The 2200+ articles in the Canadian Journal Archivaria can now be found via OAIster - thanks!

Also new in OAIster: CAIRN (29.000+ articles in French)

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=7070

Something truly remarkable happened in January 2006. An unknown 320-year old text was discovered, written by one of the world's greatest scientists. It contained Robert Hooke's minutes of the earliest years of the Royal Society's work and his reflections and comments upon them.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of 17th century science and the scholarly potential of this volume. The Royal Society was created in 1660 as the world's first independent Fellowship-based academy of science. It promoted the new philosophy of learning by experiment, observation and international correspondence. As the Society's Curator of Experiments from 1662, Robert Hooke was at the forefront of this revolution and by 1677, he had been appointed Royal Society Secretary.

The Hooke Folio shows its author in both roles, as a working experimental scientist and as an administrator. More importantly, it reveals year-by-year and meeting-by-meeting the intellectual ferment of the period 1661-1691 when science, in the modern sense, was born.

Rivalries and disputes over inventions meant that Hooke did not trust the written account of Royal Society activities left by his Secretarial predecessor, Henry Oldenburg. Therefore the Folio begins with Hooke's corrective copy of early minutes, intended as a definitive record of the events described. In fact, Oldenburg's and Hooke's writings enrich one another.

As Secretary, Hooke drafted original descriptions of Society meetings from the late 1670s and these rough minutes form the second part of the Hooke Folio. Here, the Folio contains material that was lost or distorted in official accounts of the Royal Society's story, for example fuller versions of major scientific discoveries.

The Hooke Folio is a uniquely interesting record of 17th century science. Now, you can view the secrets of the manuscript by turning pages that have been undisturbed for three centuries.

Royal Society Manuscript MS/847

Regnum Francorum online is a website about interactive mapping of early medieval Europe. The maps that the visitor will find are based on public domain GIS-data and medieval primary sources. Quotes from primary sources are available for items such as regions, cities, institutions, persons and medieval names. For example, you will be able to study the development of donated property year by year for the monasterium of Saint-Denis outside Paris, or Lorsch, situated in the middle Rhein valley. There are also maps of the source material and litterature itself. Simply click on a city to discover what sources are available for free on the internet. This is a way to make it easier to access and overview the rapidly growing collections of medieval primary sources on the internet, for example at digital Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Google Book Search and Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and connect them to each other through a graphical interface.

Regnum Francorum online is a non commercial, private project open for participation of visitors and registered users. The project is in a build-up phase. There are currently over 600 links to online sources and litterature listed in the database.

Web-link: www.francia.ahlfeldt.se

http://www.eux.tv/article.aspx?articleId=15452

Excerpt:

Publishers' attempts to shut out the "other internet players" are also being resisted by people who say the public should have "open access" to taxpayer-funded scholarly and scientific research.

The open-access movement points out that academics, who type and illustrate their own work, might just as well put their articles on the internet as publish them in expensive scientific journals.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit, open-access scientific-publishing project in the United States. Its growing stable of free journals is mainly funded by charging the authors a publication fee, usually refunded by their universities.

In Germany, copyright legislation is expected to come into force at the end of this year granting publishers the online rights to pre-1995 work. Before that time, online publication was undreamed of and rights to it were not mentioned in contracts.

Klaus Graf, an open-access advocate in Germany, is encouraging academics to use a one-year opt-out period to claim those online rights to their pre-1995 work and put the papers on the internet.

The prospect of scientists publishing on the internet instead of in paper journals has prompted academic publishers such as Springer to offer authors an open-access option, if they are willing to pay.

Even more worrying, from a publisher's perspective, is the prospect of expensive college textbooks being replaced by e-books that would be free to students. A British government agency, JISC, announced in September a nationwide trial with 26 books issued free.

http://www.cronaca.com/archives/005146.html
NYT

Bellow

Source: http://maier.randolphcollege.edu/

http://www.scienceinschool.org/2007/issue6/galls/

Image courtesy of Gianluca Farusi

http://brblroom26.wordpress.com/

Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities is the official blog of the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

http://lessig.org/blog/2007/09/on_the_texas_suit_against_virg.html

I have commented there. On the case in German see
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4131226/

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/nyregion/25magna.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[...] Sotheby’s, which today is expected to announce plans to auction it in New York in mid-December, estimates that the document will sell for $20 million to $30 million. It is the only copy in the United States and the only copy in private hands. Sotheby’s says the 16 others are owned by the British or Australian governments or by ecclesiastical or educational institutions in England.

Until last week, this copy was on display in the National Archives in Washington, steps from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But it was only on loan from a foundation controlled by the Texas billionaire Ross Perot, who bought it in 1984 for $1.5 million. [...]

The Perot Magna Carta dates to 1297 and was endorsed by King Edward I. [...]

Trudy Renna, the only employee of the Perot Foundation identified on its tax return, said in a telephone interview last week that the foundation decided to sell Magna Carta to “have funds available for medical research, for improving public education and for assisting wounded soldiers and their families.”

The tax return listed the foundation’s assets as $56.9 million at the end of last year and its contributions as $9.08 million, including more than $4 million for medical research at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. Mr. Perot is listed as president of the foundation and also as a director. Seven of the nine other directors are his wife, Margot; their five children; and his sister, Bette Perot.