dsalo | March 5, 2010I'm in Urbana-Champaign this weekend to teach an in-person day for my online collection-development class. I'm looking forward to it; every time I teach I am reminded that students are smarter than I am.
For now, tidbits!
As world plus dog probably knows already, The Economist tackled the data deluge.
Adam Christensen gives us the modest, unassuming Data. The foundation for everything on an intelligent, interconnected, instrumented planet.
Rethinking scholarly communication from the ground up: SciBling John Dupuis asks Are computing journals too slow? and Dan Cohen muses about how best to…
dsalo | March 2, 2010One of the latest institutional open-access policies comes from Harvard Business School (hat tip to Stuart Shieber).
This is the same school that plays horrendous anti-library, anti-education games with their flagship Harvard Business Review.
My head hurts.
dsalo | March 1, 2010So the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is mired in a rapidly heating controversy over a report that apparently let some dubious information slip through the cracks. Here's the money quote:
The discovery of the glaciers mistake has focused attention on the IPCC's use of so-called grey literature: reports that do not appear in conventional scientific journals, and are instead drawn from sources such as campaign groups, companies and student theses. The IPCC's rules allow such grey literature, but many people have been surprised at the scale of its inclusion.
Oh my, oh…
dsalo | February 26, 2010It's Friday! Snack on some tidbits.
In the "didn't anyone teach you to show your work in grade school?" department, we have NIWA unable to justify official temperature record, as well as the radical notion of using actual data to gauge the effectiveness of review boards in stopping unethical research.
In the "open is not a panacea" department, we have Nat Torkington rethinking open data, or at least its funding models (hat tip to Trevor Muñoz), and JISC's Clarion project trying to convince principal investigators that sharing data is a useful thing to do.
In the "let's kill all the lawyers"…
dsalo | February 26, 2010So the backstory of the truly horrific murders at the University of Alabama at Huntsville has taken an open-access turn: the perpetrator (not being a journalist, I don't think I need to say "alleged") got a rather dubious-looking article published in an open-access journal.
Further investigation into the journal only heightens concern; while we're not quite talking about Bentham or SJI here, we're definitely in that ballpark. I won't rehash details, because Richard Poynder has it covered with admirably succinct directness. I believe what he's recounted, and I agree with his analysis in its…
dsalo | February 23, 2010I've been interviewed by Bora Zivkovic, apropos of many things. Click over if you've a mind.
dsalo | February 22, 2010The journal impact factor is a sham and a crock and a delusion, let's just take that as read. (If you don't care to take that as read, which is a healthy and sane attitude—take no one's word as gospel, especially not mine!—start here or perhaps here and keep going.) Using it to judge individual researchers' output, never mind the researchers themselves, verges on the criminal, is my strong belief. I'm not against heuristics, but some heuristics are plain broken, and the journal impact factor is one of those.
So it really hurts my heart to see librarians giving this flawed number credence.…
dsalo | February 19, 2010I've altered the tagline on this blog slightly, to reflect where it seems to be going. (I am not in control here; I am merely the author-function! Sorry, sorry, lit-crit joke.)
At the same time, I've been thinking a lot about library collections, what's in them and how it gets there. (I'm teaching a graduate course in collection development at the moment, which has of course bent my thoughts in that direction.)
Here's where I'm sitting, and my commenters (who are smarter than I am) are welcome to challenge me. When collection development came into its own in academic libraries, forty years or…
dsalo | February 18, 2010I'm home sick today, and not precisely looking forward to giving my class tonight because I really do feel wiped out. Fortunately, tidbits posts are easy…
Denmark ponders the future of the research library. A thoughtful read for librarians; a good skim for scientists wondering how libraries will help them in future.
Congratulations to Galaxy Zoo for its first published paper based on crowdsourced galaxy-classification data. May there be many more!
Code is data too, says Chris Wiggins, arguing that you can't really judge results until you know what's been done to the data.
An Economic Argument…
dsalo | February 16, 2010I have a very lengthy post in pickle that is taking me some time to work through. Forgive me; sometimes that's what blogging is for, though it's tough on the posting rate.
In the meantime, a small thought about improving interaction patterns between scientists and librarians, something I still very much think is necessary for both groups.
Cameron Neylon notes in his quick review of the new FriendFeed-based ScienceFeed that the name is not ideal:
Finally there is the problem of the name. I was very careful at the top of this post to be inclusive in the scope of people who I think can benefit…
dsalo | February 9, 2010Since early days indeed, it's been possible to bypass journal publishers and libraries in a quest for a particular article by going directly to the author. Some publishers have even facilitated this limited variety of samizdat by offering authors a few ready-made offprints.
