Reported on Slashdot today: Exciting news for open access research!

"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. Scientists assert that open access will speed innovation by making it easier for them to share and build on each other's findings.

Slashdot | Bill to Require Open Access to Scientific Papers.

Several of the major academic search engines and standards bodies are working together to improve literature searches and academic repositories. The following quote is not terribly readable unless you already know most of the acronyms:

CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org), the reference-linking network of the Publishers International Linking Association (PILA), has officially launched a free DOI look-up feature called Simple-Text Query (http://www.crossref.org/freeTextQuery). Users can enter whole bibliographies with citations in almost any bibliographic format and receive back the matching Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for these references to insert into their final bibliographies.

…CrossRef actively encourages DSpace repositories to assign DOIs to original, nonduplicative works and register their DOIs with CrossRef, rather than just relying on registration with CNRI….

CrossRef also supports OpenURL links, using the OpenURL syntax in its own system and making all its publishers “OpenURL compliant” for its library participants. It also works with services such as Google Scholar, Microsoft’s Windows Live Academic Search, and Elsevier’s Scirus to connect content to the leading Web search engines.

Linking Up Bibliographies: DOI Harvesting Tool Launched by CrossRef.

The results are coming in about the impact of open access (OA) on research citations.

OA articles are freely available on the web, so that a search on Google Scholar will bring up the full text instead of a publisher’s page that demands payment before you can read it.

A ten-year research study now under way suggests that an OA article may be cited far more often than an article in the same journal that has not been posted on the web by its author.

Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals.

This is such a fundamental issue for policy analysis. I’ve been frustrated yet again this week by trying to track down an article that is not available on the web, nor even in the York University online library. Apparently it’s available in University of Toronto’s online library but I have no access to it. As a result, this article will have no influence on policy. And researchers wonder why no-one listens to them!

Most scholarly journals now permit authors to self-archive their articles on the web either before or after publication. Many funders of research are beginning to demand that their researchers self-archive, or publish in open access journals, as a way to increase the impact of the findings. Given that publication is a small proportion of the cost of doing research, and most of the research is funded by public money, it seems obvious to get the information out to the public.

From Wired Magazine:

The [peer review] process is lousy at policing research. Bad papers get published, and work that's merely competent (boring) or wildly speculative (maverick) often gets rejected, enforcing a plodding conservatism. It seems silly to say this about a system that's been in development since the mid-1700s, but the whole thing seems kind of antiquated. "Peer review was brilliant when distribution was a problem and you had to be selective about what you could publish," says Chris Surridge, managing editor of the online interdisciplinary journal PLoS ONE. But the Web has remapped the universe of scientific publishing – and as a result, peer review may finally get fixed.

In June, Nature began experimenting with a new method online. Authors submitting papers can choose a two-track process. While the work goes through the usual peer review drill, a preprint version gets posted on the Web. Anyone – even you – can comment, as long as you attach your name, affiliation, and email address. As of July, 25 articles had undergone this process, and the journal plans to issue a report late this year on how the test went.

… In other quarters, traditional peer review has already been abandoned. Physicists and mathematicians today mainly communicate via a Web site called arXiv. (The X is supposed to be the Greek letter chi; it's pronounced "archive." If you were a physicist, you'd find that hilarious.) Since 1991, arXiv has been allowing researchers to post prepublication papers for their colleagues to read. The online journal Biology Direct publishes any article for which the author can find three members of its editorial board to write reviews. (The journal also posts the reviews – author names attached.) And when PLoS ONE launches later this year, the papers on its site will have been evaluated only for technical merit – do the work right and acceptance is guaranteed. "Data becomes useful only if it's shared," Surridge says. "At the moment, our mechanisms for sharing information are the traditional journals, and if they're hard to get into, data is completely lost."

 

I like this librarian’s web log focusing on academic search. For example, here’s a comment from July 13:

Gunther Eysenbach's cogent editorial "The Open Access Advantage" over at the open-access Journal of Medical Internet Research hits several points square on the head. The one I find most appealing is that incremental benefits accrue to researchers who publish in open-access journals; the data is clear and unequivocal. Another is the simple truth that open source tools like those developed by UBC's Public Knowledge Project are better alternatives to the commercial OA publishers.

