The Journal of the Medical Library Association published a study called “The impact of free access to the scientific literature: a review of recent research” You can read the whole paper at the link provided, thus saving us all from laughing at the irony of a paper on open access locked behind a paywall. The study concludes:

Recent studies provide little evidence to support the idea that there is a crisis in access to the scholarly literature. Further research is needed to investigate whether free access is making a difference in non-research contexts and to better understand the dissemination of scientific literature through peer-to-peer networks and other informal mechanisms.

… Librarians who encourage scientists to publish in open access journals should be aware of the authors’ priorities and perspectives. Authors in the sciences tend to focus on citation impact, reputation, and accessibility to a specialized readership”not breadth of readership, copyright, or access status.

Let me get this straight: Researchers in the sciences do not see THEIR access to scientific literature as an especially important problem. But more research needs to be done to see if there is enough access by non-scientists, who probably made a large part of this research possible through their tax dollars, and if people are talking about material in scientific literature outside the ivory lab enough to warrant a crisis.

Doesn’t the whole Swartz-MIT-JSTOR debacle mentioned in my previous post provide a startling example of the hindrance to easy access even within the scientific research community?

Also, keep this study handy the next time someone waxes about the nobility of academia (not science, academia, sometimes have to emphasize these things for the anti-science trolls). All the publishing industry has to do is appeal to the essential competitive vanity of humans to keep their business model alive and well.

Never mind that Swartz is a researcher, JSTOR makes it difficult for users to download articles to which they have rightful access and the government (your taxpayer money) pays for much of the research that ends up in journals not made available to you. Culture is anti-rivalrous as the great Nina Paley likes to point out. “Anti-rivalrous goods increase in value the more they are used.”

Boston Globe: Activist charged with hacking

Aaron Swartz, a Cambridge web entrepreneur and political activist who has lobbied for the free flow of information on the Internet, was charged in federal court with hacking into a subscription-based archive system at MIT and stealing more than 4 million articles, including scientific and academic journals [while a student]. Swartz already had regular, licensed access to the database through his work at Harvard. But prosecutors said he was so committed to the immediate acquisition of materials that he used special software to enable the quick downloading. He changed the Internet protocol address on his computer several times to circumvent security guards, according to court records.

The American Prospect on this matter

It’s easy to forget that there’s something at all controversial or oppositional about accessing information, or that some people really, really want data to be free — and others don’t. Open data has been mainstreamed. Whatever hacker-culture roots the free information movement might have are subsumed by the idea that simply everyone agrees that data is meant to be free, and the struggle is over the mechanics of freeing it. That’s never really been true, as Swartz’s case makes plain.

The Huffington Post:

JSTOR’s the one that should be in prison, man, for locking up knowledge.

Note that JSTOR has no issues with Swartz and that is the government coming down on him for what they argue is felony computer hacking. Reminds me of War Games. “I mean have you gotten any insight as to why a bright boy like this would jeopardize the lives of millions?”

Map of French Quebec City’s fortifications on bedrock relief (North conveniently points to the bottom right) | Ramparts of Quebec City | July 2011

Quebec City sits between the Laurentian highlands of the southeastern Grenville Province of the Canadian Shield and the Appalachian Mountains that were formed during the Taconic and Acadian orogenies. Bedrock here is the Upper Ordovician Utica shale that “overlies the predominantly shallow marine carbonate facies of the Cambrian-Ordovician St. Lawrence Platform” (or St. Lawrence lowlands).The adjacent St. Lawrence River, which I gather formed post-Pleistocene glaciation by cutting into the relatively less-resistant sedimentary rocks sandwiched between the Laurentians and the Appalachians, is part of the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Seaway system.

As a sign by one of the many higher-up river outlooks explains, the land beneath Quebec City was not chosen by the French because of the overwhelming tectonics over an equally stupefying period of time that created it but purely for defense strategic reasons. To each their own time scale.

In a time-traveling nutshell: Canadian Shield forms the core of the North American continent –> happy passive margin forms with the buildup of a carbonate platform and the transgression of the sea –> BAM BAM Taconic and Acadian continental collision events creating the Appalachian mountains –> some quiet time as the Atlantic Ocean forms to the east –> glaciation from the north –> glacial retreat –> uplifted Quebec City and associated river –> some French dude named Samuel de Champlain surveys the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence area, claims the high cape of Quebec City and territory all the way from north of Minnesota down to and including Louisiana for New France in 1608 and his people put up a bunch of ramparts against, well, everyone –> the Brits take over in 1763 –> Canada forms in 1868 and tells everyone to sod off in exchange for putting limey monarchs on its currency –> Canadian geologists find economic natural gas in the Utica shale. (Someone call They Might Be Giants and set this to music.)

Related reading:

• The Utica Shale Formation
• Geo-Atlas of the St. Lawrence River Basin
• American Treasure of the Library of Congress: Samuel de Champlain’s 1607 Map
• The Utica’s shale gas potential

Yesterday’s Houston Chronicle:

Texas“ main electric grid operator is warning customers to reduce their usage during the peak power demand hours of 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. today as high temperatures and unexpected power plant outages will stretch supplies.

Today on Capitol Hill:

An amendment from Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) defunding the Energy Department’s standards for traditional incandescent light bulbs to be 30 percent more energy efficient starting next year was approved rather anticlimactically by voice vote.

Cut off nose, meet spited face.