Open Access: What it is and why it is required for scholarly community?

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Guides for OA journal publishers

Guides for OA journal publishers - OAD

Guidelines, primers, recommendations, and best practices for publishers of open-access journals

My first encounter with Google Health

Google Health is now a reality. On visiting it, I landed on an agreement page. Apart from other usual terms and conditions, I had to agree to authorize Google to share my health information in my profile. However, it appears that I can choose with whom it could be shared.

This could even contain sensitive information relating to the following:

* HIV or AIDS
* Mental illness or any mental health condition
* Alcohol or substance abuse
* Sexually transmitted diseases
* Pregnancy
* Abortion or other family planning
* Genetic tests or genetic diseases

This authorization also covers any record that a doctor or other health care provider may supply to Google Health. The good thing is that I can withdraw this authorization by deleting my profile or using options available in Google Health.

Health profile could be created by entering information relating to Drug interactions, Age, sex, height, Medical Conditions, Medications, Allergies, Procedures, Test results, Immunizations etc. Health profile can be populated from very user-friendly search tool or from alphabetic listings. Diseases can be added from alphabetical list. The items in the list are with “reference” links. The “reference” here means special pages with brief but excellent description of the disease. These contain information on symptoms, treatment, prognosis, tests, prevention, complications, when to consult a doctor etc. These pages are supplemented with what Google is best at. These are search results from Google Scholar, related groups and search trends. These pages are illustrated with diagrams and pictures.

One can even import medical records from independent service providers offering personal health services. It has the following in the listing. Very likely, this is going to expand in future.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Cleveland Clinic MyChart
Longs Drug Stores
Medco
MinuteClinic from CVS Caremark
Quest Diagnostics
RxAmerica
Walgreens Pharmacy

One can also explore health services for medical records. The following are listed at present:

Cleveland Clinic MyConsult
ePillBox.info
Heart Attack Risk Calculator
HxTI VaccineView
iHealth, powered by Medem
Lifestar
LIVESTRONG.COM Health Center
MediConnect Global
MyCareTeam MCT-Diabetes
MyDailyApple

One can also find a doctor and add to medical contacts. It also has tools to alert and send you notices like drug interactions depending upon information in the profile.

My overall impression is that it could become very useful tool for keeping better personal medical histories and records. As expected, presently it can be fully exploited by people residing in U.S. Hopefully more and more service providers from other countries would be associating with Google Health.

A Video on Open Access

Open Access to Scholarly Publications (Updated May 10, 2008) from Sean Kass on Vimeo.

Yet another URL Shortening Service

Came across yet another URL Shortening Service - Xrl.in - Really Tiny Links. It also provides "Bookmarklet" link to shortened the URL of the current page in your browser. For this, you can also download an extension for your Firefox. It promises to come with a facility to manage your shortened links.

Snipr still remains my favorite service for shortening long URLs. It let you to select your own suffix text (if available) and title to the URL being shortened.

More link shortening services

Found two more link shortening services - http://lin.cr and http://www.moourl.com/.

Lin.cr appears to be more attractive in the sense that its own URL is short and sweet.

Google Reader evolving into a Social Networking Site?

Just wondering whether Google Reader is gradually evolving into a Social Networking Site? It has now improved its Sharing options. It has become easier to share your favorite sites with your friends. It provides for a “Note in Reader” link that can be dragged and dropped in your browser’s bookmarks bar. Once that is done, you are ready to share your favorite sites or the sites you just discovered. Select a relevant portion of the site you wish to share through Google Reader and click on “Note in Reader”. (Well text selection is optional, but it is also better to be focused). A window will open up with title of the site being shared with selected text already filled. Now just put your annotation (yet another optional step) about the site (your friends might like to know as why you are sharing?) and click “Post Item”. You have now shared an item through Google Reader. You can email the links of shared items to your friends, share through your blog (ready to add clip in Blogger available) or copy and paste relevant HTML snippet in your site.

Will Google Reader continue to add such features and evolve into a Social Networking Site? It can add profiles, favorite contacts, communities, pictures and all that stuff. With all these usual social networking stuff powered with shared knowledge (sites), Google Reader could become “Google Wisdom” for a participating virtual community.

Open Access Directory (OAD)

A new wiki - Open Access Directory (OAD) - has been rolled out. It would serve as a compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship.

Page2RSS - Create RSS feed for any web page

Page2RSS is one of the services available for monitoring non-RSS enabled web sites. Such services monitor requested sites. Once a change is noticed, a RSS feed is generated and delivered to subscribers.

Hindi included in Google Translate

Google Translate has now included Hindi in its list of languages. So now you can translate 'English to Hindi' or 'Hindi to English'. See also few useful tools available with Google Translate. You can read English sites in Hindi or Make your own site avalable in Hindi or English. The translated text for Hindi would be in Devnagri.

But don't start celebrating yet! Translated text does not follow the grammar or syntax of Hindi. For example "My name is Sukhdev Singh" would be translated as "मेरा नाम है सुखदेव सिंह", when it should be "मेरा नाम सुखदेव सिंह है". You can suggest Google the right translation by clicking on "Suggest a better translation". It may improve translation quality in future by learning from suggestions.

List of Free Tools for Learning

Nice post listing free tools and sites that can be used for learning:

ZaidLearn: A Free Learning Tool for Every Learning Problem?

"..every learning problem (or issue) we have today, there is probably a free tool or site out there that enables us to solve it.."