Scott Madry remembers how hard it was to get a decent aerial photo before Google Earth....Google Earth changed all that. While Madry continues to spot dig sites from above, his flyovers have gone virtual. From his Chapel Hill office, using the search-engine giant's free geo-mapping program, he is able to identify potential excavation sites more quickly and without having to use precious grant money....
Madry is not alone in singing Google Earth's praises. Though not specifically designed for scientific use, since its beta release in June 2005, the program has seen growing use by geologists, geographers, and archeologists like Madry who say the program's intuitive interface and fluid 3D satellite mapping is streamlining once cumbersome research methods and making earth science more accessible to the public than ever before. Researchers from the Alaska Volcano Observatory created a Google Earth program that graphically displays volcano threat while seismologists at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) use the program to map the intensity of post-earthquake tremors....
David Wald, a seismologist at the USGS National Earthquake Information Center...sees Google Earth as a much less expensive complement, not a replacement to existing research tools....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/30/2007 02:09:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
