Open Access
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 13, 2012I was really angry riding home on the bus last Friday night. Not angry because the transit system here in Toronto is royally fudged in general or that transit to York University is fudged in particular.
No, it wasn't that particular aspect of the public sphere that had me upset.
It was the growing tendency of publishers of all sorts to try and take their works out of the public cultural commons and place them exclusively behind pay walls. It's their desire to monetize every reading transaction that had me hot under the collar.
Here's what I tweeted standing on the bus, altered a bit for…
jdupuis | February 6, 2012Note: this post is superseded by: Around the Web: Research Works Act, Elsevier boycott & FRPAA.
This post has superseded my previous post which focused solely on the Research Works Act.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 18, 2012The Stop Online Piracy Act is a piece of legislation in the US whose aims are:
The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill…
jdupuis | January 17, 2012Sometimes good things happen to good people and this is certainly the case.
Michael Nielsen has been named a SPARC Innovator for 2012.
I don't usually do awards announcements here but I've made exceptions in the past for friends and I'm doing that again today.
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition has a program called the SPARC Innovators that twice a year recognizes innovations in the field.
The SPARC Innovator program is a new initiative that recognizes an individual, institution, or group that exemplifies SPARC principles by working to challenge the status quo in…
sporte | January 10, 2012
Many of you may remember a time when music-stealing was rampant on the internet. Apple changed this situation by establishing a new kind of marketplace.
Now people pay for music and download it from iTunes.
What if there were a third party group, with an iTunes-like model, where scientific publishers would make papers available for purchase? Could this kind of model work?
Two arguments support this idea.
1. Volume sales
2. The cost of creation
Volume sales
Volume sales work like this. Let's say a publisher sells 10 papers at $30 each. This brings in $300.
That same publisher…
jdupuis | January 9, 2012Note: this post is superseded by: Around the Web: Research Works Act, Elsevier boycott & FRPAA.
Following on my post from yesterday on Scholarly Societies: It's time to abandon the AAP over The Research Works Act, I thought I'd gather together some of the recent posts on the issue.
The Wikipedia article is here, full text of the bill here and status here.
2012.01.04. New US Publisher Anti-OA Legislation by Cable Green
2012.01.04. A Threat to Open Access: the Research Works Act by Lisa Federer
2012.01.05. Update on publishers and SOPA: Time for scholarly publishers to disavow the AAP by…
sporte | January 6, 2012This morning, I learned that congress wants to reverse the advances made by NIH and go back to restricting access to scientific publications. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (New York) and Congressman Darrell Issa (California) are co-sponsoring a bill to restore the limits on public access to NIH-funded research.
I've written many times before (here, here, here, and here) about the challenges that community college faculty and students have in getting access to scientific papers.
In an era where the economic benefits of educating students in science are well-known (1), the idea of crippling…
jdupuis | January 5, 2012So, The Research Works Act, H.R. 3699 is a new piece of legislation that is being introduced in the US.
Not surprisingly it's supported by the American Association of Publishers and its Professional and Scholarly Publishing (AAP/PSP).
The legislation is aimed at preventing regulatory interference with private-sector research publishers in the production, peer review and publication of scientific, medical, technical, humanities, legal and scholarly journal articles. This sector represents tens of thousands of articles which report on, analyze and interpret original research; more than 30,000 U…
jdupuis | November 10, 2011Welcome to the latest installment in my very occasional series of interviews with people in the scitech world. This time around the subject is Michael Nielsen, author of the recently published Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science and prolific speaker on the Open Science lecture circuit. A recent example of his public speaking is his TEDxWaterloo talk on Open Science.
You can follow his blog here and read his recent Wall Street Journal article, The New Einsteins Will Be Scientists Who Share.
I'd like to thank Michael for his provocative and insightful responses. Enjoy…
jdupuis | September 23, 2011There's this weird phenomenon on Twitter of HULK accounts, where some secret individual or cabal creates an online persona to criticize the status quo in some area of human experience, but in the lively patois of the old school Marvel Comics character, The Incredible Hulk.
Feminist Hulk, Adjunct Hulk, Editor Hulk and many others.
