Today’s links to interesting news and analysis — with a new feature, daily good news!
- “When Did the Word Negro Become Taboo? In 1966 or soon thereafter“, Brian Palmer, Slate, 11 January 2010
- Good news! “Coral can recover from climate change damage, press release about this article: “Marine Reserves Enhance the Recovery of Corals on Caribbean Reefs“, Peter J. Mumby and Alastair R. Harborne (U of Exeter), PLoS ONE, 11 January 2010
- “Regime Change in Tehran? Don’t Bet on It… Yet“, Dilip Hiro (expert on Islam, see his Wikpedia bio), TomDispatch, 12 January 2010
- “How Many Iranian Nuclear Physicists Are There? Would assassinating one or two of them stop a weapons program?“, Juliet Lapidos, Slate, 12 January 2010
- Good news! “Antarctic sea water shows ‘no sign’ of warming“, The Australian, 12 January 2010 — For more on this see WUWT, which has links to the scientists’ website.
- “One-child policy condemns 24m bachelors to life without a wife“, The Times, 12 January 2010 — For more about this see the FM reference page Demography – studies & reports.
- This is brilliant and technically correct, and demonstrates how even left-ish economists have been cooped by Wall Street: “Is the economy a victory or a defeat?“, Brad Delong (Prof Economics Berkeley), The Week magazine, 12 January 2010 — “Yes, we’ve averted the worst, but unemployment is at 10%. Assessing the economic recovery.” The financial sector has become more important than the real economy.
Really good news, more benefits from ClimateGate
If these principles had been followed by climate scientists during the past decade, we would know a lot more about climate change — and the issue would be less politiziced. Secrecy creates distrust, and with good reason.
- Press release about the Roundtable’s recommendations, posted on the websites of the American Institute of Physics and the Association of American Universities.
- Scholarly Publishing Roundtable Report and Recommendations
- Scholarly Publishing Roundtable Member Bios
Excerpt from the press release
An expert panel of librarians, library scientists, publishers, and university academic leaders today called on federal agencies that fund research to develop and implement policies that ensure free public access to the results of the research they fund “as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal.”
The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was convened last summer by the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Policymakers asked the group to examine the current state of scholarly publishing and seek consensus recommendations for expanding public access to scholarly journal articles.
The various communities represented in the Roundtable have been working to develop recommendations that would improve public access without curtailing the ability of the scientific publishing industry to publish peer-reviewed scientific articles. The Roundtable’s recommendations, endorsed in full by the overwhelming majority of the panel (12 out of 14 members), “seek to balance the need for and potential of increased access to scholarly articles with the need to preserve the essential functions of the scholarly publishing enterprise,” according to the report.
… The Roundtable identified a set of principles viewed as essential to a robust scholarly publishing system, including the need to preserve peer review, the necessity of adaptable publishing business models, the benefits of broader public access, the importance of archiving, and the interoperability of online content.
Also — you can now subscribe and receive posts by email. See the box on the upper right.
Afterword
Please share your comments by posting below. Per the FM site’s Comment Policy, please make them brief (250 word max), civil and relevant to this post. Or email me at fabmaximus at hotmail dot com (note the spam-protected spelling).
