Just in case you missed it, back in February the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard voted to allow access to their scholarly works through an online repository. (Here's the resolution, and here's the press release.) This means that everything the Harvard faculty produce will be available free to everyone everywhere. Almost. The resolution contains an opt-out clause that allows faculty to request that the policy be waived on a particular article basis. In the past such loopholes have been crippling; the NIH Pubilc Access used to be voluntary, and participation was only 4% then. We won't find out the effect of the loophole for three years, when the policy is due for review.
The National Institutes of Health have changed their policy regarding public access. As of last week, all peer-reviewed publicatons resulting from work funded fully or in part by the NIH must be submitted to PubMed Central within a year so that the publication is available free to everyone. This is a change to the previous policy, implemented in 2005, under which submission to PubMed Central was voluntary. The law was changed after a 2006 progress report found that voluntary compliance was only 4%. The NIH web site has a helpful FAQ on the policy and a list of journals which submit your paper to PubMed Central for you so that you don't have to do any extra work to be in compliance. If you're interested in the evolution of this policy, you'll find a helpful timeline here.
When it comes to statistics, a lot of people get stuck. Maybe they never received any training, or maybe they've run into a problem they just don't know how to handle. That's why Yale has StatLab. Located at 140 Prospect Street, StatLab has what you need to get past those sticky statistical problems. There's a room full of computers loaded up with a bunch of statistical software packages like SPSS, SAS, Stata, R, S-plus, and just plain ol' Excel, and there are consultants on hand to help you use it all. There are even workshops throughout the year to get you up to speed. So if you're knowledge of statistics stops at p, StatLab is the place to go.
It's really easy to share stuff on the web these days. Take flickr, for instance. You upload your photos and say who can see them. You also say if other people can use them. How? With a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons licenses make it easy to define how your stuff can be used without having to hire an attorney. You can say anybody can use your photo (or song or movie or poem or whatever) in any way as long as you get credit. Or you can say that a person can use your creation as long as it's not changed. Or you can say that a person can use it but only in stuff that isn't charged for. There are six different licenses, and you get to pick. See the icon at the bottom of this page? That's the icon for the least restrictive license, called the attribution license. If you click on it you'll go to a site that spells out how what I've written here can be used.
But maybe you're not a blogger but a scientist, and maybe what you want to share is something else altogether, say a molecule or an antibody or a technique or a cell line. How do you do that? Well, the people behind Creative Commons have also brought us Science Commons. Science Commons is trying to pull down the barriers that slow progress in scientific research, and one way in which they're doing this is by making it easier to share scientific stuff by replacing Material Transfer Agreements, which often have to be negotiated, with standard, modular agreements like Creative Commons licenses.
There's more to come on this. I've only just started to get my head around it.
Dr. Noam Harel of the Department of Psychiatry issued a call for a centralized grant proposal repository on the pages of Nature a couple of weeks ago. His idea is that you write your grant, you post it to the repository, and then the funding agencies troll the repository looking for proposals appropriate for their missions and aims. This might eliminate the stress of multiple deadlines and the time wasted revising a proposal for different agencies.
So what do you think? Would the prospect of decreasing the time you spend preparing grants be enough to entice you to release that white-knuckled grip with which you hold onto your ideas?
If you're looking for a way to use the web to ease your research collaborations, Yale has a tool that could help you out. It's free, it's easy, and you may even already know about it. It's Classes*v2, Yale's course management system. If you teach or take classes in Yale College, you've almost certainly used it, but what you probably don't know is that you can get what's called a project site set up on Classes*v2 to help with your research.
Project sites on Classes*v2 work almost exactly the same as sites for classes. You can add anybody as a user, even somebody outside Yale. You can upload and download files, either for everybody in the group or just for a specific person. You can email everybody in the project, keep a wiki, keep a schedule, have discussion threads, and interact in a chat room. And if you've used Classes*V2 before, it's the same, simple-to-use interface. Interested? Then email classes2@yale.edu to see if Classes*v2 is the right tool for your collaboration.
support team, Mikhael Guy! Misha joined us in February to provide suppport for scientific software applications, and he's here to help you find the software that you need and then help you make it do what you want it to do. His background is in math, so he'll be able to figure out all that hardcore stuff that always seems to fry your brain. Don't hesitate to drop him a line when you need a hand.
