scholarly publishing
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 | October 16, 2013With Open Access Week next week, there could be no greater open access-related news here in Canada than that the three granting councils are coming together to draft a common Open Access Policy.
Of those agencies (Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council and Canadian Institute of Health Research), the CIHR already has a OA policy in effect. The process will be to first release a draft policy based on the CIHR one and then consult widely in the various communities that are involved and come to an agreement for a new common policy…
jdupuis | October 8, 2013Yes, another science blogging community among the many and yet another where an established print magazine enhances its online presence with a blogging network. And a bit more shuffling of the chairs on the deck as people with established blogs switch places or even some people start up whole new blogging personas.
The Popular Science Blogging Network!
Here's the welcome post and the list of blogs
Welcome To The Popular Science Blog Network
Today we’re unveiling 13 new blogs on PopularScience.com, each one home to a notable writer covering a specific area of innovation. We live in an era…
jdupuis | September 13, 2013Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson's book The Big Shift: The Seismic Change in Canadian Politics, Business, and Culture and What It Means for Our Future is pretty obviously not a science book. Rather, it's a book about Canadian politics. But of course here in Canada these days, it's hard to talk about science without talking about politics at least a little. This book is interesting from a science policy perspective since it endeavors to give insight into the deeper rationale behind the current Conservative government's actions. In a sense, it asks, "What kind of Canada do Stephen Harper and…
jdupuis | July 10, 2013On May 20th, 2013 I published my most popular post ever. It was The Canadian War on Science: A long, unexaggerated, devastating chronological indictment. In it, I chronicled at some considerable length the various anti-science measures by the current Canadian Conservative government. The chronological aspect was particularly interesting as you could see the ramping up since the 2011 election where the Conservatives won a majority government after two consecutive minority Conservative governments.
As an exercise in alt-metrics (and here), I thought I would share some of the reactions and…
jdupuis | June 26, 2013For various reasons, I've been collecting some resources around open access, open data and scientific and technological innovation in Canada. Since they might be more broadly useful that to just me, I thought I'd share them.
Of course, this list is incomplete. I've most likely left out whole swaths of stuff out there, both in terms of organizations and relevant posts and articles as well as institutional OA mandates and author funds I may have missed. Please feel free to suggest items in the comments.
One thing in particular I would like to add in a future iteration is a list of library/…
jdupuis | April 15, 2013Welcome to the most recent installment in my very occasional series of interviews with people in the publishing/science blogging/computing communities. This latest installment is with Mark Patterson, Executive Director of new OA publisher eLife. I attended an ARL Directors briefing conference call on eLife with Mark a little while back, highlighting for me just how interesting this project is and just how little I knew about it before the call.
Hence, this interview.
A huge thanks to Mark for agreeing to participate!
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Q0. Mark, tell us a bit about yourself and how you ended up…
jdupuis | March 24, 2013The Journal of Library Administration is published by Taylor & Francis, a big publishing conglomerate. According to Brian Mathews, while he was in the middle of putting together a special issue on the future of libraries he received notice that the editorial board was resigning due to conflicts with the publisher around what kind of author rights regime the journal should use. Here is the note he received from the board:
The Board believes that the licensing terms in the Taylor & Francis author agreement are too restrictive and out-of-step with the expectations of authors in the LIS…
jdupuis | March 8, 2013Just like the author of this piece, I too attended a recent talk by Cory Doctorow -- a brilliant talk relating the life and death of Aaron Swartz with the theme of his latest novel Homeland -- and similarly I often marvel at how lucky we are that the web is free and open.
Enjoy this wonderful little satire and shudder at the possibilities.
The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL!
The World Wide Web has been great, but to be honest, it's also been a lot harder than it needs to be. I know some of you love creating new web pages and participating in online discussions, but the last thing most…
jdupuis | March 2, 2013(This post supersedes the previous post listing items related to the Aaron Swartz story. That post was from January 20, 2013.)