UBC Academic Search - Google Scholar Blog.

John Lavis’s Program in Policy Decision-Making has  updated its web site to include new research on knowledge transfer.

A presentation on ‘Assessing provincial or national efforts to link research to action’, dated January 2006, contains many interesting points on promoting evidence-based policy.

Among them is a reference to the reader-friendly writing style of ‘graded entry’, in which there is a 1:3:25 ratio of content. A description is posted on the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation site:

Every report prepared for the foundation has the same guidelines: start with one page of main messages; follow that with a three-page executive summary; present your findings in no more than 25 pages of writing, in language a bright, educated, but not research-trained person would understand.

These are great guidelines, and are aimed at increasing the likelihood that research reports will lead to action.

 

 

BBC News reports that public and university libraries are worried that DRM restrictions (Digital Rights Management embedded software that prevents ‘illegitimate use’ of copywritten materials) may be impossible to remove from library collections, even when the copyright expires.

“Libraries have warned that the rise of digital publishing may make it harder or even impossible to access items in their collections in the future. … And there are fears that restricted works may not be safe for future generations if people can no longer unlock them when technology evolves.”

BBC NEWS | Technology | Libraries fear digital lockdown.

 

 

The Harvard Family Research Project, in a special issue of its Evaluation newsletter devoted to 'Evaluation Methodology' published a description of eight different outcome models developed by the Rensselaerville Institute’s Center for Outcomes. Logic models are only one type of outcome model that can be used to improve a program or policy.

“The models described in Outcome Frameworks fall into three main categories: program planning and management, program and resource alignment, and program reporting. In addition, most models can be used as an evaluation tool. …

“Model 1: The Logic Model. Logic models, the most widely used of these models, provide a graphic overview of a program, outlining the outcomes to be accomplished along with how they are to be achieved and for what groups.2 A logic model generally includes the target group, the resources to be used, activities, and objectives. Best used for describing a program in the broadest strokes, it can be an extremely useful tool, particularly at the earliest stages of a project. …

“Model 3: Results-Based Accountability (RBA). This model starts with the desired ends and works backward toward the means to achieve them. RBA first describes what a desired result would look like, then defines that result in measurable terms, and, finally, uses those measures to gauge success or failure. RBA asks and answers three basic questions: What do we want? How will we recognize it? What will it take to get there? This model distinguishes between population accountability and program accountability. Its inclusion of the crosswalk, a tool for matching RBA with other outcome models, is a unique and useful aspect of the framework.5

From Eight Outcome Models in the Evaluation Methodology issue of The Evaluation Exchange - at the Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP).

Highly recommended article.

 

“The Campbell Collaboration (C2) is a nonprofit organization that aims to help people make well-informed decisions about the effects of interventions in the social, behavioral, and educational arenas. Using systematic reviews of studies of interventions (programs, practices, and policies), C2 helps policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and the public identify what works.

“Systematic reviews synthesize available high quality evidence on interventions. After a thorough search of the literature to screen available studies for quality, reviewers identify the least equivocal evidence available on an intervention, describe what the evidence says about the intervention's effectiveness, and explore how that effectiveness is influenced by variations in process, implementation, intervention components, participants, and other factors.”

Randomized Trials in the Evaluation Methodology issue of The Evaluation Exchange - at the Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP).

 

Also see the US-based What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), which “collects, screens, and identifies studies of the effectiveness of educational interventions (programs, products, practices, and policies). We review the studies that have the strongest design, and report on the strengths and weaknesses of those studies against the WWC Evidence Standards so that you know what the best scientific evidence has to say.

“The WWC does not endorse any interventions nor does it conduct field studies. The WWC releases study, intervention, and topic reports. A study report rates individual studies and designs to give you a sense of how much you can rely on research findings for that individual study. An intervention report provides all findings that meet WWC Evidence Standards for a particular intervention. Each topic report briefly describes the topic and each intervention that the WWC reviewed.”

The Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia has developed an open source publishing content management system called ‘Open Journal Systems’. It promotes open access to journals by making journal publication as inexpensive and streamlined as possible, supporting every stage of the peer review and publication process. It looks great, and is described here. (They also offer free software, Open Conference Systems, for running conferences, including paper submission, archiving, and an online forum.)

