escience
jdupuis | December 16, 2010Two recent announcements that are worth noting here.
The first is for Digital Science, a Macmillan / Nature Publishing Group project involving some of the usual science online suspects like Timo Hannay and Kaitlin Thaney and some others in a really dynamic-looking multi-disciplinary team.
The press release is here and the about page here.
Digital Science provides software and information to support researchers and research administrators in their everyday work, with the ultimate aim of making science more productive through the use of technology. As well as developing our own solutions, we…
jdupuis | December 9, 2010...Instead of a different Creative Commons license, such as CC-BY? Or just with normal copyright restrictions?
(You can get an explanation of CC0 here: it implies relinquishing all rights and essentially means releasing something into the public domain.)
A good question, one that I attempted to answer as part of my Exploring Open Science session at Brock University several weeks back. While I was talking about the importance of Open Data within the Open Science movement, one of the audience members very properly pressed the point of why it's important for data to be open.
I think I gave…
jdupuis | December 2, 2010As usual, lots of terrific articles are included in this issue. More and more, I wonder why a scitech librarian would publish their articles anywhere else, especially in a toll access journal.
Old Words, New Meanings: A Study of Trends in Science Librarian Job Ads by Brenna K.H. Bychowski, Carolyn M. Caffrey, Mia C. Costa, Angela D. Moore, Jessamyn Sudhakaran, and Yuening Zhang, Indiana University
Increasing the Visibility of the Library within the Academic Research Enterprise by Annette M. Healy, Wayne State Universitty
Science Seeker: A New Model for Teaching Information Literacy to Entry-…
jdupuis | November 23, 2010A terrific new edition of The Journal of Electronic Publishing (v13i2), focusing on the future of university presses and, by extension, of scholarly publishing as a whole.
A lot of terrific-looking articles:
Editor's Note for Reimagining the University Press by Phil Pochoda
Reimagining the University Press: A Checklist for Scholarly Publishers by Peter J. Doughtery
Reimagining the University Press by Kate Wittenberg
Stage Five Book Publishing by Joseph J. Esposito
Next-Generation University Publishing: A Perspective from California by Daniel Greenstein
What Might Be in Store for Universities…
jdupuis | November 5, 2010York University Computer Science & Engineering professor Anestis Toptsis was kind enough recently to invite me to speak to his CSE 3000 Professional Practice in Computing class.
He gave me two lecture sessions this term, one to talk about library-ish stuff. In other words, what third year students need to know about finding conference and journal articles (and other stuff too) for their assignments and projects. You can find my notes here, in the lecture 1 section.
In the second session, which I gave yesterday, he basically let me talk about anything that interested me. So, of course,…
jdupuis | October 22, 2010As I mentioned a few days ago, the kind librarians of Brock University in St. Catherines, ON invited me to give a talk as part of their Open Access Week suite of events.
I've included my slides for the presentation below. There was a small but engaged group of mostly librarians that turned up.
Please don't let the high number of slides deter you from zipping through the presentation. A good chunk of the slides only have a couple of words on them and another good chunk are screen shots of xkcd strips.
The slides are in our IR here and on Google Docs here.
I'd like to thank Barbara…
jdupuis | October 18, 2010The kind librarians at Brock University in St. Catherines, Ontario have invited me to help them celebrate Open Access Week!
Their rather impressive lineup of OA Week events (and I'm not just saying this because I'm involved, believe me) is here.
My part is a talk I'm giving on Wednesday:
Wednesday, October 20 2-3:30
Exploring Open Science
Join John Dupuis, Head of the Steacie Science & Engineering Library, York University, for a discussion of how Science and Technology academics and publishers are responding to the growing open access movement and the changing nature of research in…
jdupuis | October 18, 2010It's Open Access Week this week and as part of the celebrations I thought I highlight a recent declaration by the Open Bibliographic Working Group on the Principles for Open Bibliographic Data. It's an incredible idea, one that I support completely -- the aim is to make bibliographic data open, reusable and remixable. Creating a bibliographic data commons would lead to many opportunities to create search and discovery tools that would be of great benefit to scholarship, education, research and development.
I won't try and explain the details of the declaration since it's released under a CC…
jdupuis | August 5, 2010Dorothea Salo asks the question over on The Book of Trogool.
What do you, scientists, want librarians to know about how you communicate with other scientists? Where do you feel uncertain about the process? Where do you think it's coming up short? Do you think the process should change, and if so, how and how not?
I'm aware that librarians get stuck in our own thought-bubbles just like everybody else--I myself am certainly no exception. Here's a stab at bursting the bubble.
Head on over and let her know!
jdupuis | May 11, 2010I have a few conferences coming up and I thought I'd share my schedule just in case any of you out there in sciencelibrarianblogland will also be attending.
I'll list them in order, along with whatever I'll be presenting.
