New Book: Worlds Beyond Our Own

Discover is hosting the Comet ISON Photo Contest, together with the National Science Foundation’s Division of Astronomical Sciences, and Astronomy magazine.   The contest is open to amateur and professional photographers worldwide. You can submit images online at www.nsf.gov/comet beginning October 15, 2013, through January 15, 2014. Judges will consider images in three categories; in…

Prof. Vinod Krishan (formerly Senior Professor, IIA) has written a book on Plasmas: The First State of Matter and Cambridge University Press has published the book recently.   Read more  

Springer announced it has expanded its open access (OA) publishing program by offering a fully open access option for books, which will extend Springer’s established SpringerOpen and BioMed Central journal portfolio, and its Springer Open Choice option. Any electronic version of a SpringerOpen book is fully and immediately open access, and thus freely accessible on…

A new Physics World special report examines the challenges for physicist in India   The latest special report by Physics World, focuses on physics in India. The report reveals that money is not in short supply for the country`s top researchers, but that India lacks a critical concentration of highly capable scientists who can make…

A clever data project shows the promise of open and freely accessible academic literature. by Alasdair Allan There is a huge debate right now about making academic literature freely accessible and moving toward open access. But what would be possible if people stopped talking about it and just dug in and got on with it?…

Congressional criticism is mounting against U.S. prosecutors for pursuing prison time for a popular hacker in a case that’s morphed into a posthumous cause celebre. Aaron Swartz, 26, a cofounder of Reddit and an open-Internet advocate, committed suicide in New York on Jan. 11 as a trial loomed involving charges that he had allegedly illegally…