New Open Access Books – 18 Freshly Pressed

18 new open access books have just been uploaded to our reading platform. With a base of more than 1700 books, InTech places itself as the world leader in publishing highly specialized open access books in science, technology and medicine. Be sure to get hold of our freshest content!

Metamaterial

Woven Fabrics

Liver Regeneration

Manufacturing System

Watermarking - Volume 1

Watermarking - Volume 2

The Delivery of Nanoparticles

Modern Metrology Concerns

Aneuploidy in Health and Disease

Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Design

The Continuum of Health Risk Assessments

Human Development - Different Perspectives

Neuroimaging - Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience

Clinical Flow Cytometry - Emerging Applications

Public Health - Social and Behavioral Health

Ecological Water Quality - Water Treatment and Reuse

Grid Computing - Technology and Applications, Widespread Coverage and New Horizons

Pathophysiology and Clinical Aspects of Venous Thrombo-embolism in Neonates, Renal Disease and Cancer Patients

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To know the importance of providing free access to taxpayer-funded research

The petition started at the White House homepage this Monday by the Access2Research initiative has already been signed by more than 6000 supporters.

It is always a hot topic and especially so in the States, of who has the right to access the results from research funded by the public, for the public. The petition, requiring free access over the Internet to journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research, aims to escalate the issue inside the White House, as 25,000 signatures in 30 days gets an official Administration response.

“We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.”

This is how the Access2Research petition addresses the public, choosing the approach of a broad public appeal for support, straight to the people. This petition is made possible by the Obama Administration, who have created a web platform to petition the White House directly called We The People. Any petition receiving more than 25,000 digital signatures is placed on the desk of the President’s Chief of Staff and must be integrated into policy and political discussions. In order to qualify, however, the petition must gather the signatures in 30 days.

So far, so good. Only two days into the appeal, and the petition is over 6000-strong. People are sharing the news on social networks and relevant websites, making it more likely that the petition will not only make it to the Chief of Staff’s office, but make a substantial impact and potentially change the debate happening right now.

It is important to point out that the initiative is by no way limited to US citizens. Any open access supporter is invited to sign the petition, it is only required that they register at the White House page with a valid email.

World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development – What about Cultural Diversity in Science?

May 21 has been appointed by the UN as World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development. UNESCO adopted the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity in 2001 and in 2002, the UN declared May 21 the day to remind us all to think about the values of cultural diversity in society.

 The 2012 campaign to promote cultural diversity, organised by UNESCO and the UN Alliance of Civilizations states the following goals:

• raise awareness about the importance of intercultural dialogue, diversity and inclusion
• build a global community of individuals committed to support diversity
• combat polarization and stereotypes

 The UN, on the official web-site page built for this special day, states that:

 Placing culture at the heart of development policy constitutes an essential investment in the world’s future and a pre-condition to successful globalization processes that take into account the principles of cultural diversity.

Development is inseparable from culture. In this regard, the major challenge is to convince political decision-makers and local, national and international social actors to integrating the principles of cultural diversity and the values of cultural pluralism into all public policies, mechanisms and practices, particularly through public/private partnerships.

Now, this sounds wonderful. And it is, but this nicely-put quote awakened in us a rushing flow of thoughts and mind-provoking reasoning on the state of cultural diversity in the scientific industry world-wide.

Confused about what does Cultural Diversity Day have to do with the science industry? Let us go back a few steps. Cultural diversity and heterogeneity in terms of a global, diverse array of science output centres is not an issue. Cultural diversity in science has been present, maybe, even longer than the same issue proposed itself in terms of civic and political engagement within and beyond local and global societies. In fact, there is no discrimination based on skin colour, religion or culture in science, as a scientific postulate by a researcher from an economically-less developed country does not have less relevance from the one of a Western country. But, what the global scientific community might be biased with, taking the example aforementioned, is the level of access to research and knowledge given to the Western country scientist in comparison to his less-developed country fellow. Being known in the scientific community that, on one hand, traditional scientific publishing requires paying for subscriptions to access published research, and on the other hand, it is a general conception that it publishes what is to be considered the scientific elite as it attracts readership, it all comes down to what turns around all industries today: money. If getting a good education requires quite a bit of funding, and so does paying for subscription to access research, the economic imbalance between societies strikes and imposes the imbalance in cultural diversity in terms of heterogeneity of scientific research papers output. However, if this is an on-going discussion firing the global scientific community for decades now, with the introduction of open access and its benefits being free access to research world-wide, the science dinosaurs of our time might face what the animal-like did thousands of year ago: extinction.

