Tag: Information access

Sign a US petition that govt-funded research papers be available online to ordinary people

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Jona Lendering of Livius.org draws my attention to a White House petition that should interest everyone:

We petition the Obama administration to:

Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.

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.

The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

Other bloggers have endorsed the move.  More power to their elbow, I say.  There is no good reason why public money should be spent to create private monopolies.

I suggest that all US readers of this blog take the time and sign the petition.

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A bibliography of scholarship on Gregory of Nyssa

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent has drawn my attention to a treasure online: a site maintained by Matthieu Cassin, which consists of a bibliography of articles about Gregory of Nyssa, in reverse date order.

What makes this special is that some of the articles are linked.  This includes translations of texts by the man himself:

M. Cassin, « Grégoire de Nysse, Sur la divinité du Fils et de l’Esprit et sur Abraham », Conférence 29, 2009, p. 581-611.

and this interesting article, which also discusses the titles and chapter divisions of Gregory’s work against Eunomius.  Whether the chapter divisions are authorial in late antique texts is a discussion which remains to be clarified, but the paper contributes to it.

M. Cassin, « Text and context : the importance of scholarly reading. Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium », dans S. Douglass, M. Ludlow (éd.), Reading the Church Fathers, Londres, 2011, p. 109-131 et 161-165.

There are other treasures too:

P. Géhin, « Fragments patristiques syriaques des Nouvelles découvertes du Sinaï », Collectanea Christiana Orientalia 6, 2009, p. 67-93.

P. Géhin, « Manuscrits sinaïtiques dispersés II : les fragments théologiques syriaques de Milan (Chabot 34-57) », Oriens christianus 91, 2007, p. 1-24.

although some of the links are just to pay-journals, unfortunately, or to Google books.

There are further interesting items linked from his CV, among them:

A. Binggeli, M. Cassin, « Recenser la tradition manuscrite des textes grecs : du Greek Index Project à Pinakes », dans La descrizione dei manoscritti : esperienze a confronto, éd. E. Crisci, M. Maniaci, P. Orsini, (Studi e ricerche del Dipartimento di filologia e storia 1), Cassino, 2010, p. 91-106.

Impressive!

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Saudi mufti calls for all churches to be destroyed — UK media suppresses story

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I wouldn’t bother with this story, except that the UK media seem to have received a 3-line whip, directing silence about it.  ArabianBusiness.com reports (four days ago!):

Destroy all churches in Gulf, says Saudi Grand Mufti

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has said it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region,” following Kuwait’s moves to ban their construction.

Speaking to a delegation in Kuwait, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, stressed that since the tiny Gulf state was a part of the Arabian Peninsula, it was necessary to destroy all of the churches in the country, Arabic media have reported.

Fox News reported the story from the Washington Times, and commented:

If the pope called for the destruction of all the mosques in Europe, the uproar would be cataclysmic. Pundits would lambaste the church, the White House would rush out a statement of deep concern, and rioters in the Middle East would kill each other in their grief. But when the most influential leader in the Muslim world issues a fatwa to destroy Christian churches, the silence is deafening.

On March 12, Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, declared that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region.” The ruling came in response to a query from a Kuwaiti delegation over proposed legislation to prevent construction of churches in the emirate.

The mufti based his decision on a story that on his deathbed, Muhammad declared, “There are not to be two religions in the [Arabian] Peninsula.” This passage has long been used to justify intolerance in the kingdom. Churches have always been banned in Saudi Arabia, and until recently Jews were not even allowed in the country. Those wishing to worship in the manner of their choosing must do so hidden away in private, and even then the morality police have been known to show up unexpectedly and halt proceedings. 

This is not a small-time radical imam trying to stir up his followers with fiery hate speech. This was a considered, deliberate and specific ruling from one of the most important leaders in the Muslim world. It does not just create a religious obligation for those over whom the mufti has direct authority; it is also a signal to others in the Muslim world that destroying churches is not only permitted but mandatory.

There’s nothing novel in the demand, in truth.  This is how Islam is, as a look at the dismal stories in the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria reveals.  Usually the method is to forbid repairs, which, over time, amounts to the same thing; but direct demolition or theft of the premises is also fairly common.  How else, indeed, did Hagia Sophia come to be a mosque?  How much longer we may be allowed to say this, however, I do not know.

