Tag Archives: open access

Special issue on nanotechnology and regulations from EJLT

The European Journal of Law and Technology (EJLT) is featuring 15 articles on the theme of nanotechnology and regulations in a special issue. From the Dec. 12, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

The issue contains 15 contributions that canvass some of the most pressing philosophical, ethical and regulatory questions currently being debated around the world in relation to nanotechnologies and more specifically nanomaterials.

The EJLT is an open access journal so you can view these articles or any others that may interest you. Here’s the Table of Contents for the special issue,

Table of Contents

Editorial

Editorial

Philip Leith, Abdul Paliwala

Introduction to the Special Issue

Why the elephant in the room appears to be more than a nano-sized challenge

Joel D’Silva, Diana Meagan Bowman

Nano Technology Special Edition

Decision Ethics and Emergent Technologies: The Case of Nanotechnology

David Berube

Justice or Beneficence: What Regulatory Virtue for Nano-Governance?

Hailemichael Teshome Demissie

Regulating Nanoparticles: the Problem of Uncertainty

Roger Strand, Kamilla Lein Kjølberg

Complexities of labelling of nanoproducts on the consumer markets

Harald Throne-Holst, Arie Rip

Soft regulation and responsible nanotechnological development in the European Union: Regulating occupational health and safety in the Netherlands

Bärbel Dorbeck-Jung

Nanomaterials and the European Water Framework Directive

Steffen Foss Hansen, Anders Baun, Catherine Ganzleben

The Proposed Ban on Certain Nanomaterials for Electrical and Electronic Equipment in Europe and Its Global Security Implications: A Search for an Alternative Regulatory Approach

Hitoshi Nasu, Thomas Faunce

The Regulation of Nano-particles under the European Biocidal Products Directive: Challenges for Effective Civil Society Participation

Michael T Reinsborough, Gavin Sullivan

Value chains as a linking-pin framework for exploring governance and innovation in nano-involved sectors: illustrated for nanotechnologies and the food packaging sector

Douglas Robinson

Food and nano-food within the Chinese regulatory system: no need to have overregulation.Less physicality can produce more power.

Margherita Poto

Regulation and Governance of Nanotechnology in China: Regulatory Challenges and Effectiveness

Darryl Stuart Jarvis, Noah Richmond

How Resilient is India to Nanotechnology Risks? Examining Current Developments, Capacities and an Approach for Effective Risk Governance and Regulation

Shilpanjali Deshpande Sarma

Toward Safe and Sustainable Nanomaterials: Chemical Information Call-in to Manufacturers of Nanomaterials by California as a Case Study

William Ryan, Sho Takatori, Thomas Booze, Hai-Yong Kang

De minimis curat lex: New Zealand law and the challenge of the very small

Colin Gavaghan, Jennifer Moore

I notice that the last article was authored by the same people who produced a review of New Zealand’s nanotechnology regulatory framework in Sept. 2011. The Science Media Centre of New Zealand noted this in a Sept. 6, 2011 article about the review,

The “Review of the Adequacy of New Zealand’s Regulatory Systems to Manage the Possible Impacts of Manufactured Nanomaterials” by Colin Gavaghan (in Dunedin) and Jennifer Moore (in Wellington) lists three possible levels of regulatory gaps, but points to a lack of consensus on just what constitutes a “gap”.

The authors note where such nanomaterials are not covered by existing regulation, and where these regulations are triggered by the presence of the nanomaterials. They focus on first and second generation products and say that as nanomaterials evolve, more work will need to be done on regulation.

“Some reviews of this topic have suggested that subsequent generations of nanotechnologies are likely to present a much more significant challenge to existing regulatory structures,” the authors say.

The EJLT special issue looks like it has a pretty interesting range of articles representing nanotechnology and regulations in various jurisdictions. I’m thrilled to see a couple of articles on China, one on India, and, of course, the piece on New Zealand as I don’t often find material on those countries. Thank you EJLT!