22 New Books Are Out

The recent joined efforts of world-renowned scientists and experts and InTech as a publisher resulted in 22 impressive new titles. To see what is new this spring in the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine, feel free to browse through our rich collection of scientific books supported by this latest addition.

Low Back Pain

Mobile Networks

Applied Aerodynamics

Radiometric Dating

Muscular Dystrophy

Histo-compatibility

Human-Centric Machine Vision

Applications of Virtual Reality

Recent Advances in Scoliosis

Topics in Conservation Biology

Psychology - Selected Papers

Enzyme Inhibition and Bioapplications

Advances in Knowledge Representation

Geochemistry - Earth's System Processes

Advances in Object Recognition Systems

Fuzzy Inference System - Theory and Applications

Archaeology, New Approaches in Theory and Techniques

Endometriosis - Basic Concepts and Current Research Trends

Modeling and Optimization of Renewable Energy Systems

Oxidative Stress - Environmental Induction and Dietary Antioxidants

Recent Advances in Immunology to Target Cancer, Inflammation and Infections

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging - Advanced Neuroimaging Applications

Share 2 Conference: Delete Your Facebook Account Now

The Share 2 Conference took place in Belgrade through April 26 – 28, inviting speakers such as Isak Gerson, Aubrey de Grey, George Hotz, Eben Moglen, Khannea Suntzu, Andrew Keen, Bruce Sterling, Smari McCarthy and many others, discussing social media, internet activism and the internet infrastructure built to – share information, share our emotions, share data – and share all the attacks to the integrity of our social life.

The first Kopimi wedding took place in Belgrade during the Share Conference

During the three days of the conference, I was actually sad for not having a Facebook account because I couldn’t delete it, as most of the Share speakers suggested us to. Whether web may be making us dizzy, spinning, in a digital vertigo as Keen believes, or spinning in love, getting married by the power vested in the Kopimi priests by the holy event of copying information, or virtually, ending aging – we can feel that some of our autonomy is now boxed within the parameters set by the net – or at least, we chose to share, during those three days, our experiences of living as netizens – whether we feel more controlled or liberated in a digital environment, or just seeking a “dark space” to escape this transformation of our daily life.

To Each His Own Yarn

Yarn of many colors in the Share hallway

Switching lecture halls as differently as we’d all switch tabs in our browsers, I believe each of us will spin a different yarn of the Share 2 experience – and agree with everyone else, perhaps, only, on the good taste of the “free for all” apples presented in the hallway and the overall mind indulging atmosphere created by Belgrade during the festival. A festival, because the music experience was made as intricate as the idea of rethinking future internet scenarios through blogs, books, live performances, politics, or art. “Art is,” Eben Moglen says, “what brings the future forward, allows us to play with ideas,” and, as always, “we plan things with the aid of science fiction.”

Whether by questioning the copyright paradigm and moving away from the copyright lobbying group and the values set by “the old”, testing the idea that “the copying event is holy” like Kopimis do, or questioning the aging as “the side effect of living” as something we could end – we are redefining the logic of reasoning behind our own reality, in order to better pursuit future wisdom, to better imagine the possible future scenarios. One of the scenarios would be not to try and prevent the damage to the metabolism, in order to escape our own pathology, but to intervene, by eliminating the damage itself, like the SENS foundation is trying to do (Aubrey de Grey, founder), since it is easier to describe damage (at SENS, they describe 7 deadly things accumulating in our body) than to understand completely the way the body works.

In another scenario, where we can recognize a seamless network “of things” (Rob Van Kranenbrug, Internet of Things) – of cars, of cities, of washing machines communicating – the idea is to leave this network open, and not enclosed in the hands of one middleman, one government, or one or two states (and Moglen will use examples of USA and China), that can choose to act in their un-wisdom. Moglen argues, in a dooming scenario where big data is collected about each citizen, that “we need to reposses the web away from the man in the middle.” Otherwise, our memories will become inferior to this “big data” because what is collected will not be forgotten. “Media consumes us”, he concludes, “watching us watching it,” and the freedom of thought may be lost forever if there wasn’t anyone left running free software, securing free (un-surveilled) media, leaving the seamless network – open.

