[pgrmdave]

http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/feb2005/od-03.htm

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced today a new policy designed to accelerate the public's access to published articles resulting from NIH-funded research. The policy — the first of its kind for NIH — calls on scientists to release to the public manuscripts from research supported by NIH as soon as possible, and within 12 months of final publication.

Until now, all the research done by scientists that was funded by the NIH required a fee to be viewed. They hope to have the system up and running by May 2.

[OpenMind5]

This is good news...but i still have to pay for the New England Journal...*sigh*

OP5

[ldsoftwaresteve]

I think this is good news. I also think it's the first of many things to come. This forum and others is the beginning of something much bigger, something that we can't quite do yet but eventually will: start building an online model of human understanding.

It's the evolution of communication. On the one hand we have an observation and on the other we have others who would be interested in sharing that observation. We build a model of how things are by using these observations.

We'd need a way to add an alternate model, the evidence backing it up, etc. We'd also need a way to 'post' evidence to substantiate or contradict, etc.

The reason we trust the observations of scientists is because we believe that they make careful, unbiased observations about the nature of some aspect of existence. They have a method and we trust that method.

But how do we move forward on something like this and help make it happen...or perhaps this is the way to start?

[Fishteacher73]

The concept is great, but in application it gets a bit trickier. The problem is the sheer mass of information needed to be colated and cross-referenced. The trick is finding individuals that understand the connections amongst the fields. This is the hard part.

To have information freely available to those that need it should be a huge part of the internet. Digitizing knowledge is the next step.

[ldsoftwaresteve]

Actually Fish, I wouldn’t even attempt a db approach to it, at least not with the concepts. Databases are great for organizing information and quantifying it, they’re not so good for defining concepts. We’re not there yet; someday perhaps but not now.

We have a problem with the fuzziness of neural nets and until we handle that….

I think what Tormod and the moderators are doing is perfect. This constitutes a way into the knowledge tree and we can/should be able to drill into whatever area we wish. It’s an excellent start and this website is wide open to everything, as it should be.

One thing that we don’t do yet is have an indication of the truth value of a particular branch on that tree and no way to affect the visualization of that truth value one way or the other.

We also don’t have a visual of the tree yet, that would help.

Fools don’t have a monopoly on blindness. The best among us have blind-spots and operate from fallacies. But I think that were we able to implement a way of visualizing the truth value of a belief, a line of reasoning, a concept, etc. it might help in unusual unforeseen ways. It might save a lot of time, for one thing.

Fascinating subject though.

[McGyver]

I believe this more recent NIH effort is part of Congress's 1994 (year?) FOI act to make feveral agency documents available for public viewing, At that time in 94-95, FOI was via microfiche. As we've moved into our current IT age, federal agencies have been spending milions of dollars to scan old documents into various PC file formats for the public. Clearly, with health data, there exists a real priority in the public's need to know, not just for public oversight and FOI, but to be informed on public health issues that can affect us all. The NIH has its IT work cut out, but it's no different than for the many other federal agencies. I have advocated for years that the FDA establish databases for experient public reporting on drugs and medical products. This would aid both mfr's and FDA. We've already seen mfr's own efforts via web sites to inform the public and market products. Mrf's could get creative in what content and information they offer and coordinate, though it is regulated by FDA.