A list of journals using OJS shows some of the pitfalls of open access publishing. Some of the links no longer work, so the content might be lost - there is no sign that the articles, if any, were archived. Other journals are poorly designed, and others charge for content. The journal links (URLs) are made-up domains like www.ecologyandsociety.org or sub-sites like http://calvados.c3sl.ufpr.br/ojs2/index.php/veterinary/index.php, which are unlikely to remain stable for more than a couple of years. Scientific journals must be archived, with stable references, or they are not useful to future researchers. Journal publishers, even if it’s a free journal run by volunteers, need to plan how the content will be archived in the future. All articles should use the Digital Object Identifier System (DOI) or some other persistent identity so that the documents don't vanish every time an agency redesigns its web site.

One possibility is to post journal articles on the Internet Archive, which provides free and ‘permanent’ hosting for any audio, video or text content (assuming the funding continues). OurMedia.org, the free publishing service, is described in this Salon article. I have not tested whether they have permanent URLs.

For information on why open access journals are crucial for social services and nonprofits, see my previous posting here.

 

 

“Corporations should not be given the absolute power to regulate how Canadians enjoy their music” – a quote from Michael Geist, an expert in Internet and e-commerce law, who writes often about copyright law and the extent to which rights holders (the publishing and recording industries) drive public policy in Canada and the United States.

This copyright issue has heated up recently with a fundraiser that is being held for a Liberal MP, sponsored by several major copyright backers, that some claim are tied to her support of federal copyright policies.

Copyright is a fundamental issue for a knowledge society. It is complex and controversial, with many groups of stakeholders, including consumers, artists and citizens. However, the government lobbying and legal action are being almost entirely funded by copyright-based industries, while consumer protest against unfair restrictions is being defined as zealotry or piracy.

It’s not about music, either, though the music industry is being the most heavy-handed right now. It’s about the ability to use information in a wide variety of ways. For example,

“The Liberal Party has provided a helpful reminder about why we need a fair use right under Canadian copyright law.  The Liberals have called on the Conservatives to withdraw an advertisement titled Even Liberals (currently the top link at the video portion of the party's site) because of copyright infringement.  The ad features about a two second clip of Paul Martin at a CBC town hall meeting.  The Liberals argue that the use of the clip infringes CBC's copyright and that the Conservatives did not obtain the broadcaster's permission.

“… [The] claim (which the Conservatives dispute) highlights why we need a fair use right in Canada.  … [The] notion that there should be legal uncertainty about the use of a tiny clip of a town hall meeting during an election is simply bad policy.  It is unfortunate that copyright is being used here to chill political speech, rather than to meet the law's twin purposes of creator and user rights.  When copyright law is used to do that, the appropriate response is not to change the commercial.  The right response is to change the law.”

From Geist’s blog

 

A lovely open access scholarly journal called Information Research publishes articles on a wide range of information-related disciplines. The following article discusses how researchers use listservs.

Field differences in the use and perceived usefulness of scholarly mailing lists

Excerpts from the conclusion: Contrary to the widespread assumption in computer-mediated communication studies (often leaning on virtual community metaphors), sociability and social presence were not very desirable features in scholarly mailing lists. Scholars were more likely to unsubscribe from high-traffic mailing lists containing discussion and debate than low-traffic lists that were restricted to queries and announcements. … The disadvantages of mailing lists in terms of time required for reading and handling messages, and the challenge for developing an effective personal e-mail management system easily overweighed their benefits. The preferred type of mailing list was a message board providing information about conferences and other events, and new publications.

Note that lots of communication is not necessarily a good thing. People became quickly overwhelmed with too many messages and dropped out of the listservs, especially if they were used for social and personal messages.

I enjoyed this somewhat technical article about Google’s effect on academic libraries and vice versa.

ALA | September 2005: If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em

Peter Binkley of the University of Alberta was one of the first to create a browser extension for Firefox that would add SFX link resolvers to citations in Google Scholar. Link resolvers standardize citations from disparate resources using OpenURL and compare the citations to a local library’s holdings—a middleman for finding full text of articles. Dozens of refinements followed, including plugins for Internet Explorer, links to other services, and ultimately a link-resolver service offering from Google itself.

