Biweekly links for 10/10/2008

  • The Collapse of Peer Review « The Scholarly Kitchen
    • “Ellison has painstakingly documented the decline of articles published in top economics journals by authors working in the highest-ranked schools. These authors are continuing to publish, but are seeking other outlets, including unrefereed preprint and working paper servers.”
  • Open Access Day – FriendFeed Room
    • A FriendFeed Room for Open Access Day, October 14.
  • Paul Ginsparg: The global-village pioneers
    • Superb. Many choice quotes, including this one: “If scholarly infrastructure can be upgraded to encourage maximal spontaneous participation, then we can expect not only an increasing availability of materials online for algorithmic harvesting — articles, datasets, lecture notes, multimedia and software — but also qualitatively new forms of academic effort. “
  • Ober, J.: Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens.
    • “argues that the key to Athens’s success lay in how the city-state managed and organized the aggregation and distribution of knowledge among its citizens. Ober explores the institutional contexts of democratic knowledge management, including the use of social networks for collecting information, publicity for building common knowledge, and open access for lowering transaction costs. He explains why a government’s attempt to dam the flow of information makes democracy stumble. Democratic participation and deliberation consume state resources and social energy. Yet as Ober shows, the benefits of a well-designed democracy far outweigh its costs.”
  • Editorial: APS now leaves copyright with authors for derivative works
    • There are some significant caveats (read the whole thing!), but the thrust is: “When you submit an article to an APS journal, we ask you to sign our copyright form. It transfers copyright for the article to APS, but keeps certain rights for you, the author. We have recently changed the form to add the right to make ‘‘derivative works’’ that reuse parts of the article in a new work.”
  • Timo Hannay: The Future Is A Foreign Country
    • The text for Timo’s superb presentation about the future of scientific publishing at the recent Science in the 21st Century Workshop.

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3 comments

  1. Michael, thank you for posting these links … IMHO your blog is top-rank in tracking transformational thinking, and proving links to it.

    Of your current crop, Timo Hannay’s talk on the future of the scientific enterprise was especially good (IMHO).

    In reading it, I was astonished by the close, explicit parallels between Hannay’s strategic thinking, and the strategic thinking in the US Army’s newly-released FM 3-07 Stability Operations.

    In particular, paragraphs 1-23 through 1-43 of FM 3-07 (covering Conflict Transformation, Legitimacy, Capacity Building, and Rule of Law) very closely parallel the concluding slides of Timo Hannay’s talk.

    More broadly, the overall philosophy of “learn and adapt” to an globalized mission domain is common to both works … it sure seems that each is strongly influenced by the other (as is to be expected, since both enterprises are becoming global).

    This striking parallelism between twenty-first century military enterprises and twenty-first century scientific enterprises is a good example of an eventuality that (in historian Stephen B. Johnson’s phrase) “few expect and even fewer want.”

    But on a planet with an increasingly globalized culture, shouldn’t we expect—and even welcome—the convergent evolution of previously separate enterprises?

    And isn’t it very commonly the case, that the most far-reaching innovations—in pretty much every sphere of human endeavor—are those that few expect (initially at least) and even fewer want?

  2. Just to be clear, the paragraph numbers in the above post refer not to the old (and similarly named) FM 3-07 Stability Operations and Support Operations (which is dated February 2003), but the the newly-released FM 3-07 Stability Operations (which is dated October 2008).

    These two documents, although written only five years apart, are philosophically and strategically as different as day and night.

    The striking difference in the scope and scale of these two documents is further evidence of the rapid pace of transformation that is now apparent across all globalized disciplines.

    Quantum information science being a globalized discipline—arguably the most globalized discipline—we are led to wonder, what new topics and new results might/will the second edition of Quantum Computation and Quantum Information cover?

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