Beethoven inspires Open Research

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“Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose.” That was written in 1945, proving “plus ça change; plus c’est la même chose.” It’s taken from an essay, As We May Think, by Vannevar Bush for the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic magazine. Here’s the editor’s introduction,

As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man’s physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson’s famous address of 1837 on “The American Scholar,” this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. —THE EDITOR

These days with the open data and open access initiatives, there seems to be a new interest in making science more accessible and this time it’s coming from the grassroots. Over at Techdirt, Glyn Moody in his Nov. 18, 2011 posting highlights a new project for making science research accessible. It’s called ‘Beethoven’s open repository’ and here’s more about the project from the organizers (from the Transforming the way we publish research webpage),

We want to change the way research is communicated, both amongst researchers, as well as with health practitioners, patients and the wider public. Inspired by Beethoven, we want to build a research version of his repository and try to tackle the question “What if the public scientific record would be updated directly as research proceeds?“

…

Every year, over 1 million scholarly articles are being published in around 25,000 journals. No researcher – let alone the public – can keep track of all the relevant information any more, not even in small fields. To make things worse, only about 20% of these articles are freely accessible in one way or another, but the majority is not. Our project aims at providing a technically feasible solution: open-access articles that evolve along with the topic they cover.

This would allow researchers, research funders and the public to stay up to date with research in their fields of interest. It would save researchers time because when they write their results up, they could make use of the context provided by the existing articles, and outreach would be built in from the beginning, rather than being perceived as an extra burden that comes after a traditional publication. It would also save funders time because monitoring research progress would amount to checking the change logs of the respective articles. It would also save patients time, especially when a disease makes their clocks tick faster. Last but not least, it would open the doors for science as a spectator sport, and allow for enhanced interaction between citizen science and more traditional approaches to research.

Chris Mietchen is one of the moving forces (organizers) for this effort. From the About Me page,

A biophysicist by training, I have used a number of techniques from the physical sciences to investigate biological systems and their evolution. My focus so far was on the application of Magnetic Resonance Imaging techniques to fossils, embryonic development and cold tolerance but I did some excursions into music perception, measuring brain structure, or vocal production in elephants as well.

…

For the prototyping of Beethoven’s open repository of research, I have teamed up with brain scientist M. Fabiana Kubke (@kubke) of the University of Auckland, and we invite everyone to join us in shaping the project.

The organizers are raising funds for ‘Beethoven’s open repository’ at RocketHub. They have also posted this video (which explains the reference to Beethoven as well as other details about their project),

I have featured the issue of access to research previously in my Nov. 3, 2011 posting, Disrupting scientific research. There is also a US federal government public consultation mentioned in my Nov. 7, 2011 posting. The consultation is open to comments until January 2012.

I wish Mietchen and Kubke the best of luck as they raise funds for ‘Beethoven’s open repository’.

Trip down memory lane courtesy of the Royal Society

Princeton goes Open Access; arXiv is 10 years old

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Open access to science research papers seems only right given that most Canadian research is publicly funded. (As I understand it most research worldwide is publicly funded.)

This week, Princeton University declared that their researchers’ work would be mostly open access (from the Sept. 28, 2011 news item on physrog.com),

Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University has banned researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted.

Here’s a little more from Sunanda Creagh’s (based in Australia) Sept.28, 2011 posting on The Conversation blog,

The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication.

Universities pay millions of dollars a year for academic journal subscriptions. People without subscriptions, which can cost up to $25,000 a year for some journals or hundreds of dollars for a single issue, are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research. Individual articles are also commonly locked behind pay walls.

Researchers and peer reviewers are not paid for their work but academic publishers have said such a business model is required to maintain quality.

This Sept. 29, 2011 article by James Chang for the Princetonian adds a few more details,

“In the interest of better disseminating the fruits of our scholarship to the world, we did not want to put it artificially behind a pay wall where much of the world won’t have access to it,” committee chair and computer science professor Andrew Appel ’81 said.