It was this last move that made other vendors scramble. Despite long conversations with key players in the world of the OpenURL (the standard behind link-resolver systems), Google opted to bypass the standard itself and require libraries (through their various vendors) to send information about holdings to Google so that Google might create better service links to full text in libraries. You see, the Google index can’t create an OpenURL because it crawls the full text content itself and knows nothing about citations.

Surprisingly, what’s in it for Google is less clear than what’s in it for libraries. We add serendipitous access to commercial content that we are already paying for. Google needs a revenue angle, and I’d be willing to bet it will find one. But until then, link resolvers—SFX from Ex Libris, 1Cate from Openly Informatics, WebBridge from Innovative Interfaces, Article Linker from Serials Solutions, and others, I am sure—are rushing to equip their software so that libraries can send holdings information to Google. I’m also sure that at some point Google will not be the only destination; OCLC is keenly interested in capturing digital holdings information for its collaborative cataloging.

Another major Google initative has been announced today by the University of Michigan and others. Google is digitizing all 7 million volumes in U-M's library and making them fully searchable on the web. U-M's President stated that "This project signals an era when the printed record of civilization is accessible to every person in the world with Internet access". The books that are in the public domain will be available to everyone. Other books will be searchable so that researchers can quickly locate relevant information and then get a copy of the books from their own libraries. The project will take about 6 years.

According to the Detroit Free Press, "Besides digitizing U-M's massive collection, Google plans to scan parts of other research libraries, including those at Harvard, Stanford, Oxford University in England and the New York Public Library. Those projects are much smaller in scope than Google's plans for U-M. At Harvard, for example, only 40,000 of the university's 15 million volumes will be digitized."

It is not clear whether the books will only be searchable on Google's new academic search engine - Google Scholar - or on the regular Google search engine, or both.

Google has launched Google Scholar, a specialized search engine restricted to scholarly literature like peer reviewed articles, technical reports, theses and abstracts. The search algorithms have been customized to provide the kind of information that researchers look for, and includes results from subscription-based online journals that are hidden from the public web.

In many cases, Google Scholar finds relevant citations that are only in hard copy but are referenced in an online article. From TechWeb: "In such cases, a Library Search and/or a Web Search link shows next to the book's or paper's title. The former uses the Open WorldCat program to locate a nearby library with the work, while Web Search searches the larger index for other, non-scholarly references."

For more information, see Google Scholar's  FAQ.

Google is offering to include posted reports from eligible professional associations. This is an opportunity for the voluntary sector to disseminate research and reports without big investments in OAI compliant archives as I recommended in an earlier article. If a website such as www.nonprofitscan.ca was included in Google Scholar, it could instantly provide a free search function on its own site at the same time as joining the international scholarly literature.

Lori Criss Powers pointed out this What Works Clearinghouse published by US Department of Education to "provide educators, policymakers, researchers, and the public with a central and trusted source of scientific evidence of what works in education". The site lists research on relevant topics in education, and divides them into studies that meet evidence standards, and those that do not. For example, they have collected 300 studies in the topic of Peer-Assisted Learning, of which 15 meet evidence standards and 109 are still being reviewed. Evaluators and agencies are encouraged to submit studies for review; only two topics have been studied so far.

The evidence standards themselves are worth reading, in that they define the characteristics of relevant research in particular topic areas. It's an interesting model for other areas of best practice in the human services.

The National Guideline Clearinghouse, also sponsored by the US government, lists evidence-based clinical guidelines that are selected through a multi-level peer review process. The site attempts to serve consumers and patients as well as researchers and policy-makers; it's a rich, complex site with masses of health information. Health sciences have led the push towards evidence-based practice, and it's past time for social services to follow suit. This type of clearinghouse could be very helpful to service providers and funders in key topics such as employment, immigration, family violence and so on.

 

Open Access Now is an online journal devoted to articles on various aspects of open access research, published by BioMed Central. A recent article addresses '(Mis)Leading Open Access Myths':

"In the evidence presented to the [UK] House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publications, many dubious arguments have been used by traditional publishers to attack the new Open Access publishing model. Below, BioMed Central responds to some of the most prevalent and most misleading anti-Open Access arguments.

