faculty liaison
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 15, 2015What is digital governance in the first place?
Digital governance is a discipline that focuses on establishing clear accountability for digital strategy, policy, and standards. A digital governance framework, when effectively designed and implemented, helps to streamline digital development and dampen debates around digital channel “ownership.”
-- From the Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design website.
Universities
Intellectual autonomy and stubbornness of staff
-- From the index, Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design, p. 229
Time to take a little medicine! All those…
jdupuis | September 22, 2014Melissa K. Aho and Erika Bennet's anthology The Machiavellian Librarian: Winning Allies, Combating Budget Cuts, and influencing Stakeholders is pretty good for what it is, in some ways better than I expected. It's a guide for maneuvering office politics and advancing your agenda, big and small, with the stakeholders and influencers that matters in your environment. Sadly, this book fails for what it isn't: a book that tackles the issues and trends where librarians really need to advance our agendas and make ourselves key "thought leaders" and "influencers."
The book is a collection of 25…
jdupuis | October 25, 2013It's been kind of a crazy week for me, so I haven't really had much of a chance to contribute to or even read a lot of the Open Access Week calls to arms out there right now.
So I thought I would kind of commandeer my Friday Fun silly lists habit and redirect that energy to open access.
So here it is, from Peter Suber:
Open access: six myths to put to rest
The only way to provide open access to peer-reviewed journal articles is to publish in open access journals
All or most open access journals charge publication fees
Most author-side fees are paid by the authors themselves
Publishing in a…
jdupuis | September 18, 2013It took me a long time to get through The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, something like eighteen months to finally wade through it. And it's not that it was even that bad. It a lot of ways, it was better than I expected. Part of it is the fact that it came out just before the MOOC craze hit and it seemed odd for a "future of higher education" book to sort of miss that boat. Part of it is the fact that Christensen and Eyring's book is very deeply rooted in the US experience so maybe parts of it weren't so relevant to my experience in Canada.…
jdupuis | April 29, 2013A note for my Toronto area friends, Blogfather Bora Zivkovic will be giving a talk at York University in Toronto on May 6, 2013 from 2:00 to 3:30 pm.
Here's the info:
Science and the New Media Ecosystem
Bora Zivkovic, Blog Editor at Scientific American
Monday, May 6, 2013, 2:00 – 3:30 pm
Paul Delaney Gallery, Room 320, Bethune College
York University, TorontoMap
Abstract:
The whole media landscape is shifting and changing – newspapers on the decline with blogs, Twitter and YouTube on the rise.
Science is no different. Come listen to one of the pioneers of online science communication talk…
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 | October 22, 2012It seems that Brock University in St. Catherine's, Ontario really likes me. Two years ago, the Library kindly invited me to speak during their Open Access Week festivities. And this year the Physics Department has also very kindly invited me to be part of their Seminar Series, also to talk about Getting Your Science Online, this time during OA Week mostly by happy coincidence.
It's tomorrow, Tuesday October 23, 2012 in room H313 at 12:30.
Here's the abstract I've provided:
Physicist and Reinventing Discovery author Michael Nielsen has said that due to the World Wide Web, “[t]he process of…
jdupuis | September 27, 2012Why do people go into science? Why do people go to work at scholarly societies? Why do people choose scholarly publishing as a career? Why do people choose a career at the intersection of those three vocations?
There are cynical answers to those questions, for sure, and even the non-cynical need to put food on the table. But I truly don't believe people start out their path in life based on cynicism. Rather I believe most people start their careers based on hope.
I can only hope that for a person to pursue a career in scholarly publishing at a scientific society, their goal in life is to try…
jdupuis | September 5, 2012About a month ago The Scientist published an interesting set of interviews with a set of scientists, publishers and LIS faculty on the future of scholarly publishing.
They called it Whither Science Publishing? with the subtitle "As we stand on the brink of a new scientific age, how researchers should best communicate their findings and innovations is hotly debated in the publishing trenches."
It's a pretty good set of questions and answers, provocative and thought provoking, with a few good shots especially from the scientist side of things. Unfortunately, I think it lacks a bit in terms of…
jdupuis | May 10, 2012I'd like to extend a huge science librarian blogosphere welcome to Information Culture, the newest blog over at Scientific American Blogs!
This past Sunday evening I got a cryptic DM from a certain Bora Zivkovic letting me know that I should watch the SciAm blog site first thing Monday morning. I was busy that morning but as soon as I got our of my meeting I rushed to Twitter and the Internet and lo! and behold!
