jdupuis | July 25, 2016How climate change may be fueling Canada’s fire season
Environmentalists, automakers applaud Ontario's $8.3B climate change plan
Views from people on the frontlines of climate change
How B.C.'s Climate Plan is Being Co-opted by Big Oil
Once a climate doubter, Tory leadership contender Maxime Bernier now plans to consult scientists
Climate change initiatives a $7-trillion funding opportunity for capital markets: Carney
Nearly Twenty Canadian Companies Sign On to Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition
If You Want To Fight Climate Change, Don't Fight Pipelines
These are the best arguments from the…
jdupuis | June 22, 2016One of the key faults of the Harper Conservatives' science policy was their emphasis on applied research to the detriment of basic, curiosity driven research. Obviously there needs to be a balance between any government's approach to those two kinds of research, neither polar opposite is appropriate. But the Conservatives were way out of wack with their policy, significantly favouring commercially-driven, industrial-partnership-focused, applied research. The signature policy in that vein was their transformation of the National Research Council into a Concierge to Industry.
Thankfully the…
jdupuis | June 10, 2016The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review
Scholarly Communications: Less of a market, more like general taxation?
“We don’t need OA in our field, everything is on arXiv”. Nope.>When is the Library Open? and the PS
Scholarly Communication and the Dilemma of Collective Action: Why Academic Journals Cost Too Much
Open Access: the beast that no-one could – or should – control?
Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it?
Why embargo periods are bad for academic publishers
Infrastructure is Invisible / Infrastructure is…
jdupuis | May 30, 2016I'll be attending upcoming Canadian Library Association National Forum, a kind of sunset conference as CLA reimagines and recreates itself. The idea is to take the pulse of Canadian librarians on the important issues in the library-related landscape. I'll be curating the session on Canada's National Digital Strategy, including presentations by me and two others, Emily Landriault and Bobby Glushko.
The details are below.
Digital Strategy and the Government of Canada
Presentation speakers
Emily Landriault: Open Government and Open Data
Bobby Glushko: Cyberbullying and Doxing
John Dupuis:…
jdupuis | May 24, 2016The record exec, his massive record collection and a future where records won’t matter
What an opera review spiked by the National Post really tells us
Open Letter to YouTube, “Pushers” of Piracy
I’ve sold all my CDs. Can I live without those cracked plastic cases of magic and memories?
Apple Terminating Music Downloads ‘Within 2 Years’
Apple Stole My Music. No, Seriously.
I Remember: The Music of the Holocaust
Revolutionary Eruption: The Violent Sound of Magma and Musical Fusion in 1970s France
MAGMA’S CHEERFULLY INSANE BRAND OF SCI-FI AVANT GARDE MAKE THEM PROG ROCK’S WEIRDEST OUTLIERS
Why…
jdupuis | May 18, 2016Main event. Definitely.
Elsevier's acquisition of the open access journal article and working papers repository and online community Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is definitely a case of Elsevier tipping their hand and giving us all a peek at their real long term strategy.
Much more so than their whack-a-mole antics with Sci-Hub and other "pirate" services.
One of the big hints is how they've tied it's acquisition so closes with their last important, strategic acquisition -- Mendeley. Another hint is that they also tie it in to one of their cornerstone products, Scopus.
From the…
jdupuis | May 6, 2016The town of Fort McMurray, Alberta and it's surrounding region are experiencing a horrific wildfire. Tens of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate.
The absolute most important thing in the short and medium term is to take care of the people of Fort McMurray. Yes, Fort McMurray is the hub of tar sands development in Canada. Yes, the tar sands and other fossil fuel development projects contribute to climate change. Yes, the tar sands in particular have been identified as a carbon source that needs to be left in the ground. But those aren't short and medium term considerations. Those…
jdupuis | May 3, 2016I have a son who's currently a fourth year physics undergrad who is headed more the direction of math rather than physics for the possibility of grad school. As you can imagine, I may occasionally pass along a link or two to him pointing to stuff on the web I think they might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps a) this kind of post might be more efficient and b) other undergrad students might find those links interesting or useful as well. Hence, this series of posts here on the blog.
The items I've chosen are mostly geared towards science…
jdupuis | April 29, 2016And by blame, I mean "blame."
Yesterday the flagship journal of the AAAS, Science, published a series of feature and editorial articles on Sci-Hub, the unauthorized article sharing site.
Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
The frustrated science student behind Sci-Hub
My love-hate of Sci-Hub
It's a Sci-Hub world data set
Overall, the articles are pretty good descriptions of the Sci-Hub phenomenon and relatively even-handed, especially coming from one of the big society publishers like AAAS.
There was one bit in the main article, Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone, that really…
jdupuis | April 28, 2016The math the planet relies on isn’t adding up right now
Reframing The Economics Debate Could Lead To More Action To Fight Climate Change
Abandon hype in climate models
The Future Role of Economics in the IPCC
Climate change will wipe $2.5tn off global financial assets: study
The Unsexy Climate Solution That's a Total No-Brainer
The solution to (nearly) everything: working less
Only One Canadian University Has Divested. Here's How Alumni Can Help Change That
Exxon Using Tobacco’s Failed Free Speech Defense for Decades of Deception on Climate Change
“There is no doubt”: Exxon Knew CO2 Pollution…
jdupuis | April 16, 2016Or at least a certain corner of Canadian politics. For some definitions of "blow up."
