Academic gets a new definition thanks to Iranian president

"I believe that I am an academic myself, so I speak with you from an academic point of view." Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia University

This must be a joke......I did not find any published research papers in Scopus or Google Scholar under the president's name. May be they are under classified publications in Iran.

Would not be interesting if one day President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad decides to publish his research and publishers and reviewers reject it? What would happen? Any ideas?


Btw the way the way that he was introduced to the audience by Columbia University President Bollinger shows that we don't have a clue about middle east traditions and mentality. You don't attack your guest when you welcome to your house. We like him or not Iranian President was a guest.

"In Iran, tradition requires when you invite a person to be a speaker, we actually respect our students enough to allow them to make their own judgment, and don’t think it’s necessary before the speech is even given to come in with a series of complaints to provide vaccination to the students and faculty."

http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/hourlyupdate/202820.php

Moving physical conferences, poster sessions to Second Life (at a low budget)

Jean Claude Bredley is continuing experimenting with new learning experience in Second Life.

Today he run a session on Open Notebook Science at SciFoo LivesOn which is a continuation of SciFoo. He also created a poster area in Chemistry and Biology under Chem/Bio Foo where he aims to create " a place to host domain-specific scientific discussion as perpetual poster sessions in Second Life." He also explains how this is related to scientific publishing:

"This is actually very much in keeping with the format of the Nature journal itself. The articles are typically high level and are collected from various scientific fields. I am starting with Chemistry and Biology because I feel that these areas have a strong potential for improving human lives directly (in terms of affecting disease processes for example). Also these areas are most closely related to my domain specific research of organic synthesis and drug design. (And we only have 36 booths in this area for now). Of course I would be happy to assist anyone in creating a poster area with another scientific focus.

I often tell people that they should only enter Second Life if they have a good reason for doing so. By putting posters that are similar in format and content to those that the typical researcher is likely to find at the physical conferences that they attend is probably a pretty good way to attract traditional scientists to media platforms like Second Life. If they see a poster that is interesting they can ring the bell, talk with the presenter then decide how that experience compares with a physical meeting." via Drexel Coas E-learning

Alacra's new service Research Recap

Research Recap aggregates premium and free business content in equity, credit, market, economic and academic research using a blog under the guidance of a subject expert. Nice work! and this is another good way of selling premium content from Alacra Store. via A VC

Young scientists view on key global scientific challenges

This April in celebration of 75th anniversary,ICSU (International Council for Science) brought together 147 young scientists from 71 different countries to discuss global scientific challenges. The discussions were around four topics:

1. "building bridges within the scientific community
2. building bridges between science and the world
3. working with the private sector
4. scientific freedom and responsibility"
   

One of the conclusions of the first topic was: "there is a great “fragmentation of knowledge” that makes it very difficult to realize collaborations between groups belonging to diverse disciplinary areas."

Christina Airoldi's review which is published at Chemistry International provides additional insights. Conference presentations can be found here.

Flux: A new SNS provider with a clever twist

Flux (previously Tagworld) which is using a disaggregated model of community is " an open platform that allows websites and bloggers to add community tools to their sites – the sites they control and monetize." The Plugg VinylPulse are some of the sites build using Flux software.

A publisher with a camera and toxins helping to get rid off wrinkles

My colleague David Evans who is a publisher of Elsevier's toxicology journals provides a good example how a publisher can use his camera and turn a customer interaction into a 2 minute learning burst. In this 2 minute video, he has Prof. Alan Harvey telling us briefly toxins' importance in drug discovery.

IBM study on consumer digital media and entertainment habits

"Consumers are seeking consolidated, trustworthy content, recognition and community when it comes to mobile and Internet entertainment."

Most of these elements would apply to research information too.

You can download the survey here.

Publishers use your cameras and create quality content

While I was in vacation, Blogger added a new feature that lets users add a video easily to their blogs.

The ease of taking videos - with even a mediocre digital camera, see the video- and publishing it on the web is opening a new opportunity for journal publishers to create additional quality and fresh content. So if I were a publisher of a journal here are few things that I would start doing:

• First start a journal blog

• Take a small video camera to every editors' meeting and interview them on special subjects, and post it on the blog

• Take the camera to every conference that I attend and organize and interview the lecturers or authors or the attendees on the conference topics and post these on the blog

• Each month interview the most downloaded article's authors and post it on the blog

The cost for all of these is very minimal basically the camera. And yes, you don't need to be a geek or technical person to do these.

ps This video was taken on a digital camera and uploaded here in few seconds. My son is singing his version of Happy Birthday to Tamar in Buyuk Ada this summer.

Is Googling for research "good enough" for your bottom line? A new study comparing the productivity of free and paid search tools

My colleagues know well my response to this kind of studies which shows the logical. One of the key results of the study -Free Web Search vs. Paid Search Tools- is that "researchers believe that as a search tool for technical information paid search is 325% more productive than the free web". You can download the white paper here or request the full study that was conducted independently by Martin Akel & Associates by emailing eicsutomersupport{at}elsevier{dot}com.

New Portal from Elsevier for oncology healthcare professionals

Congratulations and best luck to my colleagues at Health Science who launched OncologyStat.

The site provides access for registered users to over 100 Elsevier's cancer related journals and it's supported by ads. Here is more on the features. The site is featured in New York Times too. (The article has some wrong info too, Elsevier publishes more that 200o journals not 400)

The Medline search is powered by Scirus - a good example how we can leverage each others assets in Elsevier's two main divisions.

My initial impression of the site is that it will need some improvement with search features i.e. introduce refine feature, facets of results; provide alerting options with email or RSS; open up the Blogs for comments. I wanted to send a congratulations to Bloggers but unfortunately I could not see any commenting option.


Overall I believe that this is the kind of experiments that we should be doing in Elsevier. Are we going to make money with this? Or will it be a Chemweb like ending? Time and execution will tell.

btw OncologyStat is a good example of what I was saying to a colleague last Thursday on the tremendous opportunities in health care sector for information providers to improve the productivity for healthcare professionals and clean up the mess specifically in the information record management.