scholarly communication
cpikas | July 29, 2010This APS rocks!
Here's the press release from PAMnet:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
APS ONLINE JOURNALS AVAILABLE FREE IN U.S. PUBLIC LIBRARIES
Ridge, NY, 28 July 2010: The American Physical Society (APS) announces a new public access initiative that will give readers and researchers in public libraries in the United States full use of all online APS journals, from the most recent articles back to the first issue in 1893, a collection including over 400,000 scientific research papers. APS will provide this access at no cost to participating public libraries, as a contribution to public engagement…
cpikas | July 25, 2010The authors thesis is that the only mandatory communication of results is in peer reviewed journal articles. Scientists aren't required to do other communicating and often leave communication to the public to the media. They ask if is this is adequate given the very low percentage of scientific articles that ever make it into the press, particularly in areas outside of health and medicine, and also given the fact that for everyone out of formal education, the media is their primary source of science education.
Recent studies do show that scientists often don't mind talking to reporters and do…
sb admin | July 21, 2010So there I was, try all kinds of librarian ninja tricks on the fanciest, most expensive research databases money can buy (SciFinder, Reaxys, Inspec...) and no joy. Couldn't find what I needed. I'm perfectly willing to admit that I don't know all that much chemistry, but usually I do ok since I work with one chemist quite a bit. Finally I gave up and googled it. After a few tries, I found way down in the results an article about something else (like I needed a chemical in an aqueous solution and it had the chemical in alcohol), but the snippet drew my eye. Sure enough - had a table with my…
cpikas | July 17, 2010 This article is in early view at JASIST. It looks like it comes from the author's dissertation. It isn't terribly earth-shattering, but it's well done, it provides more evidence, and there are definitely some implications for library/IR manager practice. Here's the citation:
Kim, J. (2010). Faculty self-archiving: Motivations and barriers Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology DOI: 10.1002/asi.21336
The author went through a complicated process to identify 1,500 faculty members at 17 research institutions with DSpace IRs (not immediately clear why only DSpace…
sb admin | July 15, 2010And why we should care. Gary Price of the Resource Shelf pointed to a news story today, that Ebsco has acquired two more research databases: Criminal Justice Abstracts and Communications Abstracts. For those of you who haven't been following, Ebsco has recently acquired Ageline (it is now not available for free), NetLibrary, research databases from OCLC, The Music Index Online, World Textiles, ExPub (ChemExpert)... oh and exclusive rights to some magazines.
What we can expect from this is that those other databases will no longer be available on multiple platforms. Folks who aren't librarians…
cpikas | July 6, 2010The announcement is dated January 6, 2010, but the report itself is dated July 2010. In any case it's new to me, so I thought I would run through some interesting points. Here's the citation (as much as I can tell):
Proctor,R., Williams,R. & Stewart, J. (2010). If you build it, will they come? How researchers perceive and use web 2.0. London: Research Information Network. Retrieved July 6, 2010 from http://www.rin.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/web_2.0_screen.pdf
It often seems like people are very negative about the adoption of web 2.0 stuff in science; that is, when they're not hyping…
cpikas | July 3, 2010One of the anti-PLOSone arguments is that its acceptance rate is too high at about 70%. Since I had my RK Merton compendium open to this article, I thought I would quote some bits to backup my argument that the anti-PLOSone folks are completely full of crap on this point. Here's the citation:
Zuckerman, H., & Merton, R. K. (1971). Patterns of Evaluation in Science: Institutionalization, Structure and Functions of the Referee System. Minerva, 9(1), 66-100. (I believe this might be in JSTOR if you're at an academic institution, but it's also reprinted in Merton, R. K. (1973). The sociology…
cpikas | June 26, 2010Nick Carr, quoted by the Readablity folks here, talks about hyperlinks as distractions - part of how the web screws up our brains. I was just browsing (couldn't possibly read this one from cover to cover) Nentwich (2003) and ran across the section, "Better match of traditional reading habits". In this portion of the book, the author is talking about the impacts of ICTs, specifically hyperlinked texts, in how scientists deal with information. I'll now quote directly from page 297:
It is a truism that academics seldom read articles (not to speak about books from the first to the last paragraph…
cpikas | June 10, 2010Besides watching this like the finals of Olympic hockey, I've been seriously impressed with the thoughtful and insightful commentary from a huge bunch of my libr* online contacts. Interesting stuff, too, from scientists and other folks interested in scholarly communication.
About the confidentiality of the discussions....
