Global Knowledge Exchange.Net (GKEN)

The University of Michigan Press has started an e-book rental program for over 250 e-books.

Recently announced NSF requirement (that all grant proposal need to include a Data Management Plan (DMP) shows the importance of digital data as a foundation for the progress of science and replicability of research in the digital age. ..

"The combination of Elsevier's and Collexis' knowledge discovery technologies will create a powerful set of applications designed to support scientific management and assessment." Publishers are offering more and more tools, e.g. Thomson Reuter's InCites and SciVal.

Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work.

"You go to the store to buy a television, and then you come home and you watch some television. But the television you buy isn't the television you watch, and the television you watch isn't the television you buy. We use the same word to refer to the object and the content flow, and nobody gets confused because we all know what television is. Now all of a sudden, we have video spilling out of phones and personal computers, and the question "Is that television?" becomes really complicated."

Incorporating web 2.0 behaviors (e.g. recommending, commenting, social bookmarking) into the array of valid reserch metrics is a long work in progress...

Excerpt: "will involve the use of an ecosystem of interacting web-based resources, including the infrastructure provided by the Virtual Observatory, data provisioning services from Astronomy archives, a variety of analysis services such as Astrometry.net, notification services such as skyalert.org, and visualization services such as CDS's Aladin and Microsoft's WorldWideTelescope."

In addition to the Leiden course on scientometrics, this is a recommended event for anyone who needs to learn the rudiments ...

STAR METRICS is a federal and university partnership which is developing an empirical framework to measure the outcomes of science investments and demonstrate the benefits of scientific investments to the public. The project is led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the auspices of Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

STAR METRICS programme - "The first aim of the programme is to build a 'clean' database of all federally funded researchers in the United States ... Later on, the plan is to track patents, citations and other metrics of the research's impact. ... researchers' use of the Internet to communicate and publish will enable STAR METRICS to track the creation and transfer of knowledge properly for the first time"

Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations from Google Scholar

Scholarometer(beta) is a social tool to facilitate citation analysis and help evaluate the impact of an author's publications. Developed at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing

An excellent overview of the profusion of measures and metrics, among other topics.

What was highly significant, however, was the pace of discussion and analysis, carried out in real time on blogs and a wiki that had been quickly set up for the purpose of collectively analyzing the paper. This kind of collaboration has emerged only in recent years in the math and computer science communities. In the past, intense discussions like the one that surrounded the proof of the Poincaré conjecture were carried about via private e-mail and distribution lists as well as in the pages of traditional paper-based science journals.

e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science, and the next generation of computational infrastructure that will enable it. These two volumes contain selected papers from the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, which was held in Oxford, UK, in December 2009. This meeting has become the annual event where computational scientists and technologists come together to share, discuss and advance the exciting research that has grown out of the UK e-Science Programme.

The world's first summit on citizen cyberscience will be held at King's College London on 2-3 September. Citizen cyberscience is a growing trend where ordinary people use their computers and the world wide web to contribute in meaningful ways to an increasingly wide range of scientific challenges. Citizen cyberscience activity takes place all over the world and by its very nature participants very rarely - if ever - meet. This event will showcase a cross-section of these projects and will provide a platform for scientists and citizens to share their thoughts on the impact of citizen cyberscience face-to-face.

Computers and the web have transformed homes and businesses, and could do the same for education and training. Known as "eLearning," this can be as simple as accessing a school timetable online, or as complex as running virtual communities for sharing and creating knowledge.