dsalo | August 3, 2010Looking for us? We're happy to say that we're part of the new Scientopia blogging collective. Come see us there!
bbrown | July 14, 2010As a new blogger here at Book of Trogool I'd like to thank Dorothea for the opportunity to share in the discussion of evolving issues in technology, libraries, research, and scholarly communication.
I'm currently the Scholarly Communications and Library Grants Officer at Binghamton University, in upstate New York. I've been a librarian for some time (12 years now) and before that I was a chemist, with research experience in inorganic photochemistry, surface science reaction dynamics, and equine drug detection and quantification methods. While I did different experiments in each lab, each…
dsalo | July 13, 2010Oh, if I'd only had this picture for Zombie Day...
Credit for the photo to UK Serials Group. Credit for the alteration of the speech bubble (you can see the original slide here if you care to) to Steve Lawson.
Incidentally, I should have a postprint of an article based on this presentation up shortly. I'll leave word here when I get my act together and post it.
dsalo | July 8, 2010Richard Wallis has taken my ribbing in good part, which I appreciate; his response is here and will reward your perusal.
He also left a comment here, part of which I will make bold to reproduce:
As to RDF underpinning the Linked Data Web - it is only as necessary as HTML was to the growth of the Web itself. Documents were being posted on the Internet in all sorts of formats well before Tim Berners-Lee introduced us to the open and shared HTML format which facilitated the exponential growth of the Web. Some of the above comments are very reminiscent of the "why do I need to use HTML"…
dsalo | July 8, 2010So, the PepsiCo blog thing. Right.
Advance disclaimer: this is me talking, not either of my illustrious co-bloggers. We have not yet made a decision about what to do; one co-blogger is across the pond at a conference and the other is vacationing, so that discussion will have to wait a bit. This is just my take.
Book of Trogool is very small fry at ScienceBlogs. Very small. SB was a bit dubious about it at the start, to tell the truth, and if their info-science stable had been better-established I doubt they'd have taken it on. I'm very grateful that they did, because I needed them.
One of the…
dsalo | July 6, 2010Richard Wallis of Talis (a library-systems vendor) posted The Data Publishing Three-Step to the Talis blog recently.
My reaction to this particular brand of reductionism is… shall we say, impolitic. I just want to pat Richard on the head and croon "Who's the clever boy, then? You are! Yes, you are!" This is terrible of me, no question about it, and I apologize unreservedly.
Here's the problem, though. Aside from my friends the open scientists (and not even all of them, to be honest), practically all the data-producing researchers I know are firmly stuck on Step 1. Firmly stuck, not to say "…
dsalo | July 1, 2010I would be utterly remiss in my duties were I not to point out SciBling John Wilbanks's vitally important new open-access initiative.
I pledge my full and free support. After all, my brain is basically purée anyway…
(Apologies to those who saw this briefly yesterday. John jumped the, er, gun yesterday, and so did I.)
dsalo | June 29, 2010Much is murky in open access, but this at least is clear: academic libraries have committed different amounts of money and staff toward an open-access future, from a flat zero up to hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth.
It's the zeroes and near-zeroes that concern me (why, hello there, Yale, and hello again, Yale), though I also believe quite strongly that libraries that have made significant investments of money, staff, and/or political capital should be recognized and praised for it.
The difficulty here is that it isn't just the scale of open-access investment that varies. The nature of…
dsalo | June 24, 2010I am bursting with pride to introduce Sarah Shreeves and Elizabeth Brown as co-bloggers here on Book of Trogool!
(You'll have to excuse me if I go over my exclamation-point quota. I'm just so excited about this!)
I will let them tell you about themselves; I'll just say that Sarah works for the University of Illinois, and Elizabeth works for Binghamton University, and they're both fabulous librarians I'm very proud to know.
Please expect some dust over the next few days or weeks as I fiddle with the templates to make them co-blogger-friendly and ensure that it's clear who's written what. And…
dsalo | June 21, 2010There is, in fact, more to life than the California vs. NPG battle royale. I know, I'm surprised too.
It's funny because it's true! Daily Life in an Ivory Basement offers the NSF a data-management plan.
Along those same lines, coping with data ranks high in worry factor in this OCLC report on research-related info needs faculty say they have. Rings true, though I don't entirely believe that faculty don't look to the library on copyright; what I believe is that they mostly don't think about it, but on the rare occasion that they do, they look to the library. See also Local scientist learns…
dsalo | June 15, 2010Other people are doing NPG vs. CDL link roundups better than I am, so I'll limit myself to a few links:
Think this is a one-off moment of insanity on NPG's part? Bernd-Christoph Kaemper demonstrates the pattern.
Steve Lawson of Colorado College shares text of an email he sent to faculty at his institution. He is graciously allowing the rest of us to plunder his wording. Go ye and spread the signal!