BookCamp Toronto, May 15, Toronto
9:30: eBooks in Education and Academia -- the glacial revolution
John Dupuis (York University)
Evan Leibovitch (York University)
Description: Despite growing public acceptance of eBooks, two areas in which they could offer the most benefit -- education and academia -- are far behind the eBook mainstream. This session will discuss issues…
jdupuis | March 18, 2010I received an email a couple of weeks ago from Daniel Cromer of the Hrenya Research Group located in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His group was interested in expanding their online presence and had stumbled up the presentation I'd given a couple of years ago on Academic Blogging: Promoting your Research on the Web. He asked me if I could explore those same ideas in a short presentation to the group.
That was Monday. Sadly, I wasn't able to actually go to Colorado for the presentation -- it was all online using the…
jdupuis | March 15, 2010ISTL is a great resource for those of us in science and technology libraries. I'm happy to report on the tables of contents from the last two issues.Winter 2010
Evaluation of an Audience Response System in Library Orientations for Engineering Students by Denise A. Brush, Rowan University
Open Access Citation Advantage: An Annotated Bibliography by A. Ben Wagner, University at Buffalo
Information Portals: A New Tool for Teaching Information Literacy Skills by Debra Kolah, Rice University and Michael Fosmire, Purdue University
Are Article Influence Scores Comparable across Scientific Fields?…
jdupuis | February 22, 2010Here's what they're about:
The first draft of Panton Principles was written in July 2009 by Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, Rufus Pollock and John Wilbanks at the Panton Arms on Panton Street in Cambridge, UK, just down from the Chemistry Faculty where Peter works.
They were then refined with the help of the members of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Open Data in Science and were officially launched in February 2010.
Here they are:
Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge.
For science to effectively function…
jdupuis | October 25, 2009Registration for Science Online 2010 is open. The conference web site is here and program info is here.
Time is running out. There are currently about 175 registered and the organizers are going to cap it at 250.
I've attended the conference for the past two years and it's a blast. I really enjoyed the sessions as well as the informal times between sessions, at the meals and in the bar.
I've registered already, as has my son, Sam, who's in grade 11. He attended last year and also had a great time. Bora even interviewed him!
There's been a good tradition of librarians attending the…
jdupuis | October 19, 2009As I mentioned in my previous post, I did a little Q&A about the new outsourcing arrangement that CISTI has negotiated with Infotrieve.
Q1. What's the effect on jobs at CISTI from this move?
As you may know, NRC-CISTI is transforming itself to be well positioned to serve the needs of Canadian knowledge workers now and in the future. This transformation is a major undertaking for the organization and will require a significant transition for NRC-CISTI's workforce.
NRC is working to mitigate the effect on employees by seeking to place as many of the affected employees as possible within…
jdupuis | October 19, 2009Such is the subject line of an email I got from the NRC-CISTI people last week. NRC-CISTI is Canada's National Research Council -- Canada Institute of Scientific and Technical Informamtion. In other words, Canada's national science library. Many of you probably know them for their document delivery service.
The basic message is that the document delivery service has been outsourced to a US company:
NRC-CISTI, Canada's national science library is changing and we are energized by the possibilities as we move forward in the transformation process announced in February 2009.
Today, we are…
jdupuis | October 8, 2009The IEEE Computer Society's magazine IT Professional has a special issue on Ontologies, OWL, and the Semantic Web (v11i5). There's lots of very cool-looking stuff, mostly pretty basic.
Guest Editor's Introduction: Ontologies, OWL, and the Semantic Web by Jepsen, Thomas C.
Semantic Web Technologies: Ready for Adoption? by Janev, Valentina; Vranes, Sanja
Equal Format Databases and Semantic-Relational Encoding by Keith, Dean
Just What Is an Ontology, Anyway? by Jepsen, Thomas C.A couple of other non-semantic web articles that look worth checking out:
Joining the Conversation about IT Ethics by…
jdupuis | September 21, 2009That's the question asked by Lance Fortnow in a recent Communications of the ACM Viewpoint article (free fulltext).
Fortnow's article continues a discussion about scholarly communication patterns in computer science that's been going on for a while in the "pages" of the CACM. I've blogged about it a couple of times here and here.
Fortnow's main idea is that CS needs to get past the youthful stage of using conferences as the main vehicle for disseminating new ideas and move to a journal-based model, like most of the rest of scientific disciplines. In the end, it's all about peer review:…
jdupuis | August 20, 2009During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from September 3, 2008. There was some nice discussion on Friendfeed that's worth checking out.
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Some recent posts that got me thinking about various escience/science 2.0/open science issues:
First, Christina gets us rolling with some definitions:
So I'm asking and proposing that e-science is
grid computing - using distributed computing power to do new computational methods in other areas of science (not in CS but in Astro, in bio,…
jdupuis | August 5, 2009During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from July 3, 2007. It's one of the most popular posts I've done, and it was linked quite widely in the science blogosphere. The interview series has lapsed a bit this year, but that's mostly due to a couple of the people I was approaching just not working out. I will definitely relaunch the series in the fall and try to do one every other month or so.
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Welcome to the most recent installment in my occasional series of interviews…