Anita S. Coleman: IT News

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 21:19:32 GMT

Get Voicemail In Your Email Inbox: GotVoice.

It doesn’t have a fancy design or well throught through navigation. I can’t find a single use of Ajax or javascript on the site (although there is some use of Flash). And that’s ok, because GotVoice does something I love - it converts voicemails from my home and cell phone into MP3s and sends them to me by email.

This is something I’ve gotten quite used to with Vonage (voicemails are sent as MP3s to my email), but I don’t have the same option from my cell phone carrier. GotVoice solved the problem for me. Setup took a few minutes (you have to give GotVoice your voicemail credentials) and then it just worked. Voicemails are now sent to my inbox as MP3 files (and saved in my voicemail system).

The basic GotVoice service is free, and they announced two premium services last week. The Plus service, which is $5 per month, allows more scheduled voicemail checks per day. The Premium service, which is $10 per month, has yet more checks, and also provides you with a RSS feed with voicemails included as enclosures. While I love the idea of having a RSS feed for the voicemails, it doesn’t justify paying $10 per month. The basic free service is more than adequate for me.

If you want your voicemail in the same inbox with your email, GotVoice is an excellent choice. This isn’t as fancy as Spinvox, which converts voicemails to text, but it does save me the hassle of checking voicemail multiple times per day. Note that it only works in the U.S.

Note: There are a number of unanswered questions about the service which are either not discussed on the site or have conflicting FAQs. The comments below go into this somewhat. I’ll post clarifications once I hear from the company.

GotVoice

[TechCrunch]

Thu, 18 May 2006 17:49:49 GMT

Helping authors retain the rights needed for OA archiving. John Ober, Facilitating open access: Developing support for author control of copyright, College Crucially, an explicit place to exercise the retained rights and provide unfettered access to scholarship, i.e., an institutional repository (IR) (or, failing that, assistance in depositing work in disciplinary repositories, such as PubMed Central, arXiv, CogPrints, and the like). By noemail@noemail.org (Peter Suber). [Open Access News]

Thu, 18 May 2006 17:49:02 GMT

Advertising the institutional repository. The University of Michigan libraries issued a kind of advertisement or press release last week to encourage faculty to deposit their research in Deep Blue, UM's OA institutional repository. Excerpt: Your work: cited more, safe forever. The University of Michigan has more than 150 years of experience and expertise in presenting and preserving the world's best research and creativity. With Deep By noemail@noemail.org (Peter Suber). [Open Access News]

How can I resist this?

Sat, 06 May 2006 19:58:36 GMT

The Sultan's Elephant and the Giant Space Puppet.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cadigan/ Pat Cadigan's remarkable Friday morning in London

[Beyond the Beyond]

Threats to the science commons

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 03:21:18 GMT

Threats to the scientific commons. Richard R. Nelson, The Market Economy, And The Scientific Commons, text of a talk given at the University of Michigan School of Law, January 26, 2006. (Thanks to John Wilbanks.) Nelson does not discuss OA to literature or data, but focuses on threats to the scientific commons from patents, exclusive licenses, and high licensing fees. Excerpt:

[I]t is widely recognized that the power of market stimulated and guided invention and innovation often is dependent on the strength of the science base from which they draw....This science base largely is the product of publicly funded research, and the knowledge produced by that research is largely open and available for potential innovators to use. That is, the market part of the Capitalist engine rests on a publicly supported scientific commons. The message of this essay is that the scientific commons is becoming privatized. While the privatization of the scientific commons up to now has been relatively limited, there are real dangers that unless halted soon important portions of future scientific knowledge will be private property and fall outside the public domain, and that could be bad news for both the future progress of science, and for technological progress. The erosion of the scientific commons will not be easy to stop. Here I want to call the alarm, and to suggest a strategy that has some promise....

An associated belief or ideal ["that until recently has served well to protect the scientific commons"] is that the results of scientific research are and should be published and otherwise laid open for all to use and evaluate. As Robert Merton (1973) argued, the spirit of science is â€˜communitarianâ€™ regarding access to the knowledge and technique it creates. All scientists are free to test the results of their fellows and to find them valid or not supported, and to build on these results in their own work. Because the results of scientific research are laid in the public domain for testing and further development, the bulk of scientific knowledge accepted by the community is reliable (as John Ziman (1978) has emphasized) and scientific knowledge is cumulative. These are basic reasons why the scientific enterprise has been so effective as an engine of discovery. And economists often have argued that keeping science open is the most effective policy for enabling the public to draw practical benefits from it. My argument in this essay is that the part of the theory about good science that stresses the value of open science is basically correct, but is in danger of being forgotten, or denied....The case for open scientific knowledge clearly needs to be reconstructed recognizing explicitly that much of scientific research in fact is oriented towards providing knowledge useful for the solution of practical problems, that the applications of new scientific findings often are broadly predictable, and that this is why control over scientific findings in some cases is financially valuable property. I think there is a case for keeping basic scientific knowledge open, even under these conditions. To privatize basic knowledge is a danger both for the advance of science, and for the advance of technology....In Section II, I discuss the rise and erosion of the idea that public support of open science is warranted because the expected returns are high but the areas of return are so uncertain that market mechanisms will not suffice....

I believe the key to assuring that a large portion of what comes out of future scientific research will be placed in the commons is staunch defense of the commons by universities. Universities almost certainly will continue to do the bulk of basic scientific research. If they have policies of laying their research results largely open, most of science will continue to be in the commons. However, universities are not in general supporting the idea of a scientific commons, except in terms of their own rights to do research. In the era since Bayh-Dole, universities have become a major part of the problem, avidly defending their rights to patent their research results, and license as they choose....The argument that if an exclusive license is not given, no one will try to advance, seems particularly dubious for research tools of wide application, or for findings that appear to open up possibilities for new research attacks on diseases where a successful remedy clearly would find a large market....Universities will not give up the right to earn as much as they can from the patents they hold unless public policy pushes them hard in that direction. I see the key as reforming Bayh-Dole. The objective here, it seems to me, is not to eliminate university patenting, but to establish a presumption that university research results, patented or not, should as a general rule be made available to all that want to use them at very low transaction costs, and reasonable financial costs. This would not be to foreclose exclusive or narrow licensing in those circumstances where this is necessary to gain effective technology transfer. Rather, it would be to establish the presumption that such cases are the exception rather than the rule.

By noemail@noemail.org (Peter Suber). [Open Access News]