The next domino? How many more will there be?
Have you read Bethany Nowviskie's Fight Club Soap post yet? If you haven't, do. If you have, you might want to check back for the comments, some of…
dsalo | June 11, 2010Having inflicted at least one truly Bulwer-Lytton-contest-worthy metaphor on FriendFeed today ("The NPG/CDL thing isn't about open access; open access is just lurking there, kinda like a knife-wielding maniac in a horror movie"), I feel I must raise the stakes by linking to this Derangement and Description comic.
This is the first time anyone has dedicated a comic to me. I am honored! And still chuckling.
dsalo | June 10, 2010This morning, when Nature Publishing Group responded to the University of California library's broadside, I contemplated taking the response apart piece by piece in a bit of "... translated into English" satire.
I'm glad I didn't have the chance. I'm much, much happier for people to read the University of California library's response. (By the way, I am using "library" here as shorthand for the entire set of UCal libraries. E pluribus, unum.) I haven't words for the tart, uncompromising brilliance that is this volley in the gauntlet-throwing contest. Go, California!
Instead, I'll link to some…
dsalo | June 9, 2010So I'm turning over the California/NPG situation in my head, because I—okay, because I'm obsessive, are you happy now? (Just don't ask how late I was sending email last night.)
The very cynical portion of my brain notes that it's almost certainly easier to persuade faculty to inaction than action. California didn't try to use this crisis to convince faculty to self-archive; that's work, that is, and the tie between self-archiving and dealing with NPG's extortionate tactics is weakly evident at best. California merely told faculty "don't work for NPG." Less work! Cheers! they appear to have…
dsalo | June 8, 2010This is the sort of event I can never, ever manage to predict. Like the Harvard OA mandate. Or the PRISM Coalition.
In brief, Nature Publishing Group tried the usual big-publisher contract-renewal tactics: jack the price a lot, because although librarians squeal, faculty never listen, so eventually the librarians knuckle under and sign the big fat check.
Only this time? Not only is check signage at risk, but so is all the free labor that University of California faculty provide to NPG in the form of authoring, editing, and peer review. That latter is the real boycott, and everyone involved…
dsalo | June 8, 2010I'm not a business analyst with my eye on the scholarly publishing industry, but if I were, I'd sound an awful lot like Claudio Aspesi being interviewed by Richard Poynder.
I can't speak to Elsevier's internal organizational issues, but the rest of Aspesi's words ring true to me. Libraries have kicked the serials can as far as it will go. There is no more money now, and I don't believe more is on the horizon; if anything, less is.
I do believe that there's room for the big publishers to trim operational costs by cutting journals left and right, and I expect them to try it. I don't know how…
dsalo | June 4, 2010Another reason it's been quiet around here is that comments haven't been appearing.
This was my fault (though I am innocent of any ill intent), and I apologize with all my heart. What happened was this: I was getting quite a bit of the particularly obnoxious kind of spam that copies other comments to appear legitimate. I cranked up the behind-the-scenes spam filter, which cheerfully snaffled every single comment and then bitbucketed them after a few days.
I didn't notice this (except to wonder why nobody was commenting! I figured it was me…) until one gentleman asked me in gmail today whether…
dsalo | June 3, 2010*blows off the dust*
It's been quiet around here. Sorry about that. Morphing jobs is chaotic, as is moving offices. I've missed a writing deadline, made another, and have a third coming up. I don't have a proper desk in my new office yet (I will soon), and my current makeshift is making my good old RSI flare up, which disinclines me to type more in the evenings.
I'm also still thinking about things. I'm grateful for the out-of-band comments I've received. Mostly (and my apologies if I traduce anyone) the themes are these:
My writings are still useful to people, and
I don't seem to be making…
dsalo | May 28, 2010This post is intended for Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt's crowdsourced Hacking the Academy book.
Arguments about open access usually appeal to altruism, tradition, or economics. Even arguments supposedly aimed at researcher self-interest strike me as curiously abstract, devoid of useful example. I will therefore tell my story about open access, because I hacked the academy and lived to tell about it.
I graduated from library school in May 2005, and by good fortune managed to begin employment as an institutional-repository manager in July. Knowing no better, I wrote about my experiences and…
dsalo | May 27, 2010I'm on record predicting a toll-access journal bloodbath.
Anecdotes are not data, one dead swallow doesn't mean the end of summer, and so on… but I just heard yesterday about a second small independent toll-access journal whose sponsors may be discussing winding it down.
This isn't the scenario I was quite looking for; I expected a stable-fire or two among small journals at the big publishers. That isn't happening yet. Some big publishers are still posting record profits, so the squeeze isn't on. Others are going on buying sprees hoping to trade on exclusive access.
I do think those record…