Spam e-mails changed the life of Jeffrey Beall.  It was 2008, and Beall, an academic librarian and a researcher at the University of Colorado in Denver, started to notice an increasing flow of messages from new journals soliciting him to submit articles or join their editorial boards.  “I immediately became fascinated because most of the e-mails contained numerous grammatical errors,” Beall says.  He started browsing the journals' websites, and was soon convinced that many of the journals and their publishers were not quite what they claimed.  The names often sounded grand — adjectives such as 'world', 'global' and 'international' were common — but some sites looked amateurish or gave little information about the organization behind them.  Since then, Beall has become a relentless watchdog for what he describes as “potential, possible or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers”, listing and scrutinizing them on his blog, Scholarly Open Access.  Open-access publishers often collect fees from authors to pay for peer review, editing and website maintenance.  Beall asserts that the goal of predatory open-access publishers is to exploit this model by charging the fee without providing all the expected publishing services.  As a research librarian, Beall has been in prime position to watch the dramatic changes that have taken place in scientific publishing since the rise of the open-access movement about a decade ago.  In the conventional subscription-based model, journals bring in revenue largely through selling print or web subscriptions and keeping most online content locked behind a paywall.  But in the most popular model of open access, publishers charge an upfront 'author fee' to cover costs — and to turn a profit, in the case of commercial publishers — then make the papers freely available online, immediately on publication.  The open-access movement has spawned many successful, well-respected operations.  PLOS ONE, for example, which charges a fee of US$1,350 for authors in middle- and high-income countries, has seen the number of articles it publishes leap from 138 in 2006 to 23,464 last year, making it the world's largest scientific journal.  The movement has also garnered growing political support.  In the past year, the UK and US governments, as well as the European Commission, have thrown their weight behind some form of open-access publishing.  And scarcely a week goes by without the appearance of new author-pays, open-access publishers, launching single journals or large fleets of them.  Lars Bjørnshauge, managing director of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), based in Copenhagen, feels that the entire problem needs to be kept in perspective.  He estimates that questionable publishing probably accounts for fewer than 1% of all author-pays, open-access papers — a proportion far lower than Beall's estimate of 5–10%.  Instead of relying on blacklists, Bjørnshauge argues, open-access associations such as the DOAJ and the OASPA should adopt more responsibility for policing publishers.  He says that they should lay out a set of criteria that publishers and journals must comply with to win a place on a 'white list' indicating that they are trustworthy.  The DOAJ, he says, is now compiling a list of new, more stringent criteria.  To help clean up practices, he adds, research funders should pay author fees only to such white-listed publishers. Meanwhile, he urges researchers to be as cautious when shopping online for publishers as when shopping for anything else.  “Examine the company you are about to deal with,” he says. 
Declan Butler  See extensive article at:  http://www.nature.com/news/investigating-journals-the-dark-side-of-publishing-1.12666

When elements were discovered, there was no need to classify them.  But as time passed, the number of elements increased and it became difficult to explain the physical and chemical properties and relations between them.  Hence scientists developed various classifications at different times and arranged all the known elements in certain forms.  First Prout gave the hypothesis that all elements are made up of hydrogen because the atomic mass of all elements is a simple integral of the atomic mass of hydrogen.  But this hypothesis was not valid for a long time as some elements were discovered with fractional atomic mass.  After Prout’s hypothesis, Dobereiner gave the concept of triad in 1829.  According to Dobereiner, elements can be arranged in increasing order of their atomic mass.  After Dobereiner triad, John Newland purposed another way of classification in 1864:  Newland's Octave Law.  Octave can be defined as a group or series of eight or a series of eight notes occupying the interval between two notes, one having twice or half the frequency of vibration of the other.  For example, in the series of eight musical notes, after a certain interval the note will repeat itself.  Newland's law of octaves was also based on musical notes.  He arranged all the known elements in increasing order of their atomic mass.  He found that in this arrangement, the first and eighth elements are similar in their chemical and physical properties.  See graphs and more information at:  http://chemistry.tutorvista.com/inorganic-chemistry/law-of-octaves.html

"The Elements" (1959) is a song by musical humorist and lecturer Tom Lehrer, which recites the names of all the chemical elements known at the time of writing, up to number 102, nobelium.  The song is sung to the tune of the Major-General's Song from The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan.  The ordering of elements in the lyrics fits the meter of the song, and includes much alliteration, and thus has little or no relation to the ordering in the periodic table.  This can be seen for example in the opening and closing lines:

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,  ...
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium.
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered.

Lehrer was a Harvard Mathematics lecturer, and the final rhyme of "Harvard" and "discovered" is delivered in a parody of a Boston accent—a non-rhotic manner—so that the two words rhyme. Lehrer did not normally speak with that accent.  Lehrer accompanied himself on the piano while singing the song.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_(song)

English pronunciation can be divided into two main accent groups: a rhotic speaker pronounces a rhotic consonant in words like hard and butter; a non-rhotic speaker does not.  That is, rhotic speakers pronounce /ɹ/ (English R) in nearly all positions of a word, while non-rhotic speakers pronounce /ɹ/ only if it is followed by a vowel sound in the same phrase or prosodic unit (see "linking and intrusive R").  Therefore, when pronounced by a non-rhotic speaker, the word butter would sound like butta to a rhotic speaker.  Examples of rhotic accents are:  Scottish English, Mid Ulster English, Canadian English and most varieties of American English and Irish English.  Non-rhotic accents include most accents of England, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhotic_and_non-rhotic_accents

pillar to post   14th century order of this expression was from post to pillar, as it was developed based on certain volleys common to the old game of court tennis.  As opposed to modern lawn tennis, which is played outdoors, court tennis was played indoors - including the playing "field" and gallery.  Just as volleys are important in today's game, so they were for court tennis.  One particularly popular volley was made from post to pillar, meaning from a post supporting the net or rope in the middle to tone of the rear pillars holding up the tennis gallery.  It appears to have been a common technique for players to sustain long volleys between these two locations.  By the 15th century, English speakers were already using the originally-ordered phrase beyond tennis matches, though it often was said as from post to pillar tossed.  It was during the 16th century that the words were switched to their modern positions, likely because of frequent use away from the original source.  Currently, from pillar to post is used to describe something that moves monotonously or pointlessly from one thing to another.  http://word-ancestry.livejournal.com/60397.html?thread=619245

"When people say everything's online," says Jerry Dupont of the Law Library Microform Consortium, "they're woefully uninformed."  Dupont, founder of the LLMC, a nonprofit law library cooperative, estimates that of the 2 million unique volumes contained in America’s law libraries, only about 15 percent are available in digital form.  That figure includes access via proprietary, commercial services like Westlaw and LexisNexis.  Across the country, law libraries are trying to adapt to the digital revolution and preserve historic and precedential documents.  But budget cuts have hit hard at academic law libraries, which historically have hosted some of the most robust legal collections.  And the pressures are creating concerns that the public will lose access to essential legal documents.  For example, for six years straight the acquisitions budget for the Maine State Law and Legislative Reference Library has remained flat.  Like many law library officials, director John Barden has managed to preserve public access to most legal content, but he has been forced to make some tough calls along the way.  Rising costs have forced him to scrap treatises and cancel nearly half of his print law journal subscriptions.  At the same time, his staff has undertaken a massive effort to digitize state legal documents that date back to the 1820s. 

Read extensive article by Hollee Schwartz Temple at:  http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/are_digitization_and_budget_cuts_compromising_history