Now we can add OPEN ACCESS HULK to the party!
I was a huge fan of the Hulk comic series from the 1970s all the way through to the 1990s so I'm thrilled to see this development.
Who makes up the secret cabal of tweeters? Librarians? Scientists? No one really knows.…
jdupuis | July 19, 2011Trust me, I really tried to come up with a cool, funny title for this post.
Anyways...
We have a new reference assistant starting here next week. As somewhat typical for such a position, the new staff member has a science subject background rather than a library background. In this case, Maps/GIS.
So I thought it might be a good idea to gather together some resources for helping our new hire get acclimatised to reference work in an academic science & engineering library. After all, we're not born with the ability to do good reference interviews!
With the help of the fine folk in…
jdupuis | July 15, 2011The latest D-Lib has a bunch of really interesting articles:
Services for Academic Libraries in the New Era by Michalis Gerolimos and Rania Konsta
Digital Librarianship & Social Media: the Digital Library as Conversation Facilitator
Article by Robert A. Schrier
Building a Sustainable Institutional Repository by Chenying Li, Mingjie Han, Chongyang Hong, Yan Wang, Yanqing Xu and Chunning Cheng
Music to My Ears: The New York Philharmonic Digital Archives by Cynthia Tobar
jdupuis | June 6, 2011Sometimes we Open Access advocates tend to assume everybody is already on our side. You know, all our librarian and scientist colleagues out there. Surely by now they've seen the light. They understand the main issues and flavours of OA, can ably summarize the major arguments for OA and refute the major complaints against.
Of course, reality is a lot more complicated than my dreamy, unrealistic wishes.
Convincing librarians to support Open Access, either directly or indirectly, is usually fairly easy but even we have a number of misconceptions and misunderstandings about what OA really…
jdupuis | March 27, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, is from May 18, 2008.
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It seems that at least half the time I mention this book to someone interested in the way the web is changing social patterns the…
jdupuis | March 10, 2011If you're in the Greater Toronto Area next Tuesday, please drop by and see Michael talk. I'm thrilled that my library is co-sponsoring such a fantastic event!
Presented by:
Janusz A. Kozinski - Dean, Faculty of Science and Engineering
The Division of Natural Science
The Steacie Science and Engineering LibraryLocation: Paul A. Delaney Gallery, 320 Bethune CollegeDate: Tuesday, March 15, 2011Time: 12:30 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Refreshments will be served courtesy of Steacie Science and Engineering Library
Prof. Nielsen will describe an evolution in how scientific discoveries are made driven by new…
jdupuis | January 19, 2011Yeah, I'm talking about you, #scio11. The conference that still has significant twitter traffic three days after it's over. I've been to conferences that don't have that kind of traffic while they're happening. In fact, that would be pretty well every other conference.
Every edition of ScienceOnline seems to have a different virtual theme for me and this one seemed to somehow circle back to the blogging focus on earlier editions of the conference. Of course, the program is so diverse and the company so stimulating, that different people will follow different conference paths and perhaps…
jdupuis | January 12, 2011First of all, let me make this perfectly clear: Scott Rosenberg's Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters is a seriously terrific book. If you're a blogger, if you're interested in the phenomenon of blogging or even if you're just interested in where the media are headed, then you owe it to yourself to read this book.
I wanted to get that out of the way because, while I really enjoyed the book, there were some things that I would have liked to have seen done a bit differently and I be focusing on those quibbles more than on the things I liked about the book…
jdupuis | January 10, 2011Research intelligence - Rip it up and start again
David Thornburg on Open-Source Textbooks
"Beginnings Are Always Messy": Thoughts on Transliteracy and Inquiry from a Learning Advocate
Student Blogging about Physics
Follow-up: Transliteracy, Theory, and Scholarly Language
Lib-Value Website Now Available
The Rise of 'Convergence' Science
How Will Students Communicate?
Study: Labour market outcomes of Canadian doctoral graduates
Predictions 2010: The Growth of Intimacy
'Saturday Night Live,' Floor Wax, and the Life of the Mind
10 Things Facebook Won't Say
Going beyond a single scientific…
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…