The policy passed the Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy with a unanimous vote, and the proposal was approved on Sept. 19 by the general faculty without any changes.

A major challenge for the committee, which included faculty members in both the sciences and humanities, was designing a policy that could comprehensively address the different cultures of publication found across different disciplines.

While science journals have generally adopted open-access into their business models, humanities publishers have not. In the committee, there was an initial worry that bypassing the scholarly peer-review process that journals facilitate, particularly in the humanities, could hurt the scholarly industry.

At the end, however, the committee said they felt that granting the University non-exclusive rights would not harm the publishing system and would, in fact, give the University leverage in contract negotiations.

That last comment about contract negotiations is quite interesting as it brings to mind the California boycott of the Nature journals last year when Nature made a bold attempt to raise subscription fees substantively (400%) after having given the University of California special deals for years (my June 15, 2010 posting).

Creagh’s posting features some responses from Australian academics such as Simon Marginson,

Having prestigious universities such as Princeton and Harvard fly the open access flag represented a step forward, said open access advocate Professor Simon Marginson from the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education.

“The achievement of free knowledge flows, and installation of open access publishing on the web as the primary form of publishing rather than oligopolistic journal publishing subject to price barriers, now depends on whether this movement spreads further among the peak research and scholarly institutions,” he said.

“Essentially, this approach – if it becomes general – normalises an open access regime and offers authors the option of opting out of that regime. This is a large improvement on the present position whereby copyright restrictions and price barriers are normal and authors have to attempt to opt in to open access publishing, or risk prosecution by posting their work in breach of copyright.”

“The only interests that lose out under the Princeton proposal are the big journal publishers. Everyone else gains.”

Whether you view Princeton’s action as a negotiating ploy and/or a high minded attempt to give freer access to publicly funded research, this certainly puts pressure on the business models that scholarly publishers follow.

arXiv, celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, is another open access initiative although it didn’t start that way. From the Sept. 28, 2011 news item on physorg.com,

“I’ve heard a lot about how democratic the arXiv is,” Ginsparg [Paul Ginsparg, professor of physics and information science] said Sept. 23 in a talk commemorating the anniversary. People have, for example, praised the fact that the arXiv makes scientific papers easily available to scientists in developing countries where subscriptions to journals are not always affordable. “But what I was trying to do was set up a system that eliminated the hierarchy in my field,” he said. As a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, “I was receiving preprints long before graduate students further down the food chain,” Ginsparg said. “When we have success we like to think it was because we worked harder, not just because we happened to have access.”

Bill Steele’s Sept. 27, 2011 article for Cornell Univesity’s ChronicleOnline notes,

One of the surprises, Ginsparg said, is that electronic publishing has not transformed the seemingly irrational scholarly publishing system in which researchers give their work to publishing houses from which their academic institutions buy it back by subscribing to journals. Scholarly publishing is still in transition, Ginsparg said, due to questions about how to fund electronic publication and how to maintain quality control. The arXiv has no peer-review process, although it does restrict submissions to those with scientific credentials.

But the lines of communication are definitely blurring. Ginsparg reported that a recent paper posted on the arXiv by Alexander Gaeta, Cornell professor of applied and engineering physics, was picked up by bloggers and spread out from there. The paper is to be published in the journal Nature and is still under a press embargo, but an article about it has appeared in the journal Science.

Interesting, eh? It seems that scholarly publishing need not disappear but there’s no question its business models are changing.

Launching new open access (!) journal: Nanomaterials and Nanotechnology

Science policy, innovation and more on the Canadian 2010 federal budget; free access in the true north; no nano for Van Gogh’s The Bedroom; frogs, foam and biofuels

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There are more comments about Canada’s 2010 federal budget on the Canadian Science Policy Centre website along with listings of relevant news articles which they update regularly. There’s also a federal budget topic in the forums section but it doesn’t seem have attracted much commentary yet.