But the real issue for me is the media silence.  Fox News make precisely the right point.  For instance, I can see no sign that the BBC have reported this.  This happened a week ago.  And I didn’t know until, by accident, I saw the story on Facebook.

We cannot trust the mass media.  Incidents like this, where a story with all sorts of important implications go unreported, should act as a wake-up call.  Our mass media are in the hands of a tiny minority of people whose values are not our own. 

It isn’t that the stories they run are untrue — although the framing of the story is often dishonest or polemical.  It is the selection and the editing that ensures that only stories that reflect one particular political agenda and narrative can even be reported.  Dr Goebbels did it first (and isn’t it curious that, in all my 40 years of watching TV, I have yet to see a documentary on the media methods of the good doctor?)

And that should worry us all.

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So, farewell, O dead tree Encyclopedia Britannica

Posted on by Roger Pearse

News today that Encyclopedia Britannica has decided not to print any more editions of its encyclopedia.  Sales of the paper version have been “negligible” for years, and 85% of the income comes from the online version.  I would imagine these sales are licenses to libraries and the like.  There is, apparently, some gloating from some anonymous erk in Wikipedia — the ‘encyclopedia’ that any teenager can edit (and especially Randy in Boise).

It’s a key moment, isn’t it?  The paper encyclopedia is now definitely dead.  That is, the major reference source until 1995 is now history. 

Any reference source in paper form is now obsolete.  Any source that is not read from end to end, but instead is accessed in bits and pieces, is now on borrowed time.  There are any number of such handbooks — we might think of the Clavis Patrum Graecorum.  They’re all dead meat, and just waiting to be collected.  They cannot, commercially, exist on paper any more.

It’s a brave new world.

Mind you, I do wish someone would sue the hell out of Wikipedia and force it to institute some proper controls and regulation of trolls.  It can’t grow much beyond its current status as “collection of hearsay”, until this is addressed.

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Partial translation of Theodoret’s Commentary on Romans online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent writes:

I have been enjoying Robert C. Hill’s two-volume translation of Theodoret’s commentary on Paul’s epistles.  For comparison of Romans, I found an older translation on Google books in The Christian Remembrancer, Vol XXI, 1839 (sadly, it only covers chapters 1-8). 

The material is to be found on page 34, 93, 158, 231, 291, 349, 407, 480, 608, 671, and 734, according to the index at the front.  It ought to be rescued and added to the Additional Fathers site.

The last item indicates that it continues: but I have not been able to locate the next volume online.

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CIL to be digitised at last?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via Ancient World Online I learn of an initiative here to scan in the out-of-copyright volumes of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.  This is very welcome news, so long as we get PDF’s out of the end of it.

It probably takes an initiative to do this.  The CIL is really important, in that it contains all the Latin inscriptions.  It also contains documentary texts. 

But the volumes are huge, rare, and impossible to get access to.  So no ordinary chap is ever going to be able to slap  them on a photocopier and do the necessary.  Indeed merely photocopying a page can be a challenge.

Let’s hope the volumes will be available in PDF.  The site seems to make access to this complex, if it is possible; but that is what we want, first and foremost.

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The Australian on “Scholarly licence to print money”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent draws my attention to an article in the Australian on the academic publishing business by Colin Steele (Jan. 25, 2012).  It’s sitting behind a paywall, but if you search in Google for “scholarly licence to print money” you can click through to it.

WHO pays the piper in scholarly publishing is a very hot global topic.

If scholarly publishing were to be established de novo in the digital era, the economics would surely be very different from the current model and taxpayers would get a better deal from their funding of university research.

Scholarly publishing, especially for the six or seven huge multi-national journal publishers, is one of the most lucrative global businesses. …

Steele then backs this up by some solid statistics.  The article continues:

The big publishers clearly manage the current peer review system and provide efficient electronic platforms for access but as the UK Office of Fair Trading reported in 2002, “the overall profitability of commercial STM publishing is high . . . by comparison to other commercial journal publishing”.  …

The academic community, supported through the salaries and infrastructure of the institutions, gives away its scholarly content to commercial publishers.

