Hi Andrzej, everyone on cosmo-torun,

Thanks for those links. :)

Nice to see that Nature has discovered wikis and blogs, but it's rather hypocritical for them to say that wikis and blogs are a great thing while failing to make their own archives available for no-cost ("free as in beer") access on the web.

Moreover, wikis are usually politically free - free as in speech. They are also "money" free - free as in beer, but that's secondary. The important thing is that people can edit and improve their content.

Certainly, the wikipedia is *free* under the GFDL - GNU Free Documentation Licence. This means that you can reuse and modify and redistribute the material (provided you accept the licence conditions, whose main goal is to make sure that you give the same freedoms to other people). And of course, it's also accessible at zero cost.

There is an argument that scientific research articles should be non-free - i.e. once published, they cannot be modified. IMHO there is some justification for this. However, i don't see why review articles need to be non-free.

And certainly, both types should be available at zero-cost access.

Nature continues to refuse "free as in beer" access to virtually all of its articles.

On Thu, 1 Dec 2005, Andrzej Marecki wrote:

----- Forwarded message from NatureAlert NatureAlert@info.nature.com -----

[...]

---

NEWS FEATURES

Science in the web age: The expanding electronic universe Sarah Tomlin http://info.nature.com/cgi-bin24/DM/y/eV4x0BfWLH0Ch0qVj0ES

Science in the web age: Joint efforts At its best, academia is a marketplace of ideas. But many

Ideas are like coca-cola and soap powder? To be sold on the market?

scientists are reluctant to embrace the latest web tools that would allow them to communicate their ideas in new ways, says Declan Butler. http://info.nature.com/cgi-bin24/DM/y/eV4x0BfWLH0Ch0qVV0E7

Well, this author contradicts himself anyway, and most of the sense of the article is to violate the politically correct, pro-market ideology :)

: Such fears are dated, argues Jason Kelly, an MIT graduate student : involved in OpenWetWare. The upcoming generation, he says, believes : that excessive competition can harm science; they see the benefits of : brainstorming their research ideas on blogs as far outweighing the : risks.

Reading between the lines: the upcoming generation believes in cooperation, not competition. Two of our two biggest socio-political risks are global warming and the increasing risk of nuclear war, thanks to war criminals like Ossama bin Laden and George W. Bush and their supporters, and it's clear that the planet is too small for competition.

Cooperation is our only practical choice.

Science in the web age: The real death of print Despite clashes with publishers over copyright, Google's plan to make millions of books available online is turning the tide for efforts to digitize the world's literature. Andreas von Bubnoff tracks the demise of the printed page. http://info.nature.com/cgi-bin24/DM/y/eV4x0BfWLH0Ch0qVk0ET

Science in the web age: Start your engines Google has launched another challenge to commercial search services - this time aimed at scientists. But is the new engine running as smoothly as its fans hope? Jim Giles investigates. http://info.nature.com/cgi-bin24/DM/y/eV4x0BfWLH0Ch0qVW0E8

[...]

----- End forwarded message -----

P.S. The access to these articles is free.

Free as in "zero cost". Yes.

But they are neither wiki articles (modifiable by internetizens), nor are they blogs (comments allowed).

"Nature" still has some way to go, or to simply be ignored....

Anyway, Nature recommends wikis, and here's Nature on the wikipedia ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_%28journal%29

pozdr boud

hi Andrzej, all,

On Thu, 15 Dec 2005, Andrzej Marecki wrote:

On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 01:54:18PM +0100, Boud Roukema wrote:

...

Nice to see that Nature has discovered wikis and blogs, but it's rather hypocritical for them to say that wikis and blogs are a great thing while failing to make their own archives available for no-cost ("free as in beer") access on the web.

Let's hope it changes some time in the future. So far they published this in the latest issue:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438890a.html

... and the last para of the above reads:

"Nature would like to encourage its readers to help. The idea is not to seek a replacement for established sources such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but to push forward the grand experiment that is Wikipedia, and to see how much it can improve. Select a topic close to your work and look it up on Wikipedia. If the entry contains errors or important omissions, dive in and help fix them. It need not take too long. And imagine the pay-off: you could be one of the people who helped turn an apparently stupid idea into a free, high-quality global resource."

Wow! Cool!

i highly recommend this whole Nature article (well most of it, unfortunately, it does not seem to be a wikified article, so i can't correct the obvious errors...) to those people who think my style of teaching - with a strong wikipedia component - is too "politically incorrect"...

Also you can note that (at least) CfA UMK has a free access to new articles.

Well, it doesn't change the fact that Nature is being hypocritical.

Anyway, thanks for the info. :)

It's nice to know when authoritarian organisations are forced to accept the advantages of openness and cooperation instead of hierarchy and competition...

pozdr boud