Walt Crawford reminds us of various freedom of information requests and state laws in California that essentially mean that the terms of the final agreement won't be confidential
Beth Brown thinks that this can only help with transparency in the future - which would be a…
cpikas | June 8, 2010Read this (pdf). So the UC system has been screaming - they are totally cutting budgets, people, everything... And NPG has decided to hike their subscription renewal prices by 400%. So if the offer doesn't change, UC's going to fight back, and it will hurt. Boy, will it hurt.
cpikas | June 5, 2010 Kevin Zelnio of Deep Sea News tweeted the title of this piece and sent my mind going over the various theories of citation, what citations mean, studies showing how people cite without reading (pdf) (or at least propagate obvious citation errors), and also how people use things but don't cite them in certain fields... I was also thinking, I know what inappropriate touching is, but what's inappropriate citing? So let's take a look at the article:
Todd, P., Guest, J., Lu, J., & Chou, L. (2010). One in four citations in marine biology papers is inappropriate Marine Ecology Progress Series…
cpikas | June 3, 2010Many/most/all (?) scientists and engineers who have ever published anything anywhere are now being inundated with calls for papers (CFP). At least 3 have made it to my desk in the past month, forwarded from my colleagues who are curious and want to know more about the publisher. Two of these were precisely the same e-mail, with just names and article titles changed. That was enough that I spent a few minutes to create an internal wiki page as a guide to authors. I'm not going to share the whole thing, but I'll sketch out some points.
I started out by trying to make the point that whether or…
cpikas | May 24, 2010My larger institution's (so not my place of work, but our parent org's) libraries had a fabulous get together Friday with a session on data curation. The speakers were: Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information, Carole Palmer from UIUC, and Joel Bader from JHU and JHMI.
I tweeted, but there wasn't a hashtag, so there goes retrieval. These weren't live blogged but reconstructed from handwritten notes. These are my reconstructions of their points - so not my points and maybe not theirs.
Lynch spoke about institutions while Palmer spoke more about librarians. Bader spoke about…
cpikas | May 17, 2010Here's a quote from the Professional and Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of
American Publishers' response (pdf) to the FRPAA legislation (about):
There is no need for federal agencies to replicate content on their own sites when web-linking approaches to publishers' authoritative versions could serve better the same goal of public access. Acting on its own in the free market, the publishing industry already has made more research information available to more people than at any time in history. Articles are widely available in major academic centers and private-sector online…
cpikas | May 15, 2010Revere of Effects Measure has a great post on expertise, authorship, and "real" names. At this point, after years and years of blogs it's a shame this has to be said explicitly. The general points go like this:
there are many legitimate reasons to be pseudonymous in authoring a blog. I describe some of these in my 2007 post but another one is to let your words speak for themselves instead of bolstering them by using your professional reputation, that of your institution, or that of your publication venue.
even if you had his name, would that alone allow you trust what he's saying (Mertonian…
cpikas | May 6, 2010I â¥â¥â¥ this essay by Barbara Fister: Washington, We Have a Problem at Library Journal.
Go read it.
cpikas | May 1, 2010Anne Jefferson from Highly Allochthonous pointed me to a new essay from Geoscientist Online, the member magazine of the Geological Society (UK). That essay points both to the survey of women geobloggers (previously mentioned here) and a survey done by Lutz Geissler, Robert Huber, and Callan Bentley. (probably haven't mentioned before).
In the Geoscientist essay by Michael Welland, he discusses his own slowness in taking up blogging, but also his enjoyment of the geoblogosphere and the community he finds there. He learns of new things he wouldn't come across in his other readings and he…
cpikas | April 25, 2010 Mixed methods are always attractive, but many researchers give up because each method typically requires some epistemology which often conflicts with the epistemology of other methods. When mixed methods are done, they are often done in sequence. For example, qualitative work to understand enough about a phenomenon to develop a survey or interviewing survey respondents to get richer information about their responses. Network methods are neither quantitative* nor qualitative and it's not typical to combine them with qualitative methods - hence my interest in this piece. Of course I'm also…
cpikas | March 9, 2010Sometimes you have to just let go and release something to the wild. I have mentioned on a few occasions a qualitative study I did prior to the network study. To be honest, I think I actually did it in the Fall of 2007 ?! I thought (and was encouraged to believe) that I could get a journal article from it, but at this point, I've moved on. With the recent publication of another article on science blogs, I thought that this needed to be out there. Plus, it's really not fair to the participants who gave me their time.
After re-reading this just now, I don't think it's bad, but the title is…