Peer reviewing of millions of articles is then undertaken, almost totally without charge, by that same academic community.

The publishers then impose restrictive copyright regulations on the scholarly content, which they then sell back at ever increasing profit margins to universities which originally created the material. Logical?

Not really.

I wish I could quote the whole article.  It’s very well thought out, and calls for Australian institutions to take back control of the research that they do, that they manage, and which the taxpayer pays for.  It concludes with the following:

Ultimately, the prime issue is surely to disseminate university knowledge, which has been funded by taxpayers, as effectively and openly as possible, rather than for that knowledge simply to continue to be a source for large publisher profits and for manipulable metrics for research assessment exercises.

And who, outside of the academic publishing industry, could disagree with that?

If you can read it, do so.

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Google’s personal search makes the search engine useless

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’d noticed for some time that I wasn’t getting very good results from searches on Google.  Kate Phizackerley explains why:

I really hate what Google has done with search.  If I search for the Valley of the Kings of KV64 I looking for something I don’t already know, for news.  It’s bad enough for Valley of the Kings and even worse for KV64 because my News from the Valley of the Kings is the top blog on the subject and I have written much of the material about KV64.

Google’s new personalised search algorithm makes matters worse.  It shrinks the world.  So as well as News from the Valley of the Kings, half of the images shown are photographs I took and the front pages adds my review of Nick Reeves’ Complete Valley of the Kings on Egyptological.  Far from helping me to find new material it shrinks my world, not just down to things I already know, but down to things I have written.  You’d have to be extremely narcissistic to like a search that works like that.

Fortunately it only works if you are logged in so I work with two browsers and only log in to Google on one of them, the other I use for searching.  I can see the advantage of geo-searches.  If I type in Sutton cinema, I like the fact search shows me the programme.  That is useful.  But not search which makes me the apparent centre of the World Wide Web.

That calls for a test.  So, I fired up Safari and went to the google.co.uk page and ran a test for “Roger Pearse”.  It gave one set of results.  Then I swapped over to IE, where I am logged into Google, and did the same — and I got another set.  They were not the same.

Neither set was particularly special.  But you’d expect consistency!

This is like the problem with Google Books Search where Google doesn’t show books to non-Americans — annoying but Europublishers threatened them — but worse, doesn’t show them in the search results so you never know that you’re missing them.

Stop it, Google.  Stop doing this kind of thing.  A search should give the same results.  Anything else is a pain in the butt, unless or until you can (a) see the modifiers being used, explicit, obvious, listed at the top of the page and (b) decide to turn them off.

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How do we search sites that no longer exist?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There’s a lot of material in the WaybackWhenMachine at Archive.org.  Images of websites from days gone by, full of material that may not be online now but that we might like to see if we could.

But how?  If we know the site, we can go to it and look through.

What we need is a Google for the WaybackWhenMachine.  And this does not seem to exist.

Anyone know of anything?

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A 1918 list of English translations from ancient Greek

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This evening I ran across F. M. K. Foster’s English translations from the Greek: a bibliographical survey, Columbia, 1918 (Google books here).  A book of this date ought to be of great interest, in that all the translations listed will be public domain in the USA.  There’s even a good chance that they will be on Google Books or otherwise accessible.

I’m rather enjoying my first browse.  There are many pages of translations of Aristotle, and Euripides, of course.

But how many of us have heard of Aristoxenus of Tarentum? (p. 34 — from where I learn of a translation of his Harmonics).  Not me, that’s for sure.  But his book is here.

Or Artemidorus of Ephesus, better known as Artemidorus of Daldi, a 2nd century AD interpreter of dreams?  All the translations of his book, The interpretation of dreams, are old — 1722 is the last reprint shown.  I could not find it online.

Hyperides, The orations against Athenogenes and Philippides, were translated by F. G. Kenyon in 1893, I see.  There are quite a few versions of Longinus On the sublime — a work that perhaps few of us today have read (not me, again).

The lately discovered fragments of Menander, by “Unus Multorum” were edited and translated in 1909.  I had no luck finding it online, tho.

The list does not look nearly complete to me.  Likewise it omits all except classical Greek.  But the thing was done as a PhD thesis, under the lash, as it were, so perhaps we should not complain!

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