For those not followong Canadian politics, our more-or-less socialist party, The New Democratic Party, recently held a policy convention where they also held a leadership review vote. The current leader, Tom Mulcair, lost the vote and as a result the NDP will be spending the next two years or so looking for a new leader.
What's significant from our point of view here is why he lost the vote. While the results of the last Federal election certainly played a role, the more proximate cause was a battle of…
jdupuis | April 15, 2016Magma, the strangest rock band of all time, needs you to help finance a documentary film about their life and work.
So here goes. Up until a year or so ago I'd never heard of the French prog rock band Magma, or at least their music had never penetrated my consciousness. But last year while spending the month of May in Paris, I visited a bunch or record stores (and book stores and comic stores...) and noticed records and CDs by this band Magma prominently displayed, like I should know who they are or something. It took me a while to notice enough that I forced myself to dig a bit deeper and…
jdupuis | April 1, 2016Reader Beware: Please note the date of publication of this post.
It's been really gratifying over the last year to see how my DSCaM scholarly communications empire has grown. From it's small beginnings, Dupuis Science Computing & Medicine has craved out a small but important niche in the discount APC publishing community.
And I really appreciate how the scholarly communications community has encouraged my career progression from publisher of a journal at Elsevier to Chief Advisor on Science Libraries for the Government of Canada to last year's huge launch of DSCaM.
And the DSCaM empire…
jdupuis | February 29, 2016Rall, Ted. Snowden. New York: Random House, 2015. 224pp. ISBN-13: 978-1609806354
For those that have watched Citizenfour or read Glenn Greenwald's No place to hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. surveillance state, there's not much new or shocking in Ted Rall's excellent graphic novel, Snowden.
But for someone who hasn't had a chance to check out either or those works, this is a fantastic place to start a deeper exploration into the amazing story around Edward Snowden, one of the major figures in the current debate about the way governments try to control and monitor the Internet. It…
jdupuis | February 26, 2016Yeah, you have to figure good old Indy wasn't much of an academic colleague. Too flashy, never around to sit on a search committee, never willing to take his turn as chair, always blowing up the wrong building or disrupting the wrong classroom. And then there's the ghosts and arcs and demons and what not. And not even a book chapter or high-impact-factor publication to show for it! What, Science or Nature should have been beating down his door!
Well, let's see what his colleagues had to say about all this!
Why Professor Indiana Jones Was Hated By His Colleagues
Aug. 27, 1936
Dr. Henry Walton…
jdupuis | February 22, 2016The controversy about Sci-Hub is raging in the halls of scholarship and academic publishing.
What's the story, in a nutshell?
Sci-Hub is a Russian website that has used donated institutional login credentials to harvest tens of millions of academic articles and has posted them on their site, free to access and read for everyone. This has not pleased the academic publishing community, to say the least. Elsevier is leading the charge to shut them down, succeeding with one iteration of the site last year until, mushroom-like, Sci-Hub has popped up again this year.
My take? Mostly that it's a…
jdupuis | February 5, 2016Oh, The Onion. You are so wonderful and your take on the world of patents is so spot on that it hurts.
What are patents for, anyways?
Here's a bit of an excerpt from their 11 Step Program. Drop by the site to see the rest. Brilliant.
Step 1: First, come up with something really cool, like a cheese grater that works in both directions. Oh shit, don’t steal that one! That’s mine!
Step 2: Research the marketplace to find out if your idea is original or if some asshole has already stolen it from you.
.
.
Step 11: Spend remainder of bitter, unnaturally truncated life filing lawsuits to protect…
jdupuis | January 28, 2016We have a Steacie Library Hackfest coming up and our there this year is Making a Difference with Data. And what better area to make a difference in than the environment and climate change?
I am far from an expert on this topic, so suggestions for additions (and deletions if I've added anything inappropriate) are welcome. In particular, deeper and more complete data sources for Canada would be nice to have. I would also very much like to improve coverage beyond the North American focus with a wider variety of targeted regional and national data sources.
This set of lists is not meant to be…
jdupuis | January 25, 2016Donald R. Prothero's The Story of Life in 25 Fossils: Tales of Intrepid Fossil Hunters and the Wonders of Evolution has a bit of something for everyone. It's a great introduction to the history of life on the planet Earth, it's a solid primer on why evolution is true. It's a fun read with lots of tales of paleontological adventure and derring do. One of my favourite parts is the list of "must visit" natural history museums both in the US and around the world (I've been to seven of them, but I hope to visit more of them!). Tips on where you can actually see the fossils under discussion for…
jdupuis | January 13, 2016As you all have no doubt noticed over the years, I love highlighting the best science books every year via the various end of year lists that newspapers, web sites, etc. publish. I've done it so far in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.
And here we are in 2015!
As in previous years, my definition of "science books" is pretty inclusive, including books on technology, engineering, nature, the environment, science policy, history & philosophy of science, geek culture and whatever else seems to be relevant in my opinion.
Today's list is Gizmodo's The Science Books We Loved Most in…