Oxford University Press expands open access trial

The drive to make scientific, medical and academic research freely available on the Internet got a boost earlier this month as Oxford University Press (OUP) widened its trial of open access publishing. Oxford Journals, part of OUP, will begin its new Oxford Open project this July. It will give authors in participating journals the option to pay for articles to be freely available online as soon as they are published. It has also changed the rules so published authors can put their articles on their own websites a year after publication.

"[The move] will allow us to collect valuable, first-hand data on the demand for open access," says Martin Richardson of Oxford Journals.

Oxford Open is a further addition to the current Oxford Journals open access experiments. These include the Journal of Experimental Botany, eCAM and Nucleic Acids Research, the latter being the first major science journal from OUP to move to a full open access model.

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Printed textbooks "primitive", says high school junior

High school junior, Tim Doherty, was quoted in the press earlier this month as saying, "More people would be more apt to try using a CD-ROM at home [to do homework] than they would a textbook that can be a hassle to bring home." His comments are yet another indication that an e-textbook revolution is breaking out in schools and colleges across America.

Kinetic Books, a producer of digital physics textbooks, recently tested a new product in 90 high schools and got an enthusiastic response. In Diane Riendeau's physics classes at Deerfield High School in North Chicago, for example, students were sold on it.

"They liked the scenarios they had to solve, shooting cannon balls at a castle," she relates. "Many of the labs involved competitions between two students or the computer. I think it felt like they were playing a video game instead of doing a physics lab."

Larger textbook publishers McGraw-Hill also recognize the popularity of online learning materials and are beginning to offer electronic textbooks in CD-ROM and online form. They are also building the technology to keep the material available online. The company offers electronic textbooks in most subjects to districts that want to use them, and say that costs are similar to regular books - $14 to $66 apiece.

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Maryland squad cars wired for results

Annapolis (Maryland) Police Department is pushing to expand its use of laptops in squad cars; such has been the success of the project, which began in 2002. Currently the Department has 31 car-mounted terminals and seven hand-held PDAs. But county executive Janet Owens is including $2 million in her proposed fiscal 2006 to install them in the rest of the Department's 479 squad cars next spring.

Via a wireless modem, police officers can conduct warrant checks and view mug shots without radioing to dispatch - or even seeing the driver commit an infraction. "It gives immediate data to the officer on site," says Owens. "It allows the officers to be far more proactive."

Police officer David O'Toole, who got his $8,700 machine a month ago, says it can take up to 30 minutes to run a single tag or name through a dispatcher - "Now we're just taking a couple of minutes."

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EU backs massive digital library

A plan to create a vast digital library to preserve Europe's cultural heritage has received strong backing from European Union (EU) culture ministers. Six EU nations said they supported the initiative at culture talks, which were also attended by more than 800 artists. It is planning a 10-year digitization project to make works from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford university libraries freely available online.

EU officials and cultural commentators have voiced concern that Google's ambitious plans to build a virtual library, announced last December, could result in important European literary works missing out and being lost to future generations. Putting 4.5 billion pages of key works from Europe's libraries online would benefit researchers, as well as give disadvantaged nations access to global learning, they added.

Among the works held by the libraries are a 1687 first edition of Isaac Newton's The Principia, at Stanford, and Charles Darwin's 1871 work, The Descent of Man, which resides in Oxford's Bodleian library.

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ASIDES

Flying high - hilarious (but true) airline announcements

Every so often, airline attendants make an effort to make the in-flight "safety lecture" and announcements a bit more entertaining. Here is one example:

An airline pilot wrote that on this particular flight he had hammered his ship into the runway really hard. The airline had a policy which required the first officer to stand at the door while the passengers exited, smile, and give them a "Thanks for flying our airline."

He said that, in light of his bad landing, he had a hard time looking the passengers in the eye, thinking that someone would have a smart comment.

Finally everyone had gotten off except for a little old lady walking with a cane. She said, "Sir, do you mind if I ask you a question?" "Why, no, Ma'am," said the pilot. "What is it?" The little old lady said, "Did we land, or were we shot down?"

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