Why Collaboration, Why Now?

A good point:

Word, Excel, Powerpoint were all about making me, as a worker at my desk, able to create more work per unit of time. But, I think we've eeked out the last bit of individual productivity gain at this stage. I mean, does the new ribbon on MS Word make me more productive as an individual? Probably not. It's a great interface, but it's unlikely that there is a massive gain in personal productivity.

This next wave that we're in is about productivity gains achieved NOT by making the individual more productive, but by making groups more productive. The massive penetration of email means that we're in touch with one another like never before and dependent on teams like never before. That means that there is a huge opportunity for productivity gains through more effective collaboration.

- Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite and JotSpot, now at Google.

Open Access = Obvious Success

Everybody "knows" that open access is better, it's just that the proof has been, er, thin on the ground. No more. This study in the (open access) PLoS Biology offers the first rigorous examination of open access and non-open access papers in the same journal (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). The numbers indicate that open access is demonstrably better for the scientists that use it:

This comparison of the impact of OA and non-OA articles from the same journal in the first 4–16 mo after publication shows that OA articles are cited earlier and are, on average, cited more often than non-OA articles. To my knowledge, this is the first longitudinal study of a cohort of OA and non-OA articles providing direct and strong evidence for preferential or earlier citation of articles published originally as OA. It is also the first study showing an advantage of publishing an article as OA on the journal site over self-archiving (i.e., making the article otherwise online accessible).

Update: More positive news on the use of open access - caution: Microsoft Word format (via Open Access News).

Sign of the Times

When Microsoft adds full blogging capability to Word 2007, you know it's (a) really time to start blogging if you haven't already or (b) time to stop if you have.

Actually, this is rather a clever idea; kudos to Microsoft for thinking of it. Pity I stopped using Word after version 2 - OpenOffice.org: are we listening? (Via Ars Technica).