The folks at The Black Hole blog offer some pointed commentary with regard to the budget’s treatment of post doctorate graduates. If I understand the comments correctly, the budget has clarified the matter of taxation, i. e., post doctoral grants are taxable income, which means that people who were getting a break on taxes are now losing part of their income. The government has also created a new class of $70,000 post doctoral grants but this will account for only 140 fellowships. With some 6000 post doctoral fellows this means only 2% of the current pool of applicants will receive these awards. Do read The Black Hole post as they clarify what this means in very practical terms.

There’s been another discussion outcome from the 2010 budget, a renewed interest in innovation. I’m kicking off my ‘innovation curation efforts’ with this from an editorial piece by Carol Goar in the Toronto Star,

Five Canadian finance ministers have tried to crack the productivity puzzle. All failed. Now Jim Flaherty is taking a stab at it.

Here is the conundrum: We don’t use our brainpower to create new wealth. We have a highly educated population, generous tax incentives for research and development and lower corporate tax rates than any leading economic power. Yet our businesses remain reluctant to invest in new products and technologies (with a few honourable exceptions such as Research in Motion, Bombardier and Magna). They don’t even capitalize on the exciting discoveries made in our universities and government laboratories.

…

Economists are starting to ask what’s wrong. Canada ranked 14th in business spending on research and development – behind all the world’s leading industrial powers and even smaller nations such as Belgium and Ireland – in the latest statistical roundup by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

I believe she’s referring to the 2009 OECD scorecard in that last bit (you can find the Canada highlights here).

There are many parts to this puzzle about why Canadians and their companies are not innovative. Getting back to Goar’s piece,

Kevin Lynch, who served as Stephen Harper’s top adviser from 2006 to 2009 [and is now the vice-chair of the Bank of Montreal Financial Group], has just written an article in Policy Options, an influential magazine, laying the blame squarely on corporate Canada. He argues that, unless business leaders do their part, it makes little sense to go on spending billions of dollars on research and development. “In an era of fiscal constraint, there has to be a compelling narrative to justify new public investments when other areas are being constrained,” he says.

Here’s a possible puzzle piece, in yesterday’s (March 15, 2010) posting I noted a study by academic, Mary J. Benner, where she pointed out that securities analysts do not reward/encourage established US companies such as Polaroid (now defunct) and Kodak to adopt new technologies. I would imagine that the same situation exists here in Canada.

For another puzzle piece: I’ve made mention of the mentality that a lot of entrepreneurs (especially in Canadian high tech) have and see confirmation in a Globe and Mail article by Simon Avery about the continuing impact of the 2000 dot com meltdown where he investigates some of the issues with venture capital and investment as well as this,

“It’s a little bit about getting into the culture of winning, like the Olympics we just had,” says Ungad Chadda, senior vice-president of the Toronto Stock Exchange. “I don’t think the technology entrepreneurs around here are encouraged and supported to think beyond the $250-million cheque that a U.S. company can give them.”

One last comment from Kevin Lynch (mentioned in the second of the Goar excerpts) about innovation and Canada from his recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail,

A broader public dialogue is essential. We need to make the question “What would it take for Canada to be an innovative economy for the 21st century?” part of our public narrative – partly because our innovation deficit is a threat to our competitiveness and living standards, and partly because we can be a world leader in innovation. We should aspire to be a nation of innovators. We should rebrand Canada as technologically savvy, entrepreneurial and creative.

Yes, Mr. Lynch a broader dialogue would be delightful but there does seem to be an extraordinary indifference to the notion from many quarters. Do I seem jaundiced? Well, maybe that’s because I’ve been trying to get some interest in having a Canadian science policy debate and not getting very far with it. In principle, people call for more dialogue but that requires some effort to organize and a willingness to actually participate.

(As for “rebranding”, is anyone else tired of hearing that word or its cousin branding?)

