The Book of Trogool
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Tidbits, 30 March 2010
Posted by Dorothea Salo on March 30, 2010 Tuesday seems a good day for tidbits. (I am head-down in my UKSG presentation and class stuff at the moment, so kindly forgive posting slowness.) One argument I rarely see made for open access that should perhaps be made more often is that it reduces friction in both accessing and providing information. Want to reduce…
A personal heroine: Henriette Davidson Avram
Posted by Dorothea Salo on March 24, 2010 This is my blog post for Ada Lovelace Day, on which we celebrate technical achievement by women. I’m writing it the day before, and setting it to post at midnight. I hope someone is writing a biography of Henriette Avram. I will be first in line to buy it. I desperately want to know how…
OA publishers: just use HTML!
Posted by Dorothea Salo on March 23, 2010 I was reading the latest issue of the Journal of Digital Information today, and I found myself wishing I could turn the Readability bookmarklet loose on half its PDF-only articles. I’m sorry, authors. I know you tried, but those PDFs are terrible-looking. Times New Roman, really? (The one in Arial is the worst, though.) Could…
Thank you, OASPA
Posted by Dorothea Salo on March 22, 2010 OASPA is starting to get its act together, posting a concise summary of its membership procedures and making a new procedure for complaints relevant to the quality measures OASPA wishes to maintain among its members. I think OASPA is right not to offer to police every OA journal in existence. There isn’t enough money in…
Productized what wired into what now?
Posted by Dorothea Salo on March 18, 2010 First, a small warning: I am having an extremely crowded and busy week, so blogging here (even the catchup I need to do to the many excellent comments on the Battle of the Opens post) will suffer. Something for folks to chew on in the meantime: can anybody explain to me what this tool (if…
Societies and science
Posted by Dorothea Salo on March 17, 2010 John Dupuis asks some provocative questions; I thought I’d take a stab at answering them, and I encourage fellow SciBlings to do likewise. I quite agree with John when he says that the ferment over publishing models disguises a larger question, “the role of scholarly and professional societies in a changing publishing and social networking…
Battle of the Opens
Posted by Dorothea Salo on March 15, 2010 I’m committed to a lot of different kinds of “open.” This means that I can and do engage in tremendous acts of hair-splitting and pilpul with regard to them. “Gratis” versus “libre” open access? Free-speech versus free-beer software code? I’m your librarian; let’s sit down and have that discussion. Unfortunately, out there in the wild…
Profile: Dryad
Posted by Dorothea Salo on March 11, 2010 We have a guestblogger today! At my request, Peggy Schaeffer kindly sent me the following introduction to Dryad, which I reproduce as I received it (save for minor formatting details). I will happily pass any questions in the comments on to Peggy for response. —- Dryad is a repository for data underlying scientific publications, with…
Sensitive data, linked data, and the “reidentification” phenomenon
Posted by Dorothea Salo on March 10, 2010 One of the truisms in data curation is “well, of course we don’t let sensitive data out into the wild woolly world.” We hold sensitive data internally. If we must let it out, we anonymize it; sometimes we anonymize it just on general principles. We’re not as dumb as the Google engineers, after all. Only…
RFC: Repository platform comparison
Posted by Dorothea Salo on March 9, 2010 I interrupt your regularly-scheduled blog to ask for some help… comments closed on this post so that you’ll comment where it’ll do the most good. — Apologies for duplication, and please forward/repost as appropriate… We are working on comparing four digital-repository software packages (DSpace, ePrints, Fedora, and Zentity) in hopes of helping libraries and other…