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We can never be sure anyone else is sentient. But we can be sure enough in the case of other people, nonhuman primates, mammals, birds, fish, lower vertebrates and invertebrates as to make scepticism academic and otiose (not to mention monumentally cruel). The only genuinely uncertain kinds of cases are jellyfish, microbes and plants. The rest is not about whether but what they are feeling.

The only feelings we can feel are our own. When it comes to the feelings of others, we can only infer them, based on their behavior — unless they tell us. This is the "other-minds problem." Within our own species, thanks to language, this problem arises only for states in which people cannot speak (infancy, aphasia, sleep, anaesthesia, coma). Our species also has a uniquely powerful empathic or "mind-reading" capacity: We can (sometimes) perceive from the behavior of others when they are in states like our own. Our inferences have also been systematized and operationalized in biobehavioral science and supplemented by cognitive neuroimagery. Together, these make the other-minds problem within our own species a relatively minor one. But we cohabit the planet with other species, most of them very different from our own, and none of them able to talk. Inferring whether and what they feel is important not only for scientific but also for ethical reasons, because where feelings are felt, they can also be hurt. As animals are at long last beginning to be accorded legal status and protection as sentient beings, our new journal Animal Sentience, will be devoted to exploring in depth what, how and why organisms feel. Individual "target articles" (and sometimes précis of books) addressing different species' sentient and cognitive capacities will each be accorded "open peer commentary," consisting of multiple shorter articles, both invited and freely submitted ones, by specialists from many disciplines, each elaborating, applying, supplementing or criticizing the content of the target article, along with responses from the target author(s). The members of the nonhuman species under discussion will not be able to join in the conversation, but their spokesmen and advocates, the specialists who know them best, will. The inaugural issue launches with the all-important question (for fish) of whether fish can feel pain.

Only I can calculate my own welfare as net pleasure minus pain. No one else can do that calculation for me – nor for a population, and especially not averaging across some individuals' pleasure and other individuals' pain. Pain and pleasure are incommensurable and only pain matters morally. To maximize welfare is to minimize pain.

The primary target of the worldwide Open Access initiative is the 2.5 million articles published every year in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals across all scholarly and scientific fields. Without exception, every one of these articles is an author give-away, written, not for royalty income, but solely to be used, applied and built upon by other researchers. The optimal and inevitable solution for this give-away research is that it should be made freely accessible to all its would-be users online and not only to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it happens to be published. Yet this optimal and inevitable solution, already fully within the reach of the global research community for at least two decades now, has been taking a remarkably long time to be grasped. The problem is not particularly an instance of "eDemocracy" one way or the other; it is an instance of inaction because of widespread misconceptions (reminiscent of Zeno's Paradox). The solution is for the world's research institutions and funders to (1) extend their existing "publish or perish" mandates so as to (2) require their employees and fundees to maximize the usage and impact of the research they are employed and funded to conduct and publish by (3) depositing their final drafts in their Open Access (OA) Institutional Repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication in order to (4) make their findings freely accessible to all their potential users webwide. OA metrics can then be used to measure and reward research progress and impact; and multiple layers of links, tags, commentary and discussion can be built upon and integrated with the primary research.

"All refereed journals will soon be available online; most of them already are. This means that anyone will be able to access them from any networked desk-top. The literature will all be interconnected by citation, author, and keyword/ subject links, allowing for unheard-of power and ease of access and navigability. Successive drafts of pre-refereeing preprints will be linked to the official refereed draft, as well as to any subsequent corrections, revisions, updates, comments, responses, and underlying empirical databases, all enhancing the self-correctiveness, interactivity and productivity of scholarly and scientific research and communication in remarkable new ways. New scientometric indicators of digital impact are also emerging (http://opcit.eprints.org) to chart the online course of knowledge. But there is still one last frontier to cross before science reaches the optimal and the inevitable: Just as there is no longer any need for research or researchers to be constrained by the access-blocking restrictions of paper distribution, there is no longer any need to be constrained by the impact-blocking financial fire-walls of Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View (S/L/P) tolls for this give-away literature. Its authors/researchers have always donated their research reports for free (and its referees/ researchers have refereed for free), with the sole goal of maximizing their impact on subsequent research (by accessing the eyes and minds of fellow-researchers, present and future) and hence on society. Generic (OAi-compliant) software is now available free so that institutions can immediately create Eprint Archives in which their authors can self-archive all their refereed (published) papers for free for all forever (http://www.eprints.org/). These interoperable Open Archives (http://www.openarchives.org) will then be harvested into global, jointly searchable 'virtual archives' (e.g., http://arc.cs.odu.edu/). 'Scholarly Skywriting' in this Post Gutenberg Galaxy will be dramatically (and measurably) more interactive and productive, spawning its own new digital metrics of productivity and impact, allowing for an online 'embryology of knowledge'." (author's abstract)

