Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Best time to appreciate Open Access? When you're really sick and want to learn more about what you have.

Well, I have been out sick for a while. But I am now finally apparently getting better. Thanks to the work of scientists who have developed multiple classes of antibiotics. Anyway, more on that later. While I was out sick I spent a lot of time searching the web for information about nasty, cellulitis causing antibiotic resistant bacterial infections. And I was researching some other health related issues that may have contributed to my getting such an infection. Here are some tidbits I learned during this forced homecation.
  • Complete OA still a long way off. One thing I re-learned during this was that it is incredibly frustrating to see how much of the biomedical literature is still not freely available online. Shame on Elsevier and all the others who are still hoarding this important information.
  • Thanks to those providing OA. Related to the above issue, I came to appreciate was the societies and publishers have decided to go the OA route. I spent a lot of time reading material from ASM, BMC, PLoS, Hindawi, and a few others. And I am grateful to these groups.
  • Google rocks for science searching. Cuil, not so much. If you need to find something about some scientific concept or issue, Google really does a great job. While I was out, Cuil was announced as a possible new competitor for Google in searching. From my experience, Cuil is really really lame for science searches. I like their presentation in a magazine style. But the search results were not so good.
Anyway, enough about me. This is just a quick post to say the Tree of Life will be coming back over the next week or two. I am still out sick. But a clear sign to me that I am getting better is that I finally want to blog again.

4 comments:

  1. Glad that you are back! I hope that you are now well on the road to 100%.
    John

    ReplyDelete
  2. Glad you're getting better Jonathan. I know what you mean about the frustations of not being able to see an interesting article because you don't have access at home (or sometimes at work either). Get well soon.
    Eileen

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well, since I am superstitious (comes from my baseball playing days) ... I am not willing to say I am better yet. Still have some unpleasantries. But the path looks good.

    ReplyDelete

Most recent post

My Ode to Yolo Bypass

Gave my 1st ever talk about Yolo Bypass and my 1st ever talk about Nature Photography. Here it is ...