Information Culture: Thoughts and analysis related to science information, data, publication and culture.
I'm always happy to see librarians invading faculty and researcher blogs…
jdupuis | April 23, 2012As I mentioned last week, on Tuesday, April 17 I was part of a workshop on Creative Commons our Scholarly Communications Committee put on for York library staff. My section was on open data and the Panton Principles. While not directly related to Creative Commons, we thought talking a bit about an application area for licensing in general and a specific case where CC is applied would be interesting for staff. We figured it would be the least engaging part of the workshop so I agreed to go last and use any time that was left.
Rather unexpectedly, the idea of data licensing and in particular…
jdupuis | April 16, 2012As part of a workshop on Creative Commons, I'm doing a short presentation on Open Data and The Panton Principles this week to various members of our staff. I thought I'd share some of the resources I've consulted during my preparations. I'm using textmining of journal articles as a example so I'm including a few resources along those lines as well.
The Panton Principles
Why does Dryad use CC0?
#sparc2012 a manifesto in absentia for Open Data
Information mining from Springer full-text: I ask for freedom
Textmining Update: Max Haussler's Questions to publishers: They have a duty to reply
The…
jdupuis | April 11, 2012It's probably best to start with what Marc J. Kuchner's new book -- Marketing for Scientists: How to Shine in Tough Times -- isn't.
It isn't a social media jackass recipe book for "Success through Twitter." It isn't a detailed treatise on marketing theory. It doesn't come with a guarantee of grants, publications and prizes if you follow it's instructions. In fact, it's hardly about Twitter or blogs or Facebook or Pinterest or any of that stuff at all.
Instead, it's a primer on why getting your message out is a good idea.
Marketing for humans, in other words, where humans = scientists.
Kuchner…
jdupuis | April 1, 2012Hi everybody,
It is with great pride and excitement that I'm finally able to announce something that's been in the works for a few months now. I will be accepting the role of inaugural editor-in-chief of an exciting new journal to be published by Elsevier: The Journal of Applied Publishing Experiments.
This amazing opportunity arose a few months ago, initiated by a blog post of mine that congratulated Elsevier on their wise marketing and publishing moves and this one a bit later, where I declare my undying loyalty to the Elsevier brand. The publisher of Elsevier immediately contacted me…
jdupuis | February 21, 2012A little while back the Cost of Knowledge site started up a boycott pledge list in response to mathematician Timothy Gowers' pledge to stop contributing to Elsevier's operations by ceasing writing, reviewing and editing for them.
Here is the call to action:
Academics have protested against Elsevier's business practices for years with little effect. These are some of their objections:
They charge exorbitantly high prices for subscriptions to individual journals.
In the light of these high prices, the only realistic option for many libraries is to agree to buy very large "bundles", which will…
jdupuis | February 6, 2012Note: this post is superseded by: Around the Web: Research Works Act, Elsevier boycott & FRPAA.
This post has superseded my previous post which focused solely on the Research Works Act. I have added some coverage of the Elsevier boycott which at least partially grew out of opposition to the RWA. I'm not attempting to be as comprehensive in coverage for the boycott as for the RWA.
Some relevant resources:
The Cost of Knowledge: Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier (Boycott declaration site)
Notes on the Research Works Act a wiki maintained by Peter Suber, hosted by the Berkman…
jdupuis | January 13, 2012With the final countdown underway and the conference less than a week away, this post follows my post on library people in attendance at Science Online 2012 from a few weeks ago.
And I'd like to start off with another best-tweet-ever, this time Marieclaire Shanahan retweeting Colin Schutze:
+ they'll be fascinating! RT @_ColinS_: #Scio12 Newbie Tips: You will meet more librarians in one day than you thought existed in the world.
And that's long been one of my goals, to promote the integration of librarians into faculty and researcher conferences and social networks. And Science Online has…
jdupuis | December 6, 2011I'm doing a short presentation tomorrow on blogging for researchers as part of a day-long communications workshop for faculty here at York. And since a few months back I created a reading list for a social media presentation for grad students, I thought I'd expand that list in this post and add some more specifically blogging-related resources.
Enjoy!
Our Blogs, Ourselves (Paul Krugman)
The Power of Blogs in Forming New Fields of International Study
Should you enter the academic blogosphere? A discussion on whether scholars should take the time to write a blog about their work
Social media…