jdupuis | March 13, 2013Why I Ignore Gurus, Sherpas, Ninjas, Mavens, and Other Sages
Open Access and the Author-Pays Problem: Assuring Access for Readers and Authors in a Global Community of Scholars
Tenure-Track Science Faculty and the 'Open Access Citation Effect'
Academic Libraries as Data Quality Hubs
Writing for Exposure: What Publishers Should Promise When They Aren’t Paying
Why We Miss the First Sale Doctrine in Digital Libraries
Publishers are reshaping themselves
Teaching in a straitjacket (ie. a MOOC)
Book publishers blast Amazon's plan to control domain names
Unintended Consequences of Journal Ranking…
jdupuis | March 11, 2013I have a son who's currently a first year physics student. As you can imagine, I occasionally pass along a link or two to him pointing to stuff on the web I think he might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other science students might find those links interesting or useful as well.
By necessity and circumstance, the items I've chosen will be influenced by my son's choice of major and my own interest in computational approaches to science.
There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs
The ten commandments of student science blogging…
jdupuis | March 8, 2013Just like the author of this piece, I too attended a recent talk by Cory Doctorow -- a brilliant talk relating the life and death of Aaron Swartz with the theme of his latest novel Homeland -- and similarly I often marvel at how lucky we are that the web is free and open.
Enjoy this wonderful little satire and shudder at the possibilities.
The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL!
The World Wide Web has been great, but to be honest, it's also been a lot harder than it needs to be. I know some of you love creating new web pages and participating in online discussions, but the last thing most…
jdupuis | March 7, 2013The Myth of the Successful College Dropout: Why It Could Make Millions of Young Americans Poorer
Faculty consider the future of research libraries
In Defense of Librarians
The Real Reason Journal Articles Should Be Free
The Genius Of Raising Brilliant Kids: A Conversation With Jack Andraka's Parents
How Corporations Score Big Profits By Limiting Access To Publicly Funded Academic Research
Can repositories solve the access problem?
Take me as I am, and my paper as it is?
Declines in Print Revenue Outweigh Digital Growth, Driving Results Down at Harlequin
Inside TED: the smartest bubble in the…
jdupuis | March 2, 2013(This post supersedes the previous post listing items related to the Aaron Swartz story. That post was from January 20, 2013.)
A few comments.
Aaron Swartz's story has had a huge impact, it has reverberated far and wide not just through the interlinking worlds of technology and online activism but far into the mainstream. The library world has been no exception, with quite a few of the items below being from our world.
How has the library world reacted? If anything, I would hope that we have been challenged to examine our core values very carefully, to reflect deeply about how we make…
jdupuis | March 1, 2013A fun sentiment if I've ever heard one. And I'm sure we all have a band/performer that we'd like to nominate as the "Performer most likely to keep aliens away from earth." Being Canadian, I think I can safely nominate Celine Dion.
"We never visited because we hate The Carpenters" say aliens
Aliens have confirmed that they’ve never landed on Earth because they can’t stomach easy listening music. ‘We buzzed a Lighthouse Family concert in Tunbridge Wells and thought “Has it really come to this?”’ said a spokesextraterrestrial.
*snip*
‘It took me thirty or so of your Earth years to get there,…
jdupuis | March 1, 2013The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists—in 7 Charts
The Ph.D. Bust, Pt. II: How Bad Is the Job Market For Young American-Born Scientists?
Tenure Track as Alt-Ac
Ph.D. Job Woes
How Many Ph.D.'s Actually Get to Become College Professors?
Government vs. the Public: Mind the science gap
#CanComm, Conferences, and the Search for Allies
What I learned about Librarianship from the Signage on the Underground
The human in digital humanities
Why the Web will gut paid e-books and apps, and why free can pay for authors and publishers
The publishing industry has a problem, and EPUB is…
jdupuis | February 23, 2013Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research
Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research
Second shoe drops: new White House Directive mandates OA
AAP Supports OSTP Policy Urging Collaboration in Public Access
White House Public Access Policy Is Out
White House Delivers New Open-Access Policy That Has Activists Cheering
SPARC applauds White House for landmark directive opening up access to scientific research
Big day for open access
All you loons
PLOS Commends White House Directive on Open Access
Happy, happy day! OSTP issues directive to expand open…
jdupuis | February 22, 2013Cracked is as Cracked does. Especially in this case, where some researchers do some especially cracked things. Or more precisely, things they only could have thought of after being cracked on the head.
Librarian researchers, don't try this at your library!
The 5 Most Badass Things Ever Done in the Name of Research
5. Thor Heyerdahl Crosses the Pacific Ocean on a Raft
On the 101st day, they made it. The "boat" hit a reef in French Polynesia and beached on an uninhabited island. But it didn't prove his point; even though Heyerdahl had proved that the journey was possible, no one believed that…
jdupuis | February 20, 2013You Build A Library with Books
Beware the Big Errors of ‘Big Data’
Some Preliminary Theses on MOOCs
Tear it down, build it up: the Research Output Team, or the library-as-publisher
Publishers versus libraries>Waking Up to New Approaches to Community Media and Librarianship
Wikipedia vs Britannica
Open Access, library and publisher competition, and the evolution of general commerce
Why Science Journal Paywalls Have to Go
A Vision for the Future of Scholarly Publishing
Scientists who engage with society perform better academically
MacArthur Foundation researchers find a new digital divide…
jdupuis | February 13, 2013The biennial Western Conference on Science Education will be taking place this coming July 9–July 11, 2013.
