Tom Roper's Weblog

FT letters on open access

The Financial Times of today carries two letters on open access in reply to a piece by Arie Jongejan of Elsevier from the issue of 26th May. One is from David C Prosser of SPARC Europe, the other from Tony Delamothe of the BMJ

American notes

Poor Dickens, Dylan Thomas and Malcolm Bradbury, and all the other Englishmen who have written about visits to the USA, for now I follow feebly after them.
And much of what I say has been said before, and I suspect in more elegant style by many others. But the great thing about blogging is that, since I don’t give a fig for the world’s good opinion, I can inflict unoriginal and hackneyed reflections on the American counter-revolution on the world. These are little to do with the MLA conference and I must make clear no criticism of my hosts, who were the soul of grace and hospitality.

Elsevier and open access

Steve Harnad reports on lis-elib that Elsevier have announced that they are now a full Romeo Green publisher...in other words authors may self-archive both their pre-refereeing preprints and their refereed
postprints.

Wednesday pm: visit to NLM

A fascinating visit to the holy of holies, the National Library of Medicine. We were shown among other things their Turning the Pages project, done using the system developed by the British Library and including, doubtless with help from Bruce Madge, their copy of Elizabeth Blackwell's A Curious Herbal, the Visible Human, the NCBI work on the Human Genome and both the general and history of medicine reading rooms.
There are some photographs in the photo album.
And at last I came upon the cicadas in all their noisy splendour...

Wednesday 26th May: morning of innovation

Keynote speaker this morning was Ray Kurzweil, he who invented the Kurzweil machine speking on trends in ICT and medicine....

Tuesday 25th May

Business meeting on open access, emerging infectious diseases

More on Monday 24th May: medical informatics

Medical informatics and the Ovid party

MLA photos

I've created an MLA photo album at http://tomroper.typepad.com/photos/mla2004/
Not much there yet, but I hope it will grow if I take some more today.

Monday 24th May

Monday 24th May: McGovern lecture, business meeting and medical informatics

Sunday 23rd May

The first full day of MLA: President's address, McGovern lecture and educating the 21st century health professional