Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to call attention to the achievements of women in technology. Despite its stereotype as a field dominated by men, women have made significant contributions to the field of computing since its inception, back to Lovelace herself, the first computer programmer, having designed a program for Charles Babbage’s analytical [...]
Posts under ‘Free speech’
Sussing out the details on locus of deposit
My previous post on locus of deposit for scholarly self-archiving provoked a few reactions, as I thought it might. Stevan Harnad’s is the most thorough and notable. I think we each missed a few points.
Let me make a few statements, just to get them out of the way:
Every research funder should mandate OA to the [...]
Aborting OA: government interference in science
Sarah Lai Stirland reports on Wired’s Threat Level blog that a bibliographic database run by Johns Hopkins University has blocked all searches related to abortion — because the project receives funding from a U.S. federal agency which prohibits grantees from promoting the practice.
In a sense, this tension between scientific independence and state power (especially [...]
Shield laws, diffuse interests, and collective action
Particularly in the past few years, American journalists have been making noise about the need for a federal shield law. Currently, 33 states plus D.C. have laws to protect journalists from having to reveal privileged source information in court; the federal government has no such law. A handful of recent high-profile cases, such as that [...]
