5.4 STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF MOOCS

To suggest that faculty are innocently waiting to be pounced on by predators is to deny their agency and their ability to make choices about their own work. There may be days where that metaphor seems apt, but I think overall this is a damaging mentality to librarians interested in promoting new models of scholarly communication.

If federally funded research is going to broadly benefit society, it has to be widely accessible, not just to curious private citizens, but also to industries, private organizations, and federal, state, and local governments where scientific knowledge can help create new products, solve problems, educate students, and make policy decisions.

Giving the public what it paid for sounds noble, but from where I sit, a scientist at a well-funded research university, ensuring that research papers are available to the public for free seems pointless.

The database should have an associated web site for access by internal researchers working on atlas construction and quite likely a separate Web site for public access to published datasets.

The initial inputs for deriving quantitative information of gene expression and embryonic morphology are raw image data, either of fluorescent proteins expressed in live embryos or of stained fluorescent markers in fixed material. These raw images are then analyzed by computational algorithms that extract features, such as cell location, cell shape, and gene product concentration. Ideally, the extracted features are then recorded in a searchable database, an atlas, that researchers from many groups can access. Building a database with quantitative graphical and visualization tools has the advantage of allowing developmental biologists who lack specialized skills in imaging and image analysis to use their knowledge to interrogate and explore the information it contains.

He laid the philosophical groundwork back in 2008, in an essay entitled "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto."

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