Open access to the research literature : a funders perspective

In a declaration to commemorate the publication of the first draft of the human genome, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President Bill Clinton commented that, “unencumbered access to this information will promote discoveries that will reduce the burden of disease, improve health around the world and enhance the quality of life for all human kind” (quoted in BBC, 2000). One of the major funders of the human genome project was the Wellcome Trust , an independent charity that funds research to improve human and animal health. And, having been at the forefront of the decision to make the genome sequencing data freely available, it was perhaps inevitable that this funding body would lead the way in advocating free access to the research literature. If, as the Wellcome believes, it makes sense for scientists to have free access to raw, genomic data – to help realise the promise of this research – then it makes equal sense for scientists to be able to access the outputs (journal articles), to enable this research to be built on and developed. This chapter considers the issues around open access from the perspective of a research funder

Origin of Grassy Lake

Two theories have been proposed to explain the formation of Grassy Lake. One attributes the formation of the swamp to earthquake; the other states that it is one of the many so-called oxbow lakes in the area. A study of aerial photographs showing the absence of fault zones and related sandblows tends to rule out any possibility of an earthquake origin, and in size and shape the swamp in no way resembles an oxbow lake. The aerial photographs reveal instead that the formation of the swamp was due to a natural levee being built up by a river which meandered through the low area now called Grassy Lake. The presence of dense stands of bald cypress (Taxodium distichum (L.) Richard), which grow in abandoned river channels, and a knowledge of the ecology of bald cypress support this hypothesis

Christian School Discipline: A Collaborative Approach to Improving Student Behavior

A Catholic elementary school systematically developed a comprehensive discipline program with input from the administrator, teachers, students, parents, and other members of the parish community. Developed around the themes of respect, spirituality, and responsibility, the program was systematically evaluated over the first year of a three-year period of implementation. Survey results of parents, teachers, and students indicate positive perceptions of the project by aU three groups

Benefits of slush hydrogen for space missions

A study was performed to quantify the benefits of using slush hydrogen instead of normal boiling point liquid hydrogen as a fuel for several space missions. Vehicles considered in the study included the Space Shuttle/Shuttle-C, LEO to GEO transfer vehicles, Lunar and Mars transfer vehicles, and cryogenic depots in low Earth orbit. The advantages of using slush hydrogen were expressed in terms of initial mass differences at a constant payload, payload differences at a constant tank volume, and increases in fuel storage time for cryogenic depots. Both chemical oxygen/hydrogen and hydrogen nuclear thermal rocket propulsion were considered in the study. The results indicated that slush hydrogen offers the potential for significant decreases in initial mass and increases in payload for most missions studied. These advantages increase as the mission difficulty, or energy, increases

Funding the Way to Open Access

The Wellcome Trust - the UK's largest non-governmental funder of biomedical research - is taking action to ensure the work it supports is available to al

Information Literacy as Structured Authoring

By drawing on the early findings of an IRB-approved study, this presentation will discuss some challenges involved in teaching structured authoring, defined here as topic based authoring combined with an XML or XML-like structure. Since the late 1980s, Robert E. Horn and others referred to structured authoring/writing as a new paradigm that transforms the ways writers think about information usage, presentation, and structuring. Charlotte Robidoux (2007) and Sally Henschel (2010, 2014), among others, have explored how curriculums that taught structured authoring might help students begin to understand how the approach changes writing. However, as Joy Robinson et al (2019) demonstrated, support for learning the technologies involved (like MadCap Flare or Adobe Framemaker) is often minimal, usually only what instructors can teach themselves, leading to comparatively low adoption of structured authoring even in technical writing courses, especially at non-R1 institutions and teaching-focused institutions. As a result, some structured authoring developers, specifically MadCap and their Scholar Program, have begun providing their software for free to institutions to use, though training is still mostly self-directed. This presentation will discuss a study on the first attempt to pilot training in both the technology and the information paradigm needed to use structured authoring, highlighting successful elements as well as difficulties. It will conclude will suggesting possible remedies and ways to incorporate the approach in different styles of writing classes

Quantum state targeting

We introduce a new primitive for quantum communication that we term "state targeting" wherein the goal is to pass a test for a target state even though the system upon which the test is performed is submitted prior to learning the target state's identity. Success in state targeting can be described as having some control over the outcome of the test. We show that increasing one's control above a minimum amount implies an unavoidable increase in the probability of failing the test. This is analogous to the unavoidable disturbance to a quantum state that results from gaining information about its identity, and can be shown to be a purely quantum effect. We provide some applications of the results to the security analysis of cryptographic tasks implemented between remote antagonistic parties. Although we focus on weak coin flipping, the results are significant for other two-party protocols, such as strong coin flipping, partially binding and concealing bit commitment, and bit escrow. Furthermore, the results have significance not only for the traditional notion of security in cryptography, that of restricting a cheater's ability to bias the outcome of the protocol, but also on a novel notion of security that arises only in the quantum context, that of cheat-sensitivity. Finally, our analysis of state targeting leads to some interesting secondary results, for instance, a generalization of Uhlmann's theorem and an operational interpretation of the fidelity between two mixed states