Tom Roper's Weblog

Last survivor of the battle of Jutland

This morning's Times has the obituary of Captain Henry Fancourt, last survivor of the Battle of Jutland, who died aged 103 on January 8th

US Universities cancel "big deals'

The BMJ reports that three US university libraries are cancelling "big deal" journal subscriptions with Elsevier. Harvard is cancelling a bundled package of Elsevier journals, and Cornell also announced last month it would not renew a package of more than 900 titles. Stanford is considering a draft resolution on journal bundling and will make a decision in February.
BMJ 2004; 328: 68 (10 January)

LOCKSS: digital preservation initiative from Stanford

The BMJ reports the inelegantly-named LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) initiative from Stanford. Supported by over fifty publishers, including the BMJ, the LOCKSS project gives librarians a cheap and easy way to keep, preserve and offer access to local copies of web published material.
Reich, V and Rosenthal, D
Preserving today's scientific record for tomorrow
BMJ 2004;328:61-62 (10 January)

Librarians in Who's Who

Today's Times lists librarians who have made it into the new Who's Who. They list Robin Adams of Trinity College Dublin, David Bradbury of City of London, Antonia Byatt of the Women's Library, Inez Lynn of the London Library, Chris Rusbridge of Glasgow, Michele Shoebridge of Birmingham, David Sutton of Readng, Jean Sykes of LSE and Martyn Wade of the National Library of Scotland. Charles Oppenheim of Loughborough is mentioned in the academics section

Letters in THES on open archiving

Two letters in today's THES in response to the piece on open archiving in the previous issue. Iain Stevenson claims, unconvincingly I think, that open access is only for the rich, while Steve Harnad corrects the impression given that he was arguing for self-archiving as a substitute for publication in peer-reviewed journals, rather than in addition. Online content is only available to subscribers, but the paper reference is: THES January 9 2004 1622: 17

BMJ takes up open archiving

The BMJ also takes up the issue. See:
Open access publishing takes offTony Delamothe and Richard Smith
BMJ 2004;328:1-3, doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7430.1

Once more on open archiving in THES

The latest THES runs a piece by Geoff Watts on open access, following up on an earlier article i covered in this blog. The author cites two examples of the problem open access hopes to solve:
1. He searches the Nature website for articles on open access and finds as the first result among 190 an article entitled: Scientific publishing: who will pay for open access? But he would have to pay $18 to view it
2. He also cites Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, who told a recent JISC meeting how he had tried to access a report in Journal of Infectious Disease report on malaria research in Gambia, work funded by the Wellcome, but got the message "access denied".
Watts discusses various solutions:
PubMed Central : set up by the US National Library of Medicine, to offer free access to all peer-reviewed life sciences literature
Public Library of Science: PLoS have moved away from their original model of asking researchers to pledge not to work with journals that didn't make content freely available six months after publication, but have now started to developing their own journal titles, PLoS Biology being the first. PLoS medicine is to launched later this year
Institutional self-archiving: here they quote, as before, Steve Harnad of Southampton , the leading UK champion of self-archiving.
I must point out that the online content of the THES itself is not freely available, but is only accessible to subscribers through a rather clunky password system. The paper reference is:
Watts, Geoff
Crusaders for a truly free flow of ideas
THES 2004 1621: 17-18

Solipsism gone mad

This blogging is a lonely art, and one that seems to me to be solipism gone mad

Sappho in LRB

In my long struggle to learn classical Greek (which has become much easier now I attend the splendid classes at the University of Sussex taught by Vassiliki Dimitropoulou) I took a couple of months ago to trying to read Sappho. Apart from the subject matter, I also thought that the brevity of her surviving work might make it easier for a tyro like me, differences between her dialect and the Attic I'm learning notwithstanding. Even with the help of a parallel text from the Loeb library , I'm finding it hard going.
But the London Review of Books has an article by Emily Wilson reviewing a new translation of the poems by Anne Carson, a book on the reception of Sappho by Margaret Reynolds and Erica Jong's new novel Sappho's Leap.

Online poker

Nothing to do with rugby or horseracing, but the Times for two days now has been flogging online poker for all its worth. Is this simply journalists trying to fill space, do News International own an online poker site, or is there some other explanation for this puffery?
It seems to me entirely pointless, just like the lame attempts of some bookies to offer what they called "virtual horseracing" a few years back. Only the most compulsive gambler could gain any pleasure or interest from what is nothing more than a rather complicated online fruit machine. I haven't played the game for many a year but the essence of poker has to be the physical presence of the cards, the hands, the dealer and the other players and the interplay of them all is something that cannot be reproduced online