The autonomy of the Share festival itself was questioned during the “Why Share Sucks?” panel

In my view, the central question was revolving around the ways of securing our own autonomy – the autonomy of an individual over the pathological processes of his own body, the autonomy of an individual user inside the net, the autonomy of “a thing”/a robot inside the net, and finally, even the autonomy of the Share festival itself – much discussed in the “Why Share Sucks?” panel. While we wonder who sets the parameters of the autonomy of an individual, or a thing, or a festival; and while we use effort to secure it, we should wonder whether the parameters are controllable at all, and whether a remixed equation would bring new parameters that would be used and reused, rather than abused, to define this new man, “homo piratus” (Pirate Party Serbia) or a human who shares – who has evolved in politics.

Again, the ramblings are my own.

Books, books, books…

Not that we are bragging, but there are 37 new books in our Science, Technology, Medicine collection. They bring the latest research in their respective fields contained in individual chapters written by world’s top experts; professionals and members of academia. And the best thing is that all all the content is available for free, for everyone to read, share and download.

Keratitis

Biomarker

Brachytherapy

Radioactive Waste

Agricultural Science

Diversity of Ecosystems

Essential Notes in Psychiatry

Atrial Septal Defect

Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumour

Ergonomics - A Systems Approach

Oxidative Stress and Diseases

The Functioning of Ecosystems

Advances in Crystallization Processes

Virtual Reality and Environments

Special Applications of Photogrammetry

Fourier Transform Applications

Quality Management and Practices

Stratigraphic Analysis of Layered Deposits

Advances in Selected Plant Physiology Aspects

Applied Aspects of Ultrasonography in Humans

Semantics in Action - Applications and Scenarios

Miscellanea on Encephalopathies - A Second Look

Current Frontiers and Perspectives in Cell Biology

Primary Care at a Glance - Hot Topics and New Insights

Trends in Immunolabelled and Related Techniques

Semiconductor Laser Diode Technology and Applications

Cochlear Implant Research Updates

Infrared Spectroscopy - Life and Biomedical Sciences

New Advances and Contributions to Forestry Research

Risk Management for the Future - Theory and Cases

Semantics - Advances in Theories and Mathematical Models

Hemodynamics - New Diagnostic and Therapeutic Approaches

Global Perspectives on Sustainable Forest Management

Oxidative Stress - Molecular Mechanisms and Biological Effects

Infrared Spectroscopy - Materials Science, Engineering and Technology

Scanning Probe Microscopy-Physical Property Characterization at Nanoscale

The Cardiovascular System - Physiology, Diagnostics and Clinical Implications

29 More Books Available

Expand your knowledge, as we have recently expanded our collection with 29 new books from the fields of Science, Technology, and Medicine. All the latest titles containing all the latest research in diverse topics are completely free for you to read, share and download.

Vitrectomy

Hysterectomy

Embryogenesis

Crop Plant

Food Quality

Male Infertility

Particle Physics

Protein Structure

Bayesian Networks

Coronary Interventions

Diabetic Nephropathy

Epidemiology Insights

Spinocerebellar Ataxia

Antiphospholipid Syndrome

Miscellanea on Encephalo-pathies

Smart Nanoparticles Technology

Fuel Injection in Automotive Engineering

DNA Sequencing - Methods and Applications

Dyslexia - A Comprehensive and International Approach

Rural Development - Contemporary Issues and Practices

Traditional and Novel Risk Factors in Athero-thrombosis

Emerging Informatics - Innovative Concepts and Applications

Strategies for Tourism Industry - Micro and Macro Perspectives

Superconductors - Properties, Technology, and Applications

New Advances in the Basic and Clinical Gastro-enterology

Novel Approaches and Their Applications in Risk Assessment

Cancer Prevention - From Mechanisms to Translational Benefits

Readings in Advanced Pharma cokinetics - Theory, Methods and Applications

Visions for Global Tourism Industry - Creating and Sustaining Competitive Strategies

World Book and Copyright Day: Book, Do You Take Copyright to Be Your “Awfully” Wedded Wife?

