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FOS Newsletter Archive
FindArticles.com
Wikipedia
My first pick is the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter archive edited by Peter Suber, which provides lucid, well-balanced summaries about developments in electronic publishing, digital copyright, and new digital services and products of scholarly communication. The second pick is the new, smartened-up version of FindArticles.com, a free full-text database of nearly 500 scholarly and trade journals and general interest magazines licensed by LookSmart from the Gale Group. The Pan is Wikipedia, an encyclopedia meant to be built from scratch as a worldwide community project by contributions, corrections, and additions from anyone, anytime without any substantial guidelines or formal editorial process. It may be fine for providing an outlet for those who pine to be a member in some community, but it looks more like a prank, to see how the (wo)man of the street and the press fall for it.
the picks
FOS NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE
The FOS Newsletter (www.earlham.edu/-peters/fos) is the brainchild of Peter Suber, a professor of Philosophy at Earlham College. Don't stop reading herehe is well versed in arguing against the incompetency defense for competent people (as practiced by "cunning and dishonest lawyers"), in using Dialog for teaching philosophy, and in discussing the pros and cons of various XML schemas. His background serves him well in the extremely lucid, concise, practical, and balanced reporting of developments in many aspects of electronic publishing, digital copyright, and the future of scholarship. FOS is the acronym he coined for Free Online Scholarship. It covers research papers, conference papers, dissertations, essays, books, and reference sources in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, and is available free of charge on the Web.
Each issue of the newsletter consists of summaries of the latest developments in the field. These summaries are not merely indicative or informative abstracts, but critical summaries, with links to several related sites for background and contrasting opinions. Amidst the many press releases promoting digital products and services masquerading as articles-even sneaked into refereed research papers-it is refreshing to read the opinions of a scholar who consistently looks at both sides of the coin, cuts through the clutter, and points to areas worthy for digging further to find gold. Time and again, he is the first to report on...