Rowland Institute Library Blog

Coming to Boston is a five-day conference and trade show on nanotechnology including participation of dozens of universities, industry representatives and commerce. Harvard’s Charles Lieber is one of the keynote speakers. Session topics include nanodevices, biotechnology, drug design, among others. (Source: MIT’s Technology Review Friday Update)

(access restricted to subscribers). An opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education states that

(Abstract freely available. Harvard affiliates follow this link for full text.)A study published in PNAS last week examines insitutional site license subsscriptions to online journals and whether users benefit from such arrangements. They report: “If a journal is priced to maximize the publisher’s profits, scholars on average are likely to be worse off when universities purchase site licenses than they would be if access were by individual subscriptions only.” In contrast, university press and society journal site licenses benefit the scientific community because the subscription prices are closer to the costs of producing the journal. It’s also noted that some societies fund their activities with subscription monies and the scientific community also gains from these. In the latter instance, the university libraries play a key role negotiating and providing online access for users at their institutions. So for reasonably-priced journals, institutional access is a good per-capita value.

Harvard’s recent mass cancellation of Elsevier titles reflects problems with such pricing. At one point in the article, the authors point out that for a lot of journals the price reflects what users are (have been) willing to pay, rather than actual production costs.

The article does not address questions of open access.

“Scientists as Parents,” the January 2004 feature from Science’s Next Wave offers several perspective articles on starting a family while also launching or maintaining a career in science. (Requires Harvard ID/subscription for access)

It’s titled “Improbable Research- What’s New,” and has an RSS feed. Among other wonderful things, the transcript of Lene Hau’s Nano Lecture from the last Ig Nobel celebration is linked. (Source: Joho the Blog)

A Man with a Phd offers these RSS feeds for Science and PNAS Early Edition.

A mosaic of images (10,000 galaxies?) from the Hubble Space Telescope has been released. (Source: Yahoo News)

(Source: O’Reilly Network Developer News)

(Accessible to Harvard affiliates only). Science magazine tells of preliminary reports suggesting only small increases in budgets for NIH and NSF next year.

A study by a Harvard researcher finds that women and minorties in the sciences advance less rapidly than their male counterparts,not fitting the stereotype of what a competent scientist should like, difficulty getting peer support, and “simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility”.