Myth 1	The cost of providing Open Access will reduce the availability of funding for research
Myth 2	Access is not a problem - virtually all UK researchers have the access they need
Myth 3	The public can get any article they want from the public library via interlibrary loan
Myth 4	Patients would be confused if they were to have free access to the peer-reviewed medical literature on the web
Myth 5	It is not fair that industry will benefit from Open Access
Myth 6	Open Access threatens scientific integrity due to a conflict of interest resulting from charging authors
Myth 7	Poor countries already have free access to the biomedical literature
Myth 8	Traditionally published content is more accessible than Open Access content as it is available in printed form
Myth 9	A high quality journal such as Nature would need to charge authors £10,000-£30,000 in order to move to an Open Access model
Myth 10	Publishers need to make huge profits in order to fund innovation
Myth 11	Publishers need to take copyright to protect the integrity of scientific articles"

 

Nature journal has completed its series on Open Access publishing with a few wrap-up articles summarizing the pros and cons of open access models. One of the articles addresses the needs of researchers themselves, based on an international web survey of 91,500 senior authors who had recently published in an ISI-indexed journal.

"The survey yielded 3,787 fully completed questionnaires, with responses from 97 countries and from each major discipline in the sciences and social sciences.

"What authors tell us they want from the journals systems reflects a view that has probably not changed much over the past four centuries. They want the imprimatur of quality and integrity that a peer-reviewed, high-impact title can offer, together with reasonable levels of publisher service. Above all, they want to narrowcast their ideas to a close community of like-minded researchers."

97% of the respondents said their target audience was other researchers in the same  field. Only 56% said their target audience included education professionals, 45% wanted their own funders to read their articles, and 40% wanted policy-makers and opinion formers to read them.

"The significance of this finding is that it places one of the journal crisis’ traditional scapegoats, the cry that there are ‘too many journals’, into its proper context. It might even be argued that there are too few titles to satisfy fully scientists’ needs."

It also points to the importance of journals or other communication vehicles that reach out to policy makers and opinion formers, because scientific literature is not aimed at them.

An article on CrossRef describes how academic research can more easily be searched through creating a stable location and protocol for citing and cross-referencing documents (using the DOI for the more technical readers out there).

"Nearly 600 primary publishers, libraries, affiliates, agents, and journal-hosting platforms currently use CrossRef. [this has since grown to over 650]... All told, the network has registered 10.3 million content items, representing more than 9,200 journals, in addition to several thousand books and conference proceedings." Publishers pay as little as $250/year for access to the CrossRef service, based on their publishing revenue. (Charges go up to $30,000/year for the huge ones.)

According to CrossRef, "A truly comprehensive linking network for online research content is probably within reach within a five-year timeframe".

To see what a search might look like, check out the CrossRef/Google pilot test here. It includes only 29 of the 650 publishers that use CrossRef.

There's a systematic bias in published medical research whereby 'successful' studies are far more likely to end up in the literature. There are two reasons. One is the tendency of medical journals to only accept studies with exciting findings (rather than studies that don't find any effects). So, for example, imagine that a drug is studied in 50 different clinical trials, and in 49 trials there is no significant difference between the treated groups and the control groups. 49 of the studies would be boring. Only the 1 in 50 study would be published, leading readers to the conclusion that the drug works. This is a serious and continuing problem with scientific literature in general, but has more immediate consequences in medical research. The other reason is similar, but involves the reluctance of pharmaceutical companies and other sponsors to publish negative results for their own products. Often only the successful studies are submitted to medical journals and the rest are buried.

Some of the leading medical journals are now addressing this problem. "If pharmaceutical and medical device companies want their studies published in some of the world's most prestigious medical journals, they will have to report studies that usually never see the light of day, commonly referred to as secret studies.... Currently, 11 publications, including the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, will require companies to register all clinical trials in a public trials registry if they want their studies considered for publication.

""If all trials are registered in a public repository at their inception, every trial's existence is part of the public record and the many stakeholders in clinical research can explore the full range of clinical evidence," said a statement on all 11 journals with the new policy.... For the most part, negative studies never get published in medical journals, because companies don't submit the "bad news", the new policy will help eliminate selective reporting, which distorts the body of evidence available for clinical decision-making. "

From Healthtalk.

