Today, Wikipedia is not available to us -- at least not easily (you can still view it on mobile devices and also in your browser with some tweaks). The reason is that it is part of a protest against SOPA and PIPA -- two pieces of legislation being considered by the US Congress. To read …
JSTOR tests changes
Following up on my post last week on academic publishing, JSTOR has announced that it will be testing changes that may open up access further. In the coming weeks, JSTOR will make available the beta version of a new program, Register & Read, which will give researchers read-only access to some journal articles, no payment required. …
Windows + Office + Cloud on your iPad
You know you hear about these products where they promise to put Windows and Office on an iPad and they never quite work. Well, this morning I tried OnLive. This is the cloud-based gaming service but they have just released Windows and Office for the iPad. And it is free if you don't want premium …
Exit and voice in access to scholarly articles
For some reason, this week is the week of discussion of open access to scholarly articles. Here is a call for scientists to share results or lose funding (in Bloomberg). Here in the NYT is concern that new legislation will lock down NIH funded research where previously it had been openly available. Here is Kevin …
Continue reading "Exit and voice in access to scholarly articles"
A silver lining?
In today's New York Times (online), I have a short piece discussing the prospects for women in the current recession. Recessions are terrible for recent graduates and the evidence I have seen points to it being worse for women even taking into account moves to get further education. It's all somewhat gloomy. By coincidence, today …
A few updates …
Just thought I'd list a few updates to some issues that I have previously blogged about: What problem does Google+ solve? I have previously written that I was not sure what problem Google+ was solving for consumers that made it distinctive from Facebook. Today, Google revealed more by introducing social elements into search results. Basically, …
5 years ago today …
... I sat in an airport lounge waiting to board a flight back to Australia. I was watching Steve Job's MacWorld keynote address from a streaming site. Rumours had been circulating for some months that Apple would announce something big there and expectations were high. And there 10 minutes into the talk jobs announced -- …
Novices make Wikipedia tick
Wikipedia's success and even existence is a mystery. Social scientists (not just economists) do not understand how it could be that a completely open access encyclopedia could have worked. The traditional theory was that contributors who invested to make Wikipedia good would be subject to free riding and that any rewards they received would be …
Clay Shirky, paywalls, heavy sigh
I like Clay Shirky. We have met a couple of times. We are on the same page for lots of issues. And I really admire his way to economically express some important issues. But recently I have become concerned that his arguments are a little too snappy and don't really stand up when pushed. That …
Live books should be with us
A euphemism for physical books these days is to call them 'dead tree' versions. Of course, that is just descriptive as they have always been that but perhaps a better term may be 'dead' versions. In today's WSJ, Nicholas Carr argues that dead is good. An e-book, I realized, is far different from an old-fashioned printed one. …
Digitopoly 