Monthly Archives: June 2007

Pushing for more open access

There was an article on the BBC site, uh… several months ago (playing catch-up here) about a renewed push among the scientific community for open access to research results and publications.

The lack of such open access is for me a major pet peeve. The problem is simply this: all of the credibility is currently entrenched in old, slow, and expensive publishing houses. Journals take a while to build up a reputation, and nobody wants to publish in a journal with no reputation. It’s no good for one’s own credibility, and a sure-fire way to shoot oneself in the foot with regards to getting grant money.

Now, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) is making a little bit of head-way, but it’s taking a while to bootstrap for the reasons mentioned above.

So, enough complaining.

I have a plan. Unfortunately it’s in the early planning stages. It’s been stewing in my mind for 13 or 14 months, but I’ve finally put together an outline of the plan on paper, and will be running it by progressively larger groups of people, starting tomorrow with my lab. Once I’ve got the rough edges smoothed out a bit, I plan on posting it here. We need to move away from the outdated model that’s currently well-entrenched, and even unnecessarily emulated by PLoS. At the same time, scientific integrity must be maintained. It’s an interesting challenge.

Next Action Elimination Week

My life is now pretty much back in order. It was rather out of order after 2 months of craziness plus a month of traveling a lot. Nonetheless, I kept capturing thoughts and filing them away in my GTD system, and there they wait. I had a good weekly review on Friday and did a little pruning, and it left me with (as of today) 100 @Lab Next Actions and 132 @Rivendell (my apartment) next actions.

I’m going to make a concentrated effort to knock down Next Actions this week. At one point early in 2007 I was down to something like 15 @Lab next actions. One nice thing about iGTD is that it provides Next Action counts in the Contexts views. These were recently upgraded to show total counts for nested contexts (and projects) when collapsed. The numbers next to each context give me a kind of meter by which to measure my efficacy at getting things done. If the numbers are going up, that’s an indication that (a) I’ve been really creative and lots of things have been coming up to add to my system, (b) there’ just a lot going on and into the system it goes, or (c) I’m not knocking down Next Actions quickly enough. On the other hand, it’s rewarding to watch the numbers drop as I get things done.

I think a reasonable goal for this week would be to get down to 20 Next Actions each in the @Lab and @Rivendell categories. Here it goes!

Google Reader – Twice Rejected

Back when Google Reader first came out, I decided to check it out. After all, Google’s pretty good at online stuff. Maybe they’d nail the online RSS aggregator the first time around.

Nope.

However, I did a presentation last Friday for the BME grad students here on using PubMed with RSS, and used Google Reader as an example online reader. In the process, I ended up trying it out again. It was looking much better than last time. The interface for reading feeds on my Treo is great as well. However, it still has one fatal flaw.

Yesterday, Amanda asked me about a LiveJournal post she had made. Amanda’s LiveJournal, like mine, is now “friends-only” and requires authentication to access the feed. I hadn’t seen her post. In fact, I hadn’t seen any LJ posts from friends-only journals all weekend. It turns out that Google Reader still doesn’t support authenticated feeds. I tried faking it out with TinyURL and a Yahoo! pipe thing that someone made, to no avail. Back to Gregarius I go.

It’s really too bad. I loved the updated Google Reader interface. However, until they allow authenticated feeds, I can’t migrate.