOPA/PIPA/RWA) but also because they exercise monopoly control. This monopoly is supported through restrictive contracts and … Continue reading →

I’m amazed and saddened that the community has not massively signed the petition against the RWA. (I haven’t because I’m not a US citizen). The petition wanted 25,000 signatures and has only got a much smaller amount. It gives the … Continue reading →

We’ve started the @ccess resource and community to make more and hopefully all scholarly material fully BOAI- and OKD-compliant. Anyone can use it for any legal purpose and do anything with it without permission or fear of being sued by … Continue reading →

We’re taking MALARIA as our lead project in @ccess. If you haven’t read about @ccess, read the previous post. Many peple are incredibly frustrated by lack of access to the scholarly literature. I call them the “Scholarly Poor”. If you … Continue reading →

Yesterday I blogged about our new project in Opening scholarship: @ccess. Several people retweeted it, and one asked “What’s @ccess for?” – a good prompt for some more information. @ccess is to discover OPEN scholarly information, to label it, and … Continue reading →

We have started a really new exciting venture in making scholarship available to everyone. We’re starting from scratch. We’re still working out details. And “we” means “you”. About 3 weeks ago things came to a head. Many people are frustrated … Continue reading →

I have just discovered Elsevier’s content mining document. For those who don’t know I have been trying to get permission to text-mine Elsevier content for two years and have been treated as a second-class citizen and ultimately come away with … Continue reading →

This blog has been tackling the problem of Open Access, what it’s vision is and how to get a coherent movement. I’ve been excited to get a comment from Eric Raymond (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond ). Eric (whom I shared a platform with … Continue reading →

I’ve been off air for a bit as my hard disk crashed – it emitted messages (“Your disk is about to crash”, then “Ctrl-Alt-Del to access dying disk”, then – the “rest is silence”). Since I live my life in … Continue reading →

Tim Gowers has used Spike Milligan as an inspiration for challenging Elsevier: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/ . British satire is one of the things that keeps us going. I’ll use the equally irreverent Pythons in “Life of Brian” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python%27s_Life_of_Brian ). From WP There … Continue reading →