On a completely other note, the University of Ottawa has announced that it is supporting open access to its faculty’s papers with institutional funding. From the news release,

According to Leslie Weir, U of Ottawa’s chief librarian, the program encompasses several elements, including a new Open Access (or OA) repository for peer-reviewed papers and other “learning objects”; an “author fund” for U of Ottawa researchers to help them cover open-access fees charged by journal publishers; a $50,000-a-year budget to digitize course materials and make them available to anyone through the repository; and support for the University of Ottawa Press’s OA journals.

…

But the university stopped short of requiring faculty members to deposit their papers with the new repository. “We all agreed that incentives and encouragement was the best way to go,” said Ms. Weir, who worked on the program with an internal group of backers, including Michael Geist, professor of intellectual property law, and Claire Kendall, a professor in the faculty of medicine who has been active in OA medical journals.

There is some criticism of the decision to make the programme voluntary. Having noticed the lack of success that voluntary reporting of nanomaterials has had, I’m inclined to agree with the critics. (Thanks to Pasco Phronesis for pointing me to the item.)

If you’ve ever been interested in art restoration (how do they clean and return the colours of an old painting to its original hues?, then the Van Gogh blog is for you. A member of the restoration team is blogging each step of The Bedroom’s (a famous Van Gogh painting) restoration. I was a little surprised that they don’t seem to be using any of the new nano-enabled techniques for examining the painting or doing the restoration work.

Given the name for this website, I have to mention the work done with frogs in pursuit of developing new biofuels by scientists at the University of Cincinnati. From the news item on Nanotechnology Now,

In natural photosynthesis, plants take in solar energy and carbon dioxide and then convert it to oxygen and sugars. The oxygen is released to the air and the sugars are dispersed throughout the plant — like that sweet corn we look for in the summer. Unfortunately, the allocation of light energy into products we use is not as efficient as we would like. Now engineering researchers at the University of Cincinnati are doing something about that.

The researchers are finding ways to take energy from the sun and carbon from the air to create new forms of biofuels, thanks to a semi-tropical frog species [Tungara frog].

…

Their work focused on making a new artificial photosynthetic material which uses plant, bacterial, frog and fungal enzymes, trapped within a foam housing, to produce sugars from sunlight and carbon dioxide.

Here’s an illustration of the frog by Megan Gundrum, 5th year DAAP student (I tried find out what DAAP stands for but was unsuccessful, ETA: Mar.31.10, it is the Design, art, and architecture program at the University of Cincinnati),

illustration by Megan Gundrum, 5th year DAAP student

Thank you to the University of Cincinnati for making the image available.

Window sunglasses; insect microids; open access to science research?; theatre and science

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Having windows that can darken or lighten according to the amount of sunshine would save money and energy. Such windows have been around for over two decades but they haven’t worked very well. Researchers at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are working on a new, more successful generation of such windows (electrochromic windows). From the article by Joe Verrengia on physorg.com,

Insulated windows are made from multiple layers of glass. Typically the spaces between the panes are filled with a gas. Electrochromic windows are made with a very thin stack of dynamic materials deposited on the outside pane.

The dynamic portion consists of three layers: active and counter electrodes separated by an ion conductor layer. NREL researchers are experimenting with electrode layers made of nickel and tungsten oxides; the ions are lithium.

The window changes from clear to tinted when a small electric field is applied and the lithium ions move into the working electrode layers. The change can be triggered by sensors in an automated building management system, or by a flick of a switch. Electrochromic windows can block as much as 98 percent of the direct sunlight. Reversing the polarity of the applied voltage causes the ions to migrate back to their original layer, and the glass returns to clear.

It sounds exciting to someone like me who doesn’t handle the heat or air conditioning well. I just hope they can get the costs down as it’s about $1000 per square metre at this point.

While it’s not strictly speaking nanotechnology, a researcher (Jason Clark) at Purdue University is working on an insect robot, a microid. From the news item on Nanowerk,

His [Clark’s] concept, a sort of solid-state muscle for microid legs and mandibles, would allow the robot to nimbly traverse harsh environments such as sand or water. The concept appears to be the first to show such insectlike characteristics at the microscale, he said.