Academic libraries should be considered research tools, co-evolving with technology. The Internet has changed the way science is communicated and hence also the role of libraries. It has made it possible for researchers to provide Open Access (OA) (i.e., toll-free, full-text, on-line access, web-wide) to their peer reviewed journal articles in two different ways: (1) by publishing in them in OA journals and (2) by publishing them in non-OA journals but also self-archiving them in their institutional OA Archives. Librarians are researchers' best allies in both of these OA provision strategies. Some of the best examples of these pioneering libraries are described in this article. From them we conclude that an official mandate for OA provision is necessary to accelerate the growth of OA – and thereby the growth of research usage and impact -- worldwide. ; Les bibliothèques devraient être considérées comme des outils de recherche qui évoluent avec la technologie. Internet a changé la façon de communiquer la science et par conséquent le rôle des bibliothèques a changé . Les chercheurs peuvent maintenant mettre leurs articles soumis au contrôle des pairs, en Libre Accès (LA) (c.a.d.un texte intégral ,gratuit, en ligne sur le web) de deux façons différentes : (1)en les publiant dans des revues en LA et (2) en les auto-archivant dans leurs archives institutionnelles. Les bibliothécaires sont les meilleures alliées des chercheurs dans ces deux stratégies du LA. Quelques uns des meilleurs exemples sont décrits dans cet article. Nous en concluons qu'il faut une politique d'obligation d'auto-archiver pour accélérer la croissance du LA -et par conséquent l'usage de la recherche et son impact - partout dans le monde.

Academic libraries should be considered research tools, co-evolving with technology. The Internet has changed the way science is communicated and hence also the role of libraries. It has made it possible for researchers to provide Open Access (OA) (i.e., toll-free, full-text, on-line access, web-wide) to their peer reviewed journal articles in two different ways: (1) by publishing in them in OA journals and (2) by publishing them in non-OA journals but also self-archiving them in their institutional OA Archives. Librarians are researchers' best allies in both of these OA provision strategies. Some of the best examples of these pioneering libraries are described in this article. From them we conclude that an official mandate for OA provision is necessary to accelerate the growth of OA – and thereby the growth of research usage and impact -- worldwide. ; Les bibliothèques devraient être considérées comme des outils de recherche qui évoluent avec la technologie. Internet a changé la façon de communiquer la science et par conséquent le rôle des bibliothèques a changé . Les chercheurs peuvent maintenant mettre leurs articles soumis au contrôle des pairs, en Libre Accès (LA) (c.a.d.un texte intégral ,gratuit, en ligne sur le web) de deux façons différentes : (1)en les publiant dans des revues en LA et (2) en les auto-archivant dans leurs archives institutionnelles. Les bibliothécaires sont les meilleures alliées des chercheurs dans ces deux stratégies du LA. Quelques uns des meilleurs exemples sont décrits dans cet article. Nous en concluons qu'il faut une politique d'obligation d'auto-archiver pour accélérer la croissance du LA -et par conséquent l'usage de la recherche et son impact - partout dans le monde.

International audience ; Summary: No research institution can afford all the journals its researcers may need, so all articles are losing research impact (usage and citations). Articles that are made "Open Access," (OA) by self-archiving them on the web are cited twice as much, but only about 15% of articles are being spontaneously self-archived. The only institutions approaching 100% self-archiving are those that mandate it. Surveys show that 95% of authors will comply with a self-archiving mandate; the actual experience of institutions with mandates has confirmed this. What institutions and funders need to mandate is that (1) immediately upon acceptance for publication (2) the author's final draft must be (3) deposited into the Institutional Repository (IR). Only the depositing needs to be mandated; setting access privileges to the full-text as either OA or CA (Closed Access) can be left up to the author. For articles published in the 62% of journals that have already endorsed self-archiving, access can be set as OA immediately; for the embargoed 38%, all would-be users can have almost-immediate almost-OA to the deposited CA document by using the IR's semi-automatised "email eprint request" button. ; Résumé : Aucune institution de recherche ne peut offrir à ses chercheurs tous les périodiques dont ils peuvent avoir besoin, si bien que tous les articles perdent de leur impact de recherche (usage et citations). Les articles qui sont mis en Libre Accès (LA) par auto-archivage sur le web, sont deux fois plus cités, mais seulement environ 15% des articles sont spontanément auto-archivés. Les seules institutions qui approchent 100% d'auto-archivage sont celles qui l'exigent. Les enquêtes montrent que 95% des auteurs sont d'accord pour obtempérer; l'expérience réelle des institutions avec un mandat l'a confirmé. Ce que les institutions et les organismes bailleurs de fond doivent exiger est que (1) immédiatement après l'acceptation de la publication (2) le dernier écrit de l'auteur soit (3) déposé dans l'archive ...

Much of Alzheimer disease (AD) research has been traditionally based on the use of animals, which have been extensively applied in an effort to both improve our understanding of the pathophysiological mechanisms of the disease and to test novel therapeutic approaches. However, decades of such research have not effectively translated into substantial therapeutic success for human patients. Here we critically discuss these issues in order to determine how existing human-based methods can be applied to study AD pathology and develop novel therapeutics. These methods, which include patient-derived cells, computational analysis and models, together with large-scale epidemiological studies represent novel and exciting tools to enhance and forward AD research. In particular, these methods are helping advance AD research by contributing multifactorial and multidimensional perspectives, especially considering the crucial role played by lifestyle risk factors in the determination of AD risk. In addition to research techniques, we also consider related pitfalls and flaws in the current research funding system. Conversely, we identify encouraging new trends in research and government policy. In light of these new research directions, we provide recommendations regarding prioritization of research funding. The goal of this document is to stimulate scientific and public discussion on the need to explore new avenues in AD research, considering outcome and ethics as core principles to reliably judge traditional research efforts and eventually undertake new research strategies.