"Congress is expected to vote this week on a bill requiring investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to publish research papers only in journals that are made freely available within one year of publication. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/nov07/5668

In a rather "interesting" comparison, the author of this paper in IEEE Spectrum, speculates that the tactics used by insurgents in Iraq are similar to the ones used by the Open Source movement, and that the difficulties that the coalition forces are facing are similar to the challenges that monolithic companies like Microsoft are encountering for competing with a more creative and flexible opponent.

Title: "Principles and Practices of Scientific Originology"

This presentation is a satire of the current obsession with intellectual property, innovation and originality that plagues the field of medical image analysis.

The presentation makes the point that most Journals and Conferences focus on Originality and despise Reproducibility and Verification, demonstrating great disrespect for the essential elements of the scientific method. The practice of "peer-review" is offered in most cases as an insufficient substitute for the actual verification of reproducibility.

Quoted from the recently release AMS opinion

The new Insight Software Consortium website is live!