Ever spilled anything on your laptop? I have. Ever dropped your laptop? I have. You just have to figure that if you use a laptop for years, eventually something's going to happen to it. Once I heard a story about somebody driving off with his laptop on the roof of his car.
This is why you need to backup regularly, and when I say regularly I mean daily. And not just laptops either. Desktops too. Hard drives are mechanical devices and sooner or later they all fail.
Yale has a backup service that can automatically back you up every night. It costs $30.00 to set up, and then it's $5.00 per month to backup 20 GB, $10.00 per month for 50 GB, and $0.50 per month for every GB over 50. And won't you be glad you paid for it when you look in the rear view mirror and see your laptop bouncing down the road.
My hiring a few months ago is part of a broader effort at Academic Media & Technology to better support Yale's research community. To get better at serving you, we need to know what we're doing well and what we're doing not so well, and to find that out we'll be going out into Yale's research community over the next few months to listen to the faculty's experiences with IT at Yale. We'd like to hear about things like these:
- How do you store all that data you've collected over the years?
- How do you backup your data?
- Is your network fast enough?
- How do you maintain your web site?
- Do you use a blog in your research?
- Do you use a wiki in your research?
- Would you like to use high performance computing in your research?
If you'd like to meet with us, please email me. Or, if you'd like to let it all out right this second, just click the link below to leave a comment. Unless you create an account and login, your comment will be anonymous.
It's just completely impossible to keep up with the scientific literature, isn't it? Too many scientists plus too many journals equals way more than your brain can handle. Well, here's a tip that might help a little. You have a feedreader installed and running, right? Did you know you can use it to automate PubMed searches? Just run a search, look for the pull down menu that says "Send to", select RSS feed, and after a couple more clicks you're all set. Here's a screencast to show you how.
Yale has bought new licenses for three scientific software packages. Students can now get MatLab free, and faculty members can get MatLab, Mathematica, or LabView for $50.00 a copy. Details here.
I bet you think web surfing is about as easy as it could be, right? All you have to do is move one hand and your eyes, and just sit back and take it all in. But, what if there's some web site that's consistently great but only adds stuff every two or three days? What about that blogger whose every post is gold but who only posts once a week? What a pain to go there once, twice, three times a day only to keep getting denied that stimulating new content.
The answer to this is something called a feed reader. These days most web sites have something called an RSS feed. An RSS feed is a file on the web site that lists the content on the web site. When the content is added, the list is updated. A feedreader is a program that periodically checks the feed and alerts you when there's something new to check out. This means that you don't have to keep checking over and over to make sure you catch the new stuff right away.
There are a bunch of feed readers out there. Some, like Google Reader, NewsGator, and BlogLines, work within your browser. Others, like NetNewsWire (Mac) and FeedDemon (Windows), are standalone applications. All of these are free. I use NetNewsWire. Here's how to download it, install it, and subscribe to a feed:
How do you learn these days? Is it in front of a monitor rather than in front of a piece of paper? Has the web turned all those individual journals you used to follow into just one big journal for you? If so, you might want to check out Zotero. It’s a plugin for Firefox that lets you organize information right inside your browser.
You use EndNote to keep track of your references, right? Well, Zotero can do a lot of what EndNote does. It can suck an information source’s metadata from the web, it can search the metadata, it lets you assign keywords, and it lets you write some notes for each information source. Beyond what EndNote does, you can save a web page on your machine and then highlight it and stick virtual post-it notes on it. The most original feature, and the one that I liked the best, is the ability to view a timeline of your information sources, so that you can see the history of the development of a particular line of thought.
So it’s good at organizing your information, and it lets you do it right inside your browser, but how is it for formatting citations and bibliographies? Well, I’ll have to get back to you on that, because while there's a plugin for Word, I couldn’t try it out because it doesn’t work in Word 2008 for the Mac.
The future of Zotero may be even more exciting. Zotero 2.0 promises the advent of shared collections of information sources, so that you can see what your colleagues have gleaned from the web and even collaboratively annotate web pages.
