Open access to knowledge is something I firmly believe in. The open access week perhaps provides a good oportunity to us all to learn more about the movement and its aims.
There are more and more individuals as well as universities opening access to knowledge. An open society can provide a better future to us all.

A few useful links:
Open access week
Wikipedia: Open access publishing
SPARC Europe
Science Commons
CC Learn
Directory of Open Access Journals

I’ve checked my publicly available profile over at Personas (thank you, Bee, for the link) and was a bit surprised. Each time I put down my name, a different profile was created (see below). It seems I’m a very simple person (compare my profile to Malcolm Turnbull’s) but I still don’t understand how sports can define my profile. I couldn’t be less interested in sports! And although I’m interested in history and language change, it is somewhat out of place to connect my profile with genealogy.

The whole thing reminds me of all those “psychology tests” we did as teenagers. If things were that simple in life! Mind you, perhaps my profile is just elusive to software! Ha!?!

Science Daily is among PC Magazine’s top 100 websites of 2009 and I’ve found out that there are a number of articles on learning and language acquisition in it.

Research has shown that 8-year olds learn differently than 12-year olds. At the age of eight, children learn from positive feedback and do not react to negative feedback – it seems they cannot process it and use it to learn from their mistakes. Learning from mistakes is believed to be a complex process. However, it is also know that  it is the basal ganglia that reacts to positive feedback and that its activity does not change with age. Obviously positive feedback is important to us all. And as an even more recent research shows, positive feedback makes it more likely that the thing we learn next will be successful too.

Of course this has implications for teaching and parenting as well. And another useful bit: children learn better if they can explain what they’ve learnt to their parents even when parents don’t know a thing about the subject discussed. Mere listening does the trick because it is the act of explaining that helps the child and the fact that they are listened to. Good to know.

Elsevier has recently announced the Article of the Future project (I’ve learnt about it via Tony Hirst’s blog post) that aims to “redefine how a scientific article is presented online”. They also released two prototype articles from the field of cell research to illustrate their approach. The original article’s format follows the usual page layout and text organization.

However, the article of the future not just looks different, it also feels different. Look:

The text is broken up into more manageable bits and these are navigated by tabs. The first page features the title, authors and their affiliation (in a pop-up window), abstract as well as bulleted article highlights, author interview (audio or video) and a visualization of the article’s contents. The last three features are to assist the readers in deciding which articles to read and which not and also get more easily to the parts of the article they are interested in most.

Articles of the future will also display figures in ways that will connect them. This will allow readers to have a closer look at the ones they are interested in most and drill down through related supplemental figures.

This all sounds great. I wonder though how this will affect the language of science. How will the interaction between author and reader change? Can’t wait to find out.