culture of science
jdupuis | June 13, 2017As a kind of quick follow up to my long ago post on Some perspective on “predatory” open access journals (presentation version, more or less, here and very short video version here) and in partial response to the recent What I learned from predatory publishers, I thought I would gather a bunch of worthwhile items here today.
Want to prepare yourself to counter panic around predatory open access journals? Here's some great places to start.
How to talk about “Predatory” Publishing: Reclaiming the Narrative
Beyond Beall’s List: Better understanding predatory publishers
Blacklists are…
jdupuis | January 17, 2017The STM Publishing News Group is a professional news site for the publishing industry which bring together a range of science, technology and medicine publishing stakeholders with the idea that they'll be able to share news amongst themselves as well as beyond the publishing world to the broader constituency of academics and librarians and others.
You can imagine how thrilled I was to see a post with the words, "How can publishers help librarians?" in the title? I was a little disappointed to find the entire title of the post is "How can publishers help librarians? Cambridge University Press…
jdupuis | December 20, 2016I don't have the time right now to do this justice, so I'll just lay out the story over the last year or so and let you, faithful reader, follow the thread. This is an amazing story.
This is an amazing initiative at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University in Montreal.
From the press release:
McGill University announces a transformative $20 million donation to the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital
Tanenbaum Open Science Institute to open new horizons and accelerate discovery in neuroscience
The Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, was present…
jdupuis | September 12, 2016I wish I knew how many times per week I get pitched opportunities to "interview" brave, unconventional, innovative "scientists" on my blog. Too many to count, most weeks. The pseudoscience PR whirlpool is vast and slippery. But there's also the legitimate "Hey, somebody at my university just published this thing, maybe you want to talk to them" pitch. While often interesting, that's not really what I do on this blog. I don't really do science explainers.
But once in a while, a pitch resonates. And such is the case with the pitch I got from Guerilla Science a few weeks ago. I'd heard of them…
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 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 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 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
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Step 11: Spend remainder of bitter, unnaturally truncated life filing lawsuits to protect…
jdupuis | November 11, 2015A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation as part of Open Access Week at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (ie. OCADU) on "predatory" open access journals. It seemed to be well-received at the time and since then I've gotten some positive feedback as well.
So I thought I'd share the slides here in case others find what I did at OCADU useful in their own work. What I talked about is along the same lines as a post I published a while back on Some perspective on “predatory” open access journals.
First of all, I'd like to thank Chris Landry of the OCADU Library for inviting me…
jdupuis | October 28, 2015My library is hosting a Ada Lovelace Day event tomorrow (ok, a little late...). Continuing in a tradition of having Women in Science Wikipedia Edit-a-thons, we're hosting our own Wikipedia Women in Science Edit-a-thon!
I've been doing a fair bit of reading over the last couple of years about Wikipedia culture and especially how it relates to the under-representation of women both as editors and as subjects of articles. So I thought I'd share some of my readings here with all of you.
Of course, this list is in no way comprehensive or complete. I welcome suggestions for further readings in the…
jdupuis | October 4, 2015Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler by Philip Ball and Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War by Brandon R. Brown are two of the best history of science books I've read in a very long time. And even though they're both about World War II, some seventy years in the past, they've both also very topical because they are both very much about the relationship between politics and science. In a sense, what comes first, the political chicken or the scientific egg. Are scientists responsible for how their work is put to use by their political "masters?" Do scientists…
jdupuis | September 30, 2015Though not explicitly tied to our current federal election campaign, the début this week of the Science Integrity Project and the publishing of their Statement of Principles for Sound Decision Making in Canada just as the campaign heats up is surely not coincidental.
In any case, election or not, this is a wonderful initiative and I support it wholeheartedly. There's lots of background on their website about the process for coming up with the principles, an FAQ and a few examples of how the principles work in practice.
From their website:
Welcome to the Science Integrity Project. Our project…
jdupuis | July 7, 2015Science! What's it good for? Working towards better knowledge about the natural world!
Under review today are two books that approach what science is and what it's good for from very different angles. Steven Weinberg is a Nobel laureate in physics and in his book To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science he uses the example of the development of physics and astronomy in modern times to show how the scientific method has been developed and evolved over time. Harry Collins is a sociologist who was instrumental in developing the fields of science studies and the sociology of…
jdupuis | June 26, 2015There's lots of discussion out there right now in the twitter and blog world concerning Bjorn Brembs' call to librarians to jumpstart the mass migration to Open Access by essentially unilaterally cancelling all the journals they subscribe to. This act would force the hands of all the various players in the ecosystem to immediately figure out how to make Open Access work.
Which is a great idea. I actually kind of mused about this sort of scenario a while back in a post called An Open Access thought experiment. Except what I wasn't smart enough or brave enough to do was imagine a scenario…
jdupuis | May 1, 2015Being a librarian and not really being eligible for any Nobel Prizes, this probably isn't the most practical advice I've ever highlighted here on the blog. But some of you readers out there are scientists, though, right? Right?
On the other hand, I see no reason why librarians can't be eligible for the Ig Nobel Prizes, a prize I aspire to winning one day for the team. In that case, this fine article, Ten Simple Rules to Win a Nobel Prize by Nobel laureate Richard J. Roberts probably does contain a few valuable lessons towards that particular goal.
Here's a taste, but please do read the…
jdupuis | March 30, 2015Predatory open access journals seem to be a hot topic these days. In fact, there seems to be kind of a moral panic surrounding them. I would like to counter the admittedly shocking and scary stories around that moral panic by pointing out that perhaps we shouldn't be worrying so much about a fairly small number of admittedly bad actors and that we should be more concerned with the larger issues around the limitations of peer review and how scientific error and fraud leak through that system.
I'm hoping my methodology here will be helpful. I hope to counter the predatory open access (OA)…
jdupuis | March 26, 2015Here's a bunch of graphic novels I've read in the last while that are well worth your time reading and acquiring for your library!
Abadzis, Nick. Laika. New York: First Second, 2007. 208pp. ISBN-13: 978-1596431010
Laika by Nick Abadzis in a fantastic graphic novel recounting the life of the first dog in space, the Russian dog Laika. The book goes into quite a bit of social and political history of the Soviet union in the 1950s, giving a good sense of how totalitarian states sometimes make decisions. We also get an illuminating look into the lives of people around Laika as her fateful one-way…
jdupuis | March 2, 2015Finally, the Canadian government's Tri-Agency funding councils (SSHRC, NSERC, CIHR) have released the consolidated final version of it's open access policy. The draft version came out some time ago. The consultation process garnered quite a few responses, which the Tri-Agencies were kind enough to summarize for us.
And finally it is here. I have to admit I was getting a bit concerned. The final version was rumoured to have been kicking around the various departments waiting for final sign-off for months. With the rumours of the Conservatives possibly dropping the writ and calling a spring…
jdupuis | February 11, 2015
Why Science Journal Paywalls Have to Go
Authors or journal editors: Who faces more pressure in the academic publishing system?
STM Consultation on Article Sharing (Draft principles here)
ICOLC Response to the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical (STM) Statement
A second front
STM’s new publishing licenses raise antitrust concerns amid wider efforts to pollute open access standards.
Scientists have the power to change the publishing system
The costs for going Gold in the Netherlands
Springer and universities take key step towards open access (The Netherlands)
CERN and…