"Hope", a book sculpture by Su Blackwell

‘Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.’
(Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote)

UNESCO organizes World Book and Copyright Day around the world to promote reading, for example a Cervantes readathon in Spain organized yearly on April 23th, but how do you exactly promote the protection of intellectual property through copyright in a “holy copy” culture, and how holy is this matrimony between books and copyright?

This is an age that has raised fervent file-sharers, Kopimis who believe that all information should be freely distributed and unrestricted in motion, and what is sacred for them is – communication. Such belief is being accepted in Sweden as a legitimate religion since January, and the movement echoes far throughout the world that is now looking up to the sky to see servers that can fly in the air. If internet once knew not of national boundaries, now it can not recognize boundaries between what is real and virtual space. Yet, never has a more blatant attempt to exercise control over communication been tried, with acts such as ACTA, SOPA, PIPA etc., that have been fought against by activists, as well as citizens. The heart of a new war for Internet between order and disorder, may lie in – intellectual property.

We are still, however, trying to move the concept of boundaries from the physical plane to the internet, insisting on the idea that protecting a physical property, such as a book, bound in covers, is the same as protecting intellectual property, while we realize that “intellectual products by their nature are copied and shared freely and it is on the whole good for society that they be so [Lessig Wiki].”

If we create books today differently from what was once done by Cervantes and his contemporaries, if this creation resembles more a communication between readers and authors, then imposing limits to its access or trying to translate it into something printable means simply distorting our perception like Don Quixote did. Promoting the 18th century copyright  standards in an environment determined by endless copies of a non-static text, is nothing but a fool’s errand, and to think this will succeed, is to mistake a fool for a brave knight of old.

For promoting the awareness of the idea that the issue of copyright has surpassed the quibble between authors and publishers, and is now the question of economic growth and knowledge advancement, a reading on its need to adapt to the digital era is suggested. You should also get yourself familiar with the usage of Creative Commons licenses that work not against copyright, but aim to improve it and set a global standard for the new sharing culture.

Other than that, choosing from our collection of more than 1,600 open access books, all  free of copyright, should be a fine way to celebrate this day.

Alma Swan: Open Access Funder Policies to Unlock the Gate to a Broader EcoSystem of Open

UNESCO’s Guidelines for the Promotion of Open Access are to serve decision makers and funders of scientific research, and form a part of UNESCO’s strategy plan for Open Access. The paper, written by Alma Swan, one of the leading experts in the field of Open Access, the co-maker of Open Access Map and a team member of Open Oasis group, also serves the whole community as a smaller overview of recent and crucial issues in making Open Access a reality and a gateway to a wider, bigger ecosystem of Open.

“Open Access is a new way of disseminating research information, made possible because of the World Wide Web,” and, to dismantle any myths still hanging in the air, Open Access means not just any information available online, but, Swan continues, “the term Open Access tends to be used about information made available in one of two structured ways.” It implies either journals deposited in repositories (either subject specific, or in more broad, institutional repositories), or journals published by open access publishers. “Open Access journals also contribute to the corpus of openly available literature,” Swan reminds us, “there are around 7,000 of these at the moment, altogether offering over 600,000 articles.”

The paper decouples the formal definitions of open access (from Budapest, Berlin and Bethesda declarations), explains the main concepts such as the difference between libre and gratis open access, the green and gold route to open access, the historical developments that led to the creation of open access policies, and could be read as a basic text on Open Access and related policies.

Access Denied: Obviously, An Issue

Access problems to research literature are still, obviously, a vital issue discussed among both European politicians and politicians worldwide. The paper highlights but a few initiatives/facts that prove so:

• The Research Information Network (RIN) in the UK, concluded in a meta-report that brought together the findings from five RIN-sponsored studies carried out on discovery and access, that ‘the key finding is that access is still a major concern for researchers’

• On a global scale, the SOAP study, a large, 3-year, publisher-led, EU-funded project looking at Open Access and publishing, surveyed 40,000 researchers across the world and found that 37% of respondents said they could find all the articles they need ‘only rarely or with difficulty’

• The UK’s ‘Elite 5’ universities, those with libraries expected to be the best-resourced in the country, show inter-library loan costs for journal articles currently averaging around USD 50,000 per year