Two interviews with George Lakoff, author of  "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think," discuss how conservatives and liberals use "framing" - positioning issues to convince the public. He says that conservatives do it much, much better. Here's an excerpt from the 2003 interview:

"Language always comes with what is called 'framing.' Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. ... The phrase "Tax relief" began coming out of the White House starting on the very day of Bush's inauguration. It got picked up by the newspapers as if it were a neutral term, which it is not. First, you have the frame for "relief." For there to be relief, there has to be an affliction, an afflicted party, somebody who administers the relief, and an act in which you are relieved of the affliction. The reliever is the hero, and anybody who tries to stop them is the bad guy intent on keeping the affliction going. So, add "tax" to "relief" and you get a metaphor that taxation is an affliction, and anybody against relieving this affliction is a villain.

""Tax relief" has even been picked up by the Democrats. ... You see the Democrats shooting themselves in the foot.

[So what should they be calling it?]

"It's not just about what you call it, if it's the same "it." There's actually a whole other way to think about it. Taxes are what you pay to be an American, to live in a civilized society that is democratic and offers opportunity, and where there's an infrastructure that has been paid for by previous taxpayers. This is a huge infrastructure. The highway system, the Internet, the TV system, the public education system, the power grid, the system for training scientists — vast amounts of infrastructure that we all use, which has to be maintained and paid for. Taxes are your dues — you pay your dues to be an American. In addition, the wealthiest Americans use that infrastructure more than anyone else, and they use parts of it that other people don't. The federal justice system, for example, is nine-tenths devoted to corporate law. The Securities and Exchange Commission and all the apparatus of the Commerce Department are mainly used by the wealthy. And we're all paying for it.

[So taxes could be framed as an issue of patriotism.]

"It is an issue of patriotism! Are you paying your dues, or are you trying to get something for free at the expense of your country? .... But what would it take to make the discussion about that? Every Democratic senator and all of their aides and every candidate would have to learn how to talk about it that way. There would have to be a manual. Republicans have one. They have a guy named Frank Luntz, who puts out a 500-page manual every year that goes issue by issue on what the logic of the position is from the Republican side, what the other guys' logic is, how to attack it, and what language to use."

"Within traditional liberalism you have a history of rational thought that was born out of the Enlightenment: all meanings should be literal, and everything should follow logically. So if you just tell people the facts, that should be enough — the truth shall set you free. All people are fully rational, so if you tell them the truth, they should reach the right conclusions. That, of course, has been a disaster."

Lakoff explains that conservatives build infrastructure like think tanks and public relations machines more effectively than do liberals, as part of the 'strict father' vs. 'nurturing parent' value systems. Fascinating stuff. Lakoff has lots of other examples too.

He is one of the founders of the Rockridge Institute, which aims to "Reframe the terms of political debate to make a progressive moral vision more persuasive and influential." And he's just completed a practical communication manual, "Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate," which will be on Amazon starting September 8.

(Thanks to BoingBoing)

Next-generation search tools to refine results -  "The vast corpus of human knowledge could soon be published on the Internet. The problem now is how to wade through it."

The growth of digital information is far out-stripping our ability to search it. For example, approximately 100 million books have been published in all of human history, representing about 100 terabytes of storage (a terabyte is a million megabytes). There are mass book-scanning projects underway in India and China. And Taiwanese firms are planning to distribute a 2-terabyte flash memory card next year, so as soon as someone scans in the books, we'll be able to fit every book ever written in your mobile phone along with your entire music library.

This article suggests that "universal access to all human knowledge is within our grasp". In addition, several researchers are experimenting with personal information catalogues: carrying around cameras that record everything they see or hear, and capturing every image, book, movie, song that they experience.

The search challenges are horrendous. Expect to see many weird attempts to categorize and manage information. One good sign is that information scientists are acknowledging how people actually access information.

"File systems will likely begin to disappear as search gains popularity. One of the phenomena that Microsoft researchers are finding in MyLifeBits is that files are largely ad hoc categories that become outdated, said Jim Gemmell at Microsoft Research.

"Instead, data should be tagged so that if people remember a name or part of a name, they can find their way back to documents or pictures involving that person, or they can find documents created on the same day that they had a phone conversation with the person, even if the discussion involved something unrelated."