edremy - Slashdot User

Submission + - Are online journals damaging science?

Submitted by edremy on Monday July 21, 2008 @09:42AM

edremy writes: You would think that the availability of powerful search engines and online, full text databases would increase the depth and breadth of science research. According to a paper in this week's Science (Abstract available here) which compares citations for ~34 million papers over the last 60 years, you'd be wrong. Papers written in the electronic age cite newer papers on the whole, and the overall number of papers in a journal that get cited at all plummets. It's not entirely clear why this should be, but the efficiency of modern indices may tend to narrow people's searching: you lose the "Hmm, what's this other article about?" serendipity that helps find those articles that might be useful but not exactly what you wanted.

Submission + - Blackboard wins patent infringement suit (therecord.com)

Submitted by edremy on Monday February 25, 2008 @11:05AM

edremy writes: Learning management system maker Blackboard has won its initial suit against Desire2Learn. Blackboard gets $3.1 million and can demand that Desire2Learn stop US sales.

For those not familiar with the suit, you can get the details here. Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn't think something this obvious could even be patented, but so far it's been a very effective weapon for BB, badly hurting D2L and generating a huge amount of worry for the few remaining commercial LMSes that BB has not already bought and open source solutions such as Moodle.

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