I've even had publishers give me e-offprints (which to me, preprint disseminator that I am, just feels weird). The repository software ePrints can place an "ask the author" button on items that are withheld from public view for whatever reason. As best I can tell, just about everyone involved in scholarly communication…
dsalo | February 2, 2010Perhaps shockingly, I don't plan to so much as try to wade through all seven-hundred-odd pages of this report on scholarly-publishing practices. It's thorough, it's well-documented, it's decently-written… and based on the executive summary (itself weighing in at a hefty 20 pages), it won't tell me a thing I don't already know.
Academia is conservative. Academia thinks its current scholarly-production system is just fine and dandy, thank you. Academia has a love-hate relationship with peer review. Academia wants to outsource its tenure and promotion decisions any way that is convenient and…
dsalo | February 1, 2010Happy Groundhog's Day Eve! Or something.
Jennifer Rohn discusses how suboptimal data management makes downstream tasks such as submitting papers to journals a bit harder. The bit about proprietary image formats is particularly cringe-inducing.
Why Cameron Neylon is disappointed with Nature Communications. Nature is a leader among journals; the rest of us need it to get open access right.
And speaking of Cameron, Hope Leman does an absolutely brilliant interview with him.
The Research Information Network's new research officer asks pertinent questions about data-quality standards in UK data…
dsalo | January 30, 2010I'm getting quite a few more comments here than when I started, which is lovely! To keep the conversation lively and civil, I've put together a comment policy, which you can find on the blog's About page. (I'll link to it from the sidebar momentarily.)
It's mostly common sense. Moreover, I haven't had to edit or delete a non-spam comment here yet.
Still, I'd rather have a policy and not need it than need it and not have it. So now it's there.
dsalo | January 29, 2010(My apologies; this post inadvertently went up prematurely. If you were wondering where I was going with it, please read on!)
I met Steve Koch at Science Online 2010, where he wowed me showing off his students' open-notebook-science work. I love, just love, teachers who do that. I wish the sort of work I typically assign students was appropriate to it.
Because of the interactions Steve had with librarians at that conference, he's going back to talk with the digital librarian at his institution to see what they can do for each other.
I love that, too, though it makes me nervous. Consider a…
dsalo | January 26, 2010Back in the day, Time Warner merged with AOL. It turned out to be one of the worst merger ideas in the history of merger ideas, and I believe the evidence suggests that most mergers actually turn out to be clunkers!
AOL was simply at the top of its orbit, nowhere but downhill to go.
I wonder, I do, whether Time Warner learned from that experience, and that's why they started shopping exclusive deals to aggregators. (For the record, exclusive deals aren't new in this market.) Grab all the money you can with the exclusivity flag—before the market value of your product declines with a vengeance…
dsalo | January 26, 2010It's odd to wake up in the morning to discover that I've earned a new Nerd Merit Badge. I for one welcome our new Boing Boing overlords readers, and I thank the marvelous Jessamyn West for the shout-out.
Now. To clear some things up.
It was pointed out in a lengthy comment to the BoingBoinged post that publishers aren't doing this because they're evil; it's Just Bidness. Well, yes, it is. That doesn't require me to refrain from pointing out that Just Bidness in the monolithic-publisher toll-access serials industry is squeezing libraries, destroying university presses and responsible small…
dsalo | January 25, 2010I don't hear as much curiosity from the research community as I'd like to about what a librarian knows and does, but I do hear some.
For that some, I suggest poking through the fourth annual iteration of Librarian Day in the Life. A wide variety of librarians blog, tweet, photograph, and vid about what their day is like.
Don't just pay attention to the research-related ones, either. The more people who understand in their bones what public librarians, school librarians, and special librarians add to the communities they serve, the better off everyone is, librarian and community alike.
So go…
dsalo | January 22, 2010Because I scanted you on tidbits for quite some time, have a second tidbits post in a single week!
A little library advocacy: Five library resources you should be using.
Otherwise-closed data tend to open up in direct proportion to the perceived importance of the problem: GlaxoSmithKline opens up data on anti-malaria compounds. Now let's make this the default stance, shall we?
Undergraduate science librarian Bonnie Swoger talks Science Online 2010 and data.
Also on the Science Online 2010 roundup, the amazing Kevin Smith of Duke makes trenchant observations about copyright anxiety and it's…
dsalo | January 21, 2010Again in no particular order, some thoughts and ideas that came to mind during Science Online 2010:
I did quite a bit of library advocacy during the conference, and not just during the session dedicated to it! I noticed that I had the best luck when I could define a library service in terms of outcomes that would be useful to the person I was talking to. Not "IRs are great! Open access now!" but "if your interns deposit their presentations into the IR, your program will build institutional memory, and the interns themselves will build identities as researchers." Seems obvious enough, but the…