Friday, October 10, 2003

The Party is Over for Books on the Web This post is too good not to repost. Publishers must have nightmares about the future. Here's the deal. You write the book (or journal article) for free. In the case of journal articles it will be peer reviewed - also for free. We (the publisher) will in turn charge exhorbant subscription fees or overprice books and keep all the money. Scientists want to explore, publish, collaborate, make discoveries AND LET THE WORLD KNOW ABOUT THEM. Yes, you've heard it before, the Internet changes everything. I can hardly wait. Two publishers have approached us wanting to do a hardcopy version of http://philip.greenspun.com/internet-application-workbook/ (the textbook for 6.171 at MIT). Both have lost interest when we said that we wanted to keep the text online. To a traditional publisher the Web is a place for stuff that isn't quite good enough to sell. If the manuscript ever does become good enough to sell it should be made inaccessible to anyone who isn't able to scratch up the $40. An amusing side note is that one of the publishers who felt that it was critical to make every last dime possible from the sale of our book was Microsoft Press, whose working capital is $40 billion. This dovetails slightly with http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/, a quixotic effort to fight every academic journal publisher and all professional societies. (In my own little field, for example, ACM and IEEE do their best to deny access to computer science research results to anyone who is not working at a university, a member of their orgs, or willing to pay $$$. I.e., if you're a kid in Africa wanting to learn something about computer science you're not going to do it by looking at these folks' journals on the Web.) Economic growth comes from scientific and technical innovation. Scientific and technical innovation depends to a large extent on innovators having access to each others' published results. It is thus a shame that the only way that an author can get money or tenure is by turning over his or her work to an organization whose primary goal is artificially restricting access to that work. [philg News] 7:01:31 AMGoogle It!

Lancet online - all 180 years The journal Lancet has taken a bold step by digitizing its entire journal, all 180 years worth. First published in 1823, over 340,000 articles are available online (for a fee). I hope that other journals follow their lead by digitizing their material for online access. Lancet would be smart if they would supply citation information to the National Library of Medicine to be included in the PubMed database. In the not too distant future, physicians will have access to the world's literature any time from their desktop. Sometimes I wish I could just start over. One of the greatest lessons from medical school came from a Renal physician that I greatly admired. As with many medical students just starting out, I showed my prowness by quoting from just publshed articles. He advised me to go to the library and pull volumes from those journals from the 1960's and browse . I did as I was told and imagined myself learning medicine then, quoting from the recently published literature. Of course, with time, what would seem so well meaning then would be diastrous now. Mercury diuretics and other treatments and procedures which are not only not helpful but down right dangerous. One can learn a lot from these old articles. Two years ago a previously healthy volunteer died from a research study at Johns Hopkins University. This unfortunate death could have been prevented. PubMed, which catalogs online the medical literature from 1966 was the primary method used by the Johns Hopkins researchers to plan the research project. The flaw, and a serious one, was that the drug and its serious side-effects they used had been researched in the 1950's. Don't think that old literature is valuable? 6:28:28 AMGoogle It!