Or, it was. All you have to do (assuming they already hold a political office) is check out Project Vote Smart.

Just punch in the name of the representative of interest, and you get a categorized list of their voting record, ratings according to various interest groups, campaign finance information, and more. Mysteriously-named bills are explained with summaries.

To get you started, here are some links directly to voting records and interest group ratings:

• John McCain: Voting Record – Interest Group Ratings
• Hillary Clinton: Voting Record Interest Group Ratings
• Barack Obama: Voting Record – Interest Group Ratings

However, what if you already had a good device for reading e-books? What if you wanted to read some classics or books released under Creative Commons licenses on it? Then you would be in luck!

A couple of months ago, Molly sent me a link to a new book released under a Creative Commons license, called Postsingular. A link from the book’s page led me to Books In My Phone. This site takes Creative Commons books and those out of copyright, loads them into a simple and effective e-Book reader that runs on J2ME, and makes it possible to download them directly on to your phone. I have so far read Postsingular, Walden, and part of Moby Dick on my phone, and am happy to report that it was a pleasant and engaging experience.

The reader is fairly well written, except for one thing. If you hit the back key when you have just opened the book, it loses your place and goes back to the beginning. This is not so awful as it sounds, for it is easy to skip from chapter to chapter and from page to page. Aside from that glitch, it’s easy to change the font size, page up and down, and (as mentioned) skip around the book. The reader is entirely self-contained (J2ME aside), and (with a few quirks) remembers your place when you exit!. This last item is overlooked in many readers and prevented me in the past from using my Treo devices to read e-Books.

Therefore, if you enjoy reading while waiting, commuting, or even in a bed or a chair, I recommend that you try reading something from Books In My Phone. If you like sci-fi, Postsingular is not a bad place to start.

Also, let me know if you find any books there that you’d like to recommend!

I’ve had a couple of conversations with Dr. Rachel Karchin here at the ICM regarding Open Access scientific publishing, and PLoS specifically. Last week, she forwarded an email to me regarding PubCasts on SciVee. (Example here.)

A “PubCast” is basically the same thing as a “SlideCast“. (Have you noticed that everything is named with “Cast” at the end lately, all spawned from the term “Broadcast” and made popular by “PodCast”?) Let’s start with a SlideCast. The idea with a SlideCast is that presentations are not composed merely of speaking or merely of slides. Many people make their presentations in such a way that the slides stand on their own, but these are typically awful presentations. They’re just slide-formatted outline notes. A good presentation requires the visuals and spoken commentary. In a SlideCast, slides with their various animations and transitions are shown with an audio narration by the presenter. PubCasts go one step further and actually include video of the presenter speaking along with the slides. They also preferably include the paper. I think the video is probably not necessary, unless it’s video of the person presenting in front of the actual slides, but that requires green screening or extremely high quality video (for the slides to be readable), both not worth the hassle.

On the whole, I think PubCasts are an excellent idea. A proper scientific presentation should get the audience engaged by getting them emotionally involved, making them see why they should be interested, while a paper gives all of the gory details. In this way, you get both together. How often do you have the paper handy to follow along when watching a scientific presentation? In my experience, pretty much never. People usually present the stuff they’re working on, not the stuff they’ve published (background excepted).

Unfortunately, I don’t have any true Open Access papers yet. My paper that’s supposed to come out next month will not be Open Access, as the fee from the publisher for it was outrageous, and I couldn’t really justify it to my advisor. Nonetheless, I already have a slide deck put together for the paper, and have presented it, so in the near future I’m planning to do a SlideCast of it and post it here on the blog.

As such, I have completed the layout of the only HR article on which I am an author, and published it here. The final version of the article as laid out by Heart Rhythm is available here, if you happen to have access.

I wrote in January about an article in Nature that highlighted the PR offensive being launched by the major science publishers.

That effort has apparently borne fruit. The issue is well-covered by John Dupuis. A sad but interesting twist, which made the front page of Slashdot, is that these organizations bent on protecting their copyright lock-in stole images from Getty Images for their web site. As the post in that last link notes, the onslaught of complaints subsequent to hitting the Slashdot front page convinced them to go buy the images properly from Getty.

Just as Microsoft started the FUD machine as Linux gained prominence, watch for a truckload of FUD from PRISM in the days to come.

ADDENDUM: There’s a good summary post that quotes my statement just above (and those of many other science bloggers) here.

On 1st August last year, PLoS ONE opened its doors for submission and so we have decided to call today our official birthday.

…

Most importantly of all though, in the last year, or, at least, in the months from December 2006, we have published 695 pieces of original research. All of that research is, of course, Open Access and all of that research can be annotated by users, discussed by users and for the last few weeks rated by users.

…

This potential for interaction is unprecedented in any other scientific publication and it is being used to an extremely high standard.

You should go read the whole thing. They have three birthday wishes:

Whenever you write about a published paper, be it in a journal or on a blog, always provide a link to the freely available version of the paper if one exists.

Whenever you read a paper in PLoS ONE, always rate it before leaving.

And most importantly….

Whenever you write a scientific paper, always, always, always publish it Open Access.

I finally signed up today to get notices about articles in PLoS Computational Biology and PLoS Medicine. (Where’s PLoS Computational Medicine, hmm?)

It’s pretty clear that with 75 papers in two years from Johns Hopkins alone, PLoS is off to a great start. This can only mean good things for the future of open access publishing in the sciences.

Here’s the intro from the post:

I’ve been waiting to write this Blog posting for a while and now I can. As from today PLoS ONE has a user rating system for its articles. All users can now rate articles in three subjective categories: Insight, Reliability and Style. We have made the tool, now we need you to come and use it.

User rating is a very common feature of websites these days, be it for movies, books, blog posts, pretty much anything. What user rating allows is a quick and easy survey of a communities opinion. Despite the obvious advantages to hard pressed scientists trying to get to grips with a vast literature this simple system hasn’t been much applied to scientific papers up to this point.

The major exception to this is probably Faculty of 1000, which has been providing ratings for papers for many years, but that is not based on the opinion of a whole community but only the thoughts of a select few.

So what will this new rating system look like? Well, if you go to any of the six hundred or so papers that PLoS ONE has so far published and look in the right had column you will see a little box containing five small stars. Those indicate the overall aggregate rating of the paper based on individual ‘votes’ from individual users.

What’s interesting about this is that it’s a little different from a citation index, the main way that articles are scored. You see, normally scientific articles are given a ranking or score based on how much they are cited in other articles. This is a pretty good idea, but it neglects sort of “terminal” articles — that is, articles that mark the end of most investigation into a particular niche. These articles may nonetheless be extremely interesting or useful, but never garner a large citation index. Furthermore, articles of interest to people in other fields, or even the general public, will never garner any indication of said interest or popularity under the conventional system. The occasional exception might be popular science articles inspired by new publications in Nature or Science.

With the emergence of an article rating system, that may change. People can read and rate articles without having to write an entire manuscript. People can leave comments on articles without drafting (and having accepted) an “official” editorial or response in a major academic journal. Things are getting a lot more interesting, and quickly.

As the title of the article suggests, Rate Early, Rate Often.

Their about page is very informative, describing the origins of the project. It seems to be run by the Czech government, and includes not only digital resources but metadata on meatspace records and artifacts as well.

I saw a sign on a reference librarian’s door the other day about spending hours of aimless internet searching versus 10 minutes with a reference librarian. It’s a decent point, and I was in the library that day to look at reference materials better than anything I could find online, but more and more of the resources and catalogs (real-world pointers) that we need to do research are becoming available online, and to everyone.