“The microids would be able to walk, run, jump, and pick up and move objects many times their own weight,” Clark said. “A microid can also do what no insect or other microrobot can do, which is continue walking if flipped on its back. Who knows, maybe flight is next.”

He also envisions the possibility of hordes of microids working in unison and communicating with each other to perform a complex task.

“You can’t underestimate the power of having thousands of microids working together, much like ant colonies,” he said.

Those last bits about flying and working in unison bring Michael Crichton’s 2002 nanotechnology novel, Prey, to mind. Crichton conceptualized a swarm that was intelligent, voracious, and almost unstoppable. As I recall, Crichton included aspects of insect behaviour, network theory, neuroscience, and self-assembling nanotechnology to describe his swarm. It caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the nanotech research community as scientists were concerned that it might set off a controversy similar to ‘frankenfoods’ or GM (genetically modified) foods but nothing came of it at the time.

Techdirt had an interesting bit last week about open access to science research,

Via James Boyle, we’re pointed to an editorial that supposedly is all about improving access to research via open access policies for the public — and just so happens to be locked up behind a paywall itself. Apparently, the publisher doesn’t necessarily agree with the authors’ conclusions.

I did check out the link to find the publisher is the journal Science and they require a free registration or a subscription for access to the editorial. Either Techdirt made a mistake or the editors at Science changed access to the editorial.

Combining insects with the journal, I found a news item on physorg.com about a theatre review published in Science,

Typically science doesn’t bed down with theatre, much less mate with artistic vigor, but the accord between the two is explored in the recent production Heuschrecken [The Locusts] developed by Stefan Kaegi of Rimini Protokoll. “And why not?” asks Arizona State University’s Manfred Laubichler and Gitta Honegger who review the production in the Jan. 29 issue of the journal Science.

…

The marriage of theatre and science is not new. The Greeks, starting with Aristotle embraced a more integrated relationship of the two. “But a divide came when we associated science with the brain and the arts with emotions,” Honegger says.

The news item goes on to discuss the particulars of the production such as a 60 square metre terrarium of 10,000 locusts, actors, scientists, video cameras, interwoven narratives, and locust music. I am quite inspired by it.

Coincidentally, Rimini Protokoll, the German theatre arts company mentioned in the news item, has a production here in Vancouver (as part of PUSH International Performing Arts Festival 2010 [Jan. 20 to Feb. 6]) which integrates video games and theatre. From the Canwest article by Peter Birnie,

Tim Carlson is a Vancouver playwright who was in Berlin in 2006 for a production of his play Omniscience. Carlson was so impressed by a Rimini Protokoll production of Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein trilogy in the German capital that, when he subsequently learned the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival was bringing Rimini Protokoll here, asked to work with them.

“I knew that they shape their shows for particular cities,” Carlson explains, “and they would want to do research here. I had them meet [former city councillor] Jim Green, they visited In-Site and had an architecture tour with [noted critic] Trevor Boddy. One thing that really captured their interest was the video-gaming industry in town, so that kind of turned the light on.”

Electronic artist Brady Marks was hired to find a way that 200 people could game together, and other electronic designers were brought on board to do the 3D modelling. As it does in other productions, Rimini Protokoll then hired local experts — not actors — to perform as themselves.

Marks is the electronic artist directing things, with animator Duff Armour as a game tester, former politician (and Railway Club owner) Bob Williams as a politician and traffic flagger Ellen Schultz as, well, the traffic flagger for the show. Carlson explains that Williams will be something of a political commentator when the audience holds its own presidential election.

You can phone 604.251.1363 to inquire about tickets for the production (Best Before) at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre.

FrogHeart

Commentary about nanotech, science policy and communication, society, and the arts

Tag Archives: open access

Special issue on nanotechnology and regulations from EJLT

Table of Contents

Editorial

Introduction to the Special Issue

Nano Technology Special Edition