I'm thinking very seriously of going and I think science/engineering librarians in general should consider doing so as well.
Here's how they describe it:
The biennial Western Conference for Science Education creates an ongoing organizational infrastructure that invites teaching and research faculty, librarians and other educational professionals, regardless of their experience level, to collaborate on the improvement of post-secondary Science education through the exchange of…
jdupuis | February 9, 2013So here's the rather strange story.
Way back in 2010, librarian Dale Askey, then of Kansas State University, wrote a blog post critical of the humanities monograph publisher Edwin Mellen. Basically, he stated that the publishers' low quality did not justify their high prices. No big deal, really, librarians have lots of opinions about publishers and share them all the time around the water cooler, at conferences and online. But perhaps foreshadowing what was coming, Askey remarked in his post: "Given how closely Mellen guards its reputation against all critics, perhaps I should just put on my…
jdupuis | February 8, 2013Librarians seem to be under siege these days, both from within and without.
But at our core, librarians no matter where they work just want to make the world a better place.
io9 has a wonderful older post with a list of fictional librarians who've perhaps put that motto into action a little more directly than most: 20 heroic librarians who save the world.
Here's a couple, but definitely go on over to the post and check the rest out:
Rex Libris in the Rex Libris comics
Rex Libris is the "tough-as-nails Head Librarian at Middleton Public Library," who strikes fear into recalcitrant borrowers —…
jdupuis | February 7, 2013Like lunch, writing isn’t free
when librarians lend their politics - or, information wants to be doctrinaire
OLITA Resolution on Opposition to Access Copyright License Agreements
Calling out nonsense - Access Copyright
On (Access) Copyright
What is the government's interest in copyright? Not that of the public.
The Fastest Way to Send Big Chunks of Data Is Through the Mail, Not the Internet
Postdocalypse now
You Can't Start the Revolution from the Country Club
The end of the book as we know it, and I feel (mostly) fine.
Lending literacy
When Authorship Isn’t Enough: Lessons from CERN on the…
jdupuis | February 4, 2013Jonathan Fetter-Vorm's Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb is a real gem of a graphic novel, yet another stunning exemplar of what is possible with the graphic novel format.
As I've often said, there are basically two kinds of science graphic novels -- those that use the format to illustrate the same content as a textbook would have on the theory that anything illustrated must be more accessible and enjoyable. And those that use the graphic novel format to its fullest, finding a new way to bring science to a mass audience. The latter, of course, if preferable. But I have to…
jdupuis | January 31, 2013Some colleagues and I are presenting tomorrow at the latest Ontario Library Association Super Conference. Here's the info:
Session: #1307:
Friday 3:45 PM 5:00 PM
IF I KNEW THEN WHAT I KNOW NOW
Career development
Speaker(s)
John Dupuis, Acting Associate University Librarian, Information Services, York University; Tanis Fink, Director, Seneca Libraries, Seneca College; Amanda French, Manager, Sciences and Business Dept, Mississauga Library System; Klara Maidenberg, Virtual Reference Services & Assessment and Evaluation Librarian, Scholars Portal, OCUL; Zachary Osborne, Head Librarian,…
jdupuis | January 30, 2013I'm doing a session at the Ontario Library Conference tomorrow with a few colleagues. The topic is Creative Commons licensing and I'm doing the section on Open Data. It's a kind of a replay of what we did for library staff about a year ago.
Here's the info this time:
Session: #308
Thursday 9:05 AM 10:20 AM
Creative Commons and Beyond
Speaker(s)
Timothy Bristow, Digital Humanities Librarian; John Dupuis, Acting Associate University Librarian, Information Services; Andrea Kosavic, Digital Initiatives Librarian; Sharon Wang, Association Librarian; York University
Learn more about creative…
jdupuis | January 28, 2013Every year for the last several years I've collated and extracted the science books from all the various "best books of the year" lists in different mainstream media and various other outlets. I've done the same this year for books published in 2011! I can tell it's been popular among my readers from the hit stats I see for this blog and from the number of keyword searches on "best science books" or whatnot I see in my analytics program.
Way back in 2009, I started taking all the lists I could find and tallying up all the "votes" to see which books were mentioned the most times. An…
jdupuis | January 20, 2013The recent death of Aaron Swartz has provoked a lot of commentary on the web so I thought I would gather some of it here. This is by no means an attempt to be comprehensive as the amount of commentary has been truly vast. I've tried to gather enough so that someone working through even a small selection of the posts would get a good idea of all the dimensions of the story. I've also tried to perhaps give a bit of a library/academia slant in the selection.
As usual with these compilations, readers should feel free to suggest further readings in the comments especially those that add a…
jdupuis | January 19, 2013Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure.
Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting about all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year.
All the previous 2012 lists are here.
This post includes the following: Top Books of 2012: History of Science, Paleontology , Zoolology.
Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History by Ahmad Dallal
Smoking Ears and Screaming Teeth: A Celebration of Scientific Eccentricity and Self-Experimentation by Trevor…