For millions of disabled people the web remains a limited, and limiting, resource. Making websites accessible is essential in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity for all. Continue reading
Riding the Tectonic Plates 1: The Changing User
Image: Tobias Alt
- The changing user
- Changing business models
- Future tech trends
The question on everyone’s lips: is it opening time yet?
It’s been whirlwind year for open access.
Around this time last September I referred in a post on this blog to the lack of disruption in scientific publishing. My chief source for this remark was Michael Clarke’s post of Scholarly Kitchen from 2010. The subject was discussed a few weeks later at that year’s Semantico Symposium event and none of the very knowledgeable people around the table demurred from the basic picture painted by Clarke. True, a change in the attitude of UK funding councils against impact factor of journals in assessing the quality of university departments was mentioned as something that could have a future disruptive effect. However the next assessment this might affect was not until 2014.
In general however, the view held that OA looked like a bit of slow-burn thing.
One year on, things look very different – from a UK perspective at least. Scientists are in active revolt, governments and high-profile funding bodies have weighed in with their support, and a subject previously of interest only to those within the publishing industry and academe is now all over mainstream media.
It’s interesting to review the timeline of events that have changed the landscape so radically in such a relatively short space of time.
Continue reading In support of OAuth 2.0: Facilis descensus Averno (It’s easy to go to hell)
Last year, Semantico was approached by Geoff Bilder of Crossref fame, to assist in building the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) system. For ORCID to succeed it needed an authentication method that enabled third parties to interact with the system. Geoff was instrumental in investigating the use of OAuth 2.0, and asked us to provide recommendations on the best way forward. After our investigations, we felt that OAuth 2.0 was the right choice. Continue reading No-passwords prediction is an IBM-barrassment
As the leading developer of access management systems for digital publishing, we were naturally intrigued by IBM’s prediction before Christmas: ‘You will never need a password again‘. This is one of the five predictions IBM made about ‘innovations that will change the way we live, work and play in the next five years’. Biometric data, it seems, will not only tighten up security online but also massively simplify the business of authenticating your identity, something we all have to do wearyingly often nowadays.
‘Over the next five years, your unique biological identity and biometric data – facial definitions, iris scans, voice files, even your DNA – will become the key to safeguarding your personal identity and information and replace the current user ID and password system.’
Five years really isn’t all that long a time. So, should we at Semantico retool all our client sites for the coming change and rewrite our software accordingly? It may surprise you to learn that we didn’t hire in some extra developers to start working on the task over Christmas.
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