A few comments.
Aaron Swartz's story has had a huge impact, it has reverberated far and wide not just through the interlinking worlds of technology and online activism but far into the mainstream. The library world has been no exception, with quite a few of the items below being from our world.
How has the library world reacted? If anything, I would hope that we have been challenged to examine our core values very carefully, to reflect deeply about how we make…
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 | January 30, 2013I'm doing a session at the Ontario Library Conference tomorrow with a few colleagues. The topic is Creative Commons licensing and I'm doing the section on Open Data. It's a kind of a replay of what we did for library staff about a year ago.
Here's the info this time:
Session: #308
Thursday 9:05 AM 10:20 AM
Creative Commons and Beyond
Speaker(s)
Timothy Bristow, Digital Humanities Librarian; John Dupuis, Acting Associate University Librarian, Information Services; Andrea Kosavic, Digital Initiatives Librarian; Sharon Wang, Association Librarian; York University
Learn more about creative…
jdupuis | January 20, 2013The recent death of Aaron Swartz has provoked a lot of commentary on the web so I thought I would gather some of it here. This is by no means an attempt to be comprehensive as the amount of commentary has been truly vast. I've tried to gather enough so that someone working through even a small selection of the posts would get a good idea of all the dimensions of the story. I've also tried to perhaps give a bit of a library/academia slant in the selection.
As usual with these compilations, readers should feel free to suggest further readings in the comments especially those that add a…
jdupuis | January 17, 2013On January 10, 2013 Rick Anderson published a post at The Scholarly Kitchen published on six mistakes library staff are making when dealing with our vendors. Most of them were fairly standard stuff like don't be rude, don't waste people's time. That sort of thing. (Yes, sometimes I think that every time I link to a Scholarly Kitchen article, an open access journal loses its wings.)
The sixth, however, was a bit different.
Putting political library concerns above patron needs. I’ve saved for last the “mistake” that I know is likely to be the most controversial, but I think it must be said.…
jdupuis | December 31, 2012While it has not generally been my practice to do year end review posts, artificially trying to tie the various and disparate strands of my blogging habits together into some sort of coherent story, I think for this year it's worth doing. And that's because my blogging year did seem to have a coherent theme -- advocating for a fairer and more just scholarly publishing ecosystem.
In particular I spent an awful lot of time advocating for Open Access in one way, shape or form. Not that I haven't always done so, but with all the various events happening in the academic and library worlds this…
jdupuis | December 18, 2012Yes, the science blogging community has certainly seen some gyrations in the last few years with a bunch of new networks sprouting up, sometimes from the ashes of other networks, sometimes completely on their own.
The latest is Phenomena: A science salon hosted by National Geographic magazine.
Phenomena is a gathering of spirited science writers who take delight in the new, the strange, the beautiful and awe-inspiring details of our world. Phenomena is hosted by Jamie Shreeve, Executive Editor for Science at National Geographic magazine, who invites you to join the conversation.
So far at…
jdupuis | November 29, 2012Like the old saying goes, information wants to be free. In particular, the consumers of information would prefer for the most part not to have to directly pay for the information they are consuming. The information itself, if I may anthropomorphize for a moment, also wants to circulate as freely as possible, to be as consumed as widely as possible, to be as highly regarded as possible. That way it gets to be the information that "wins" the best-used-most-used information sweepstakes.
This seems to me to be a first principle for scholarly communications. Both the users of the information and…
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 | October 1, 2012The most recent controversy to whip up the library and science blogospheres revolves around SUNY Potsdam cancelling their American Chemical Society journal package because the subscription packages on offer sucked up too high a percentage of their total budget. SUNY Potsdam Library Director Jenica Rogers wrote about the decision on her blog, garnering quite a bit of attention, including a feature in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The feature included some rather rude and derailing comments from a representative of the ACS, who later threw some gasoline on the PR fire on a chemistry…
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…