PhysMath Central Blog
Tonight's Horizon, for UK-based readers of this blog, will be presented by PMC Physics A board member, Brian Cox. Brian is looking at gravity and why we still can't quite figure out what it is or what causes it.
Horizon: What On Earth Is Wrong With Gravity? BBC2 21:00
UPDATE (30 Jan): There is an article on the show's content, written by Brian Cox on the BBC website. UK-based readers can watch the whole programme again until next Tuesday on BBC's iPlayer.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:11 Comments (2)
A trip to the ATLAS detector at the LHC lead to an fascinating discussion between Peter Murray-Rust and Jim Downing about 'big science' and how that contrasted to lab-based science:
I felt like Arthur Dent watching the planet-building in the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It is enormous. And the detectors at the edges have a resolution of microns. I would have no idea how to go about building it. So many thanks to Salavtore and colleagues. And it gives me a feeling of ownership. I shall be looking for my own sponsored hadron (I’ve never seen one). So this is “Big Science” - big in mass, big in spending, big in organisation, with a bounded community. A recipe for success.
...
But where do sciences such as chemistry, materials, nanotech, condensed matter, cell biology, biochemistry, neuroscience, etc. etc. fit? They aren’t “big science”. They often have no coherent communal voice. The publications are often closed. There is a shortage of data.
But there are a LOT of them. I don’t know how many chemists there are in the world who read the literature but it’s vastly more than the 22,000 HEP scientists. How do we give a name to this activity. “Small science” is not complementary; “lab science” describes much of it it but is too fixed to buildings.
Jim Downing came up with the idea of “Long Tail Science”. The Long Tail is the observation that in the modern web the tail of the distribution is often more important than the few large players. Large numbers of small units is an important concept. And it’s complimentary and complementary.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 12:53 Comments (0)
Rolf Heuer goes APE for open access
There has been surprisingly little written on the web about Rolf Heuer's keynote speech at the Academic Publishing in Europe (APE 2008) conference in Berlin last week. Thankfully though, Peter Murray-Rust and the SCOAP3 initiative have come to our rescue. In fact, Peter reports that there was no wireless and no electricity at the meeting venue, so that explains the paucity of live blogging reports!
Heuer, who is an editorial board member of PMC Physics A and will takeover from Robert Aymar as Director General of CERN in January 2009, delivered his presentation entitled: "Innovation in Scholarly Communication: Vision and Projects from High Energy Physics" (pdf link, 7MB)
The presentation is particularly interesting as it looks not only at the SCOAP3 project and its plan to turn an entire field open access, but also it outlines what they plan to do with this new corpus of OA material. This includes commenting, tagging, text and data-mining, new bibliometrics to measure impact, aggregation of related material and the preservation and re-use of experimental data.
If anyone thinks that Open Acess is just reading a pdf for free on the web, then this presentation shows the world of possibilities that opens up when the entire dataset is interoperable, free of copyright and re-use retrictions and available to all.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 12:12 Comments (2)
UC Berkeley to cover fees for open access publishing
Researchers at UC Berkeley can now publish their articles with PhysMath Central (and other OA journals) and have their library cover 100% of any charge which may be payable.
From the press release:
The University strives both to maximize the benefits of Berkeley’s research for the scholarly community and to advance knowledge in ways that improve the quality of life in local and global communities. Today Berkeley joins other universities in the United States and Europe in offering its researchers access to funding to cover publication charges for open access (OA) journals and fees charged by non-OA publishers that are willing to provide immediate free access to articles.
This means, amongst others, PhysMath Central. From the FAQ:
What charges does this cover?
This initiative covers publication charges for open access journals such as PLoS, BioMedCentral, PhysMathCentral, and others (capped at $3000). It covers paid access charges for non-OA journals (capped at $1500 per article).
The program is an 18-month experiment funded by the discretionary
accounts of Thomas Leonard, University Librarian, and Beth Burnside,
Vice Chancellor for Research. Further information from the BRII homepage and here.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 12:07 Comments (0)
Scholarship for the Facebook generation
SPARC-ACRL Forum '08 from Matt Agnello on Vimeo.
