Publishers vs. Open Access January 27, 2007
Posted by Andre Vellino in Open Access, Open Source.add a comment
News@Nature.com reports that Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society have consulted with Eric Dezenhall, the controversial author of Nail ‘Em! Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses, to help them strategize on how to deal with the Open Access movement.
This conflict rather reminds me of the early days of the Microsoft vs. open source software battles. I think that, as with Open Source, the Open Access movement will eventually develop a range sustainable business models that enables traditional publishers to continue making money (e.g. by providing value-added information retrieval services) without needing to own exclusive rights to the content.
Virtual Collections January 22, 2007
Posted by Andre Vellino in Digital library.2 comments
I think it is possible and would be useful to write software that helps users build “virtual collections” of scholarly articles according to themes or intersecting subjects of interest. This would encourage readers to make serendipitous discoveries that typically occur in browsing mode rather than searching mode. (more…)
Open Source Portlet Containers January 20, 2007
Posted by Andre Vellino in Java, Open Source, Portlet.add a comment
I am looking for an open source portal platform that I can use for research purposes. For the moment, I am not especially concerned about scalability, performance, or enterprise-grade features (management, reporting, etc.) I just want a simple portal environment that works in a (portable) programming language that I understand (or care to understand which rules out Perl or PHP 
) and that supports Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) or at least Web Services. I also want to be able to see how it works, so I prefer Open Source. (more…)
Collaborative Filtering January 16, 2007
Posted by Andre Vellino in Collaborative filtering, Digital library, Recommender service.3 comments
One area of research that I think will be fruitful and also beneficial to the end-user of a science library portal is a collaborative filtering (CF) system. The general idea is to take information about the user’s past usage statistics to help cluster / rank search results, offer serendipitous recommendations and automatically update library “alerts”. (more…)
Digital ID January 15, 2007
Posted by Andre Vellino in DRM, Digital Identity, Digital library, Personal identity.2 comments
I sometimes think that there are no (or very few) really new ideas, just better versions of old ones. The iPod is a better Walkman and the Walkman was a better record-player. Perhaps blogs are just a better (or just updated?) version of the Gutenberg printing press.
I am new to the digital library scene, so I’m not sure about this, but I have this sense that one of the stumbling blocks to progress is the tension between copyright owners (e.g. authors and publishers) and the libraries that are in charge of collecting content and distributing it. Perhaps this tension could be resolved (somewhat) if the old idea of a library loan for a physical book / or journal article, with all the concomitant constraints – primarily “due dates” and “number of copies available for loan” – was updated with a digital counterpart. (more…)
