Textbooks. Source: "The reason I don't sleep at night..." by Amanda Munoz on Flickr. License: CC-BY 2.0.

Ars Technica reports that the state of California has started a project to write free digital textbooks for the state’s public schools. The project is focusing on high school math and science courses.

Schwarzenegger has tasked California Secretary of Education Glen Thomas with making sure that the new textbooks are ready for deployment in fall 2009. Thomas will be collaborating with the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and the president of the State Board of Education.

Public education is costly in California and accounts for roughly 40 percent of the state government’s annual budget. The state’s current financial woes have forced Schwarzenegger to search for ways to cut some of the fat out of school spending.

“As California’s budget crisis continues we must find such innovative ways to save money and improve services,” said Governor Schwarzenegger in a statement. “California was built on innovation and I’m proud of our state’s continued leadership in developing education technology. This first-in-the-nation initiative will reduce education costs, help encourage collaboration among school districts and help ensure every California student has access to a world-class education.”

This is great news, however it is worth noting that the article points out a number of roadblocks in California’s school system with regard to textbooks. Hopefully these can be overcome, although that will be a huge battle. Even so, education, whether K-12 or higher, desperately needs free (libre) resources, and it’s good to hear that California is stepping up and starting this initiative.

• Ars Technica
• Slashdot

Illustration of Human Skull. Credit: "65-5376-2" by otisarchives1 on Flickr (PD)

Mike Rhode, the chief archivist at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, a medical museum run by the US Army, has released hundreds of photographs from their digital archives on Flickr under a CC-BY license:

“You pay taxes. These are your pictures,” Rhode said. “You should be able to see them.”

The collection includes images of injured veterans, medical treatments (like the hernia operation above), the first airplane crash investigation, and public health warnings about the dangers lice posed to World War II soldiers.

[...]

“We have pictures from all types of military conflicts and all different types of medicine and issues in medicine,” Rhode said. “We love the stuff that we’re able to play with and want to bring it to everyone else in the world.”

While this is a great thing, there are some problems. First, if these photos were taken by US government personnel in the course of their duties — like, say, military archivists — shouldn’t these photos be in the public domain, not CC-BY? Also, why Flickr? There are better places to archive these public domain digital photos — the Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons both come to mind.

Again, this is a good thing, but the execution seems poor.

• Flickr page for archives
• Wired Blog article

Green Tech -- Credit: jurvetson on Flickr (CC BY)

Two weeks ago, Representative John Conyers (D-MI14), along with 4 other Democrats in the US House of Representatives, introduced a bill that would bar federal agencies funding research from making open access a condition of federal funding, like has been done at the NIH:

If passed, the bill would essentially bar agencies of the federal government from requiring the transfer of copyright, whole or in part, as a condition for receiving public funding. That would prohibit measures like the recently enacted NIH public access policy, which requires investigators who accept taxpayer funds to deposit their final papers in the PubMed Central repository and give the agency a non-exclusive right to offer free access within a year.

HR 801, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, is a reintroduction of a House bill from last year, which was left to expire after committee hearings in Congress. The argument for that bill — which has changed little since last year — goes like this:

In his testimony, former Register of Copyrights Ralph Oman, said he didn’t “have a dog in this fight,” but clearly had a favorite breed: Oman bluntly told lawmakers that in his opinion, the NIH mandate would “destroy the market” for commercial scientific journals, and cause a “dilution” of copyright. Oman said that Congress directed the NIH to provide access “consistent with copyright law,” a phrase lobbied for and added to the NIH mandate by publishers, which the current policy does not do. Perhaps Zerhouni “misunderstood,” Oman said, noting that Congress directed him to address “public access” not “free public access.” In written testimony worthy of a presidential campaign TV commercial, Oman suggested that “the hairy snout” of government be kept out of science publishing, drawing a good-natured rebuke from Rep. John Conyers (D-MI).

Open access policies benefit everyone, and the American taxpayer should have the right to see the fruits of their investment in the scientific community. The argument saying that this bill would bring open access policies into harmony with copyright law is nonsense; if the policy was violating copyright law, why didn’t the publishing companies sue for a remedy? This is a gimme for the publishing companies, and the people involved in sponsoring this bill should be ashamed of themselves. Why is it, with things like this, that the argument is always about the damage to business and never the damage to the public?

• Open Access News
• LibraryJournal.com
• LibraryJournal.com on last year’s hearings
• Bill Status at OpenCongress.org

An article in “Nature” has been published, which reveals that more data sharing could have prented last year’s flu.

When the World Health Organization met in February 2007 to select a vaccine for the northern hemisphere’s upcoming flu season, there was already evidence that H3N2 influenza, one of the three strains used in the vaccine, was mutating among the public.

But replacement strains proved difficult to culture in eggs, where the viruses used in flu vaccines are grown — hence the six-month lead time. The WHO opted to stick with the previous year’s H3N2 strain, which soon proved to be utterly ineffective.

“I wouldn’t change the people responsible for the final decision, but had the process been more open, it’s possible that other voices would have spoken up and said, ‘You can’t leave the strain the same,’” said Salzberg. “That’s how science works. The process works better when everyone gets to contribute.”

Proprietary culture makes me sick, literally.

• Wired
• The contents of the syringe [pdf]

To speed up progress, researchers are creating a program to take data from an existing “Gene Wiki” and post it as stubs to Wikipedia. Instead of fighting Wikipedia, with their project, they’ve decided to work with it.

Since the launch of the project, the researchers have found the number of edits on mammalian gene pages to have doubled.

The researchers hope to create a positive feedback loop among scientists to improve the project and encourage community contribution.

“I think the idea of community intelligence is a proven model that will undoubtedly have a place in scientific research,” Su told iTnews.

This is certainly an important step in pushing the legitamacy of Wikipedia (as well as learning more about our genes).

• IT News
• Slashdot
• Plos Biology

Science Commons has launched Health Commons, a project it hopes will speed up productivity in the area of medicine.

The drug discovery process is badly broken. Despite the scientific and technological advances that make genetic decoding commonplace, the time it takes to go from gene target to cure still stands at 17 years.

Science Commons’ mission is to speed the translation of basic research to useful discoveries, and we believe that a new approach is necessary to find more cures, faster. Today, we’re opening up the Health Commons, a project aimed at bringing the same efficiencies to human health that the network brought to commerce and culture.

The project, founded by Science Commons in collaboration with CommerceNet, CollabRX and the Public Library of Science (PLoS), is introduced in a 6-minute video presentation and white paper posted on the Science Commons website. The paper, Health Commons: Therapy Development in a Networked World [PDF], is co-authored by John Wilbanks, Vice President of Science at Creative Commons, and Marty Tenenbaum, an Internet commerce pioneer and founder of CommerceNet and CollabRX.

Hopefully this is embraced by the medical community.

• Science Commons
• An Introduction to the Health Commons