• A World Health Organization survey carried out in the year 2000 found that researchers in developing countries claim access to subscription-based journals to be one of their most pressing problems. This survey found that in countries where the per capita income is less than USD 1000 per annum, 56% of research institutions had no current subscriptions to international journals, nor had for the previous 5 years
  

“Altogether, however,” Swan explains, “the current overall percentage of the literature that is openly available can be assumed to be currently around 30%.” Swan argues as well that “Open Access to research outputs is not an isolated concept. It sits within a broad ecosystem of ‘open’ issues that are taking root in the scientific research sphere.” Open Access is now widely seen, and even discussed in mainstream media as “an important early step in a move towards creating a knowledge commons and building true knowledge societies.” As a crucial piece of a much bigger jigsaw, Open Access should be promoted on three levels: policies should be created, advocacy should support the implementation of such policies and better online infrastructure should be developed.

 Guidelines for the Funders

The UNESCO document first and foremost serves as a guideline paper for funders that wish to create OA policies and institutions that wish to mandate them. “Policy development is of critical importance to the progress of Open Access and a structured process is the best way to ensure a good policy outcome. Policy support is necessary even where advocacy is at its most effective,” the policy framework section states.

Swan even adds a short historical overview of first policies created on institutional, national and funders level:

• The first policy to have any real effect was the mandatory one adopted by the School of Electronics & Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, in 2002. This required authors in that School to place their postprints (the authors’ final version of their peer-reviewed articles) in the School’s repository.

• Research funders, too, have been introducing policies over the past 5 years or so. The first was the Wellcome Trust, a London-based funder of biomedical research worldwide. It adopted its policy in 2005, quickly followed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US.

• As well as institutional and funder policies, there has been some development of policy at national level. The first national policy was in the Ukraine in 2007.

Policies should specify what kind of open access they mandate, what is the embargo period, where will the output be deposited (in institutional repository, funder repository, in both…), what type of content will be deposited and more (see the summary below).

“The optimum arrangement, one that accommodates the needs of all stakeholders, and has the potential to collect the greatest amount of Open Access content,” Swan suggests, “is for a network of institutional repositories to be the primary locus for deposit and for centralised, subject-specific collections to be created by harvesting the required content from that network of distributed repositories.”

As for the copyright permission, sadly, in policies that mandate green open access, Open Access is dependent upon the permission of the copyright holder. The text continues: “Where the author has transferred all rights to the publisher, as is most often the case when signing a standard publisher CTA, permission to make work Open Access must be sought from the publisher. Seeking permission from publishers for more than they offer as standard is unlikely to be successful.“

By the end of the document, Swan calls to action: “Research funders play a crucial role in policy making with respect to Open Access. Where funders are disbursing public money they will wish to ensure that the results of their funding are disseminated as widely as possible and used by all who can benefit. Open Access increases the visibility, usage and impact of research, and enables it to reach all constituencies that can benefit, including the education, professional, practitioner and business communities, as well as the interested public. The return on public investment in science is thereby maximised. Research funders are therefore encouraged to develop and implement an Open Access policy.”

Twenty New Books Out

There has been yet another increase in our rich collection of free online books in the field of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Our virtual shelves have just been stacked with 20 new titles containing the latest research findings and theoretical challenges. Free for you to read, share and download at InTechOpen.

Electroplating

Neurodegeneration

Osteosarcoma

Mechanical Engineering

Technological Change

New Perspectives in Plant Protection

Fourier Transform - Signal Processing

Advances in Natural Gas Technology

Municipal and Industrial Waste Disposal

Health and Environment in Aquaculture

Sustainable Forest Management - Case Studies

Advances in Customer Relationship Management

eLearning - Theories, Design, Software and Applications

Evidence Based Medicine - Closer to Patients or Scientists?

Stoichiometry and Materials Science - When numbers matter

In Vitro Fertilization - Innovative Clinical and Laboratory Aspects

Crosstalk and Integration of Membrane Trafficking Pathways

Real-Time Systems, Architecture, Scheduling, and Application

Molecular Dynamics - Studies of Synthetic and Biological Macromolecules

The Role of Osteotomy in the Correction of Congenital and Acquired Disorders of the Skeleton