Open Access publishing refers to making scholarship—primarily journal articles, but data is often included here as well—freely available to the public. Open Access became international news earlier this year when mathematician Timothy Gowers announced that he was boycotting Elsevier, a major academic publisher, and thousands of other researchers signed (and are still signing) on. (For a short overview of Open Access, see the just-published Open Access and the Future of Academic Scholarship by Barbara Fister—thanks to Maura Smale @msmale for the link.) Continue Reading »

PostGIS and SpatiaLite offer a large number of spatial query operations, including buffers, intersections, and spatial joins. It’s really useful, especially when you’re still experimenting, to visualize your results without having to create a new spatial table, spatial view, or exporting to a shapefile or other GIS data format. Fortunately, there are several ways to do this, including at least three plugins for Quantum GIS: Fast SQL Layer, PostGIS Query Editor, and RT SQL Layer. In this blog post I will walk you through using Fast SQL Layer. Continue Reading »