A fascinating panel on "Working with the Facebook generation: Engaging students views on access to scholarship" at the recent SPARC-ACRL Forum, as captured on video by Matt Agnello. From the SPARC website:
Tech-savvy students, who live and breathe information sharing, are critical to changing the way scholarly communication is conducted. Not bound by traditional modes of research exchange, students are using all the technologies at their disposal to engage in scholarly discourse - including blogs, wikis and tagging tools. What will they do next? How do they view the future of scholarly exchange?
The third speaker is Andre Brown from one of our favourite blogs, Biocurious, who explains how blogs are simply another medium for comuunication - no more, no less. However, the potential of blogs and wikis for the dissemination of research is enormous and is roughly at the same stage the general web was 15 years ago i.e. it's about to explode and take us places we can't yet imagine, but we are going to like.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 11:06 Comments (1)
The title refers not to some ethereal thought experiment with antimatter, but rather to the existence of 'physics' outside of the realms of high-energy physics. The Incoherent Ponderer was upset with the recent Scientific American special report on The Future of Physics which seemed to focus exclusively on terascale/LHC physics:
I guess I am tired of arrogant statements like "physics" = "high energy physics", which is how a lot of popular media characterizes it. The irony, however, is that with ILC construction in serious peril, and with LHC not even operational yet (unclear what, if anything, they will find) - the REAL "future of physics" is arguably with biophysics, condensed matter or "materials" physics and AMO. I would expect that large particle collider experiments being phased out, with more useful data coming from cosmology (=astronomy).
At the same time, experiments in low-energy physics (condensed matter, optical, molecular, biophysics, materials and chemical physics) will continue to ramp up at an increasing rate.
It will be interesting to see how the proportion of students opting for a career in high-energy physics changes with the LHC switch-on and the potential non-appearance of the ILC over the coming 10 years.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 14:34 Comments (1)
UK-based teacher and science communicator Alom Shaha has created a series of short films about the science behind the Large Hadron Collider, unusually using animation and claymation to get across some of the concepts to its target audience of young scientists. They can all be viewed from the LabReporter website, and their channel on YouTube, and have already received rave reviews.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 12:00 Comments (0)
Statistics, it is said, can prove anything. STATS - however - are keen to de-bunk abuse of statisitics in science and the media.
From their 'about' page:
Since its founding in 1994, the non-profit, non-partisan Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) has become a much-valued resource on the use and abuse of science and statistics in the media. Our goals are to correct scientific misinformation in the media resulting from bad science, politics, or a simple lack of information or knowledge; and to act as a resource for journalists and policy makers on major scientific issues and controversies.
To get a flavour of their work, read the STATS Dubious Data Awards 2007.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 11:41 Comments (0)
Confessions of an OA publisher
Just before Christmas I was approached by John Dupuis (of the excellent Confessions of A Science Librarian blog) who wanted to conduct an interview with me. Due to a rather hectic period of work, followed by a significantly less hectic period of holiday, I only managed to get the answers back to John yesterday - but they are already up on his blog. There are only 10 questions, but I did seem to give rather 'full' answers to most of them.
Read the interview in full here.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 10:22 Comments (0)
After a nice long seasonal break it is time to get our noses back to the grindstone and look forward to an eventful 12 months in physics. 2008 looks like being the best of times and the worst of times for those involved in particle physics as the LHC nears completion, but at the same time budgets for research are under intense pressure in the UK and US.
For PhysMath Central we look forward to publishing the first articles in PMC Physics B, devoted to all things relating to condensed matter, atomic, molecular and optical physics. In addition we will be launching several new journals and even living up to our name and entering the mathematics area - as well as computer science. If you are interested in starting or transferring journals to PhysMath Central, let us know.
For everyone else, the warmest of wishes you as we look forward to a year in which true open access to research starts to permeate all areas of research.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 16:25 Comments (0)