scholarly publishing
jdupuis | September 26, 2012Scholars who grew up with the internet are steadily replacing those that grew up without it. Scholars who expect to put everything they write online, who expect to find everything they need online, and who expect unlocked content that they may read, search, link, copy, cut/paste, crawl, print, and redistribute, are replacing those who never expected these boons and got used to them, if at all, looking over their shoulder for the copyright police. Scholars who expect to find the very best literature online, harmlessly cohabitating with crap are, inexorably replacing scholars who, despite…
jdupuis | September 13, 2012Jenica Rogers is Director of Libraries at the State University of New York at Potsdam. Like so many institutions SUNY Potsdam subscribes to the suite of journals published by the American Chemical Society. Now, that's always a challenge since the ACS prices their products very aggressively as well as pushing the envelope with annual price increases.
Well, push finally came to show and SUNY Potsdam is Walking away from the American Chemical Society.
The problem:
In May 2012, after much internal discussion and debate, three SUNY library directors from the comprehensive colleges (myself…
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 | August 28, 2012Imagine a scenario where suddenly over night all toll access publishing suddenly converts to Open Access. You go to bed and your average academic library spends millions of dollars on serials. You wake up, and the subscription bill is zero.
Now, that doesn't mean that suddenly scholarly publishing doesn't cost anything to support. It just means that the money to support that publishing is coming from somewhere other than library budgets. I would generally assume that an entirely open access publishing ecosystem would be significantly less expensive overall than the current mixed publishing…
jdupuis | August 20, 2012My colleagues and I are taking our Creative Commons/Panton Principles presentation on the road to another library conference this winter. As a result, I'm still compiling more references on the topic so I thought I share what I've found recently with all of you.
Of course, suggestions for more resources are always welcome in the comments.
NLM APIs (library as data incubator)
Harvard Releases Big Data for Books
What does one do with millions of MARC records?
Harvard Library Bibliographic Dataset Now Available via EBSCO Discovery Service™ from EBSCO Publishing
Harvard Publicly Releases…
jdupuis | August 3, 2012This one is a little less on the strictly amusing side and a little more on the useful and thoughtful side for a Friday Fun post, but sometimes it's worth mixing things up a bit.
I've mostly not read these books myself but I am in the middle of the Christensen/Eyring book right now. And they all look very useful and interesting, if only as a springboard for disagreement and debate. A little bit of end-of-summer reading is always a good thing!
Without further ado, from OnlineUniversities.com, the 10 Best Books on the Future of Higher Ed.
Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money…
jdupuis | July 18, 2012I'm on my annual summer hiatus for the month of July so I'll be only publishing my weekly Friday Fun posts as well as re-posting some of the interviews I did a few years ago on the old blog with people from the publishing, library and science worlds. Not that my posting of late has been particularly distinguishable from the hiatus state, but such is the blogging life after nearly ten years: filled with ups, downs, peaks, valleys.
This interview with Mike Morgan is from April 24, 2007.
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It's time for another in my occasional series of scitech publishing/…
jdupuis | July 5, 2012I'm on my annual summer hiatus for the month of July so I'll be only publishing my weekly Friday Fun posts as well as re-posting some of the interviews I did a few years ago on the old blog with people from the publishing, library and science worlds. Not that my posting of late has been particularly distinguishable from the hiatus state, but such is the blogging life after nearly ten years: filled with ups, downs, peaks, valleys.
This interview, with Eugene Wallingford, is from July 9, 2008.
I'm hoping to get these out weekly, but we'll see. They're mostly cobbled together in odd moments…
jdupuis | June 22, 2012The title of this post might be a bit misleading. I don't really think it's much of a question.
Of course it's ok to get paid to promote open access.
My university pays me to be a librarian. I have faculty status. I can decide what I think are the most important issues in my field. I can advocate for solutions to those issues. I have decided that one of the most important issues in my field of science librarianship is the broken scholarly communications system. I have come to the conclusion that a system of open access to the scholarly literature is much fairer and probably ultimately much…
jdupuis | June 12, 2012Welcome to the most recent installment in my very occasional series of interviews with people in the publishing/science blogging/computing communities. The latest is with Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt of PeerJ. PeerJ is a new startup in the scientific publishing industry, using a rather unique business model whereby authors will be able to pay one fee and they get a lifetime of publishing their articles in PeerJ.
Please see my post with the PeerJ press release for more details.
I recently had an opportunity to ask Peter and Jason some pre-announcement questions about PeerJ and I've included…
jdupuis | June 12, 2012I'm not one for posting publisher press releases on this blog (and embargoed ones at that!) but sometimes you just have to try something a little different. And this is such an occasion.
Below is the press release for a new science publishing startup called PeerJ. It is founded by Peter Binfield, formerly of Public Library of Science, and Jason Hoyt, formerly of Mendeley. The core idea is that scholars will be able to pay one fee (starting at $99) and be able to publish on the PeerJ platform for life. The truly interesting aspect of this is that PeerJ is peer reviewed. It's kind of like a…
jdupuis | May 21, 2012Today is #OAMonday.
It marks the launch of a petition on the Whitehouse web site to "Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research."
Here is the text of the petition:
We petition the obama administration to:
Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.
We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would…
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 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 | March 27, 2012This post has superseded my two previous link collection posts here and here.
The first focused solely on the Research Works Act, the second added posts on the Elsevier boycott and this one also incorporates posts on the reintroduction of The Federal Research Public Access Act. These three stories are all intertwined to the extent that it is difficult to separate them out completely. That being said, I'm not attempting to be as comprehensive in coverage for the boycott or for FRPAA as for the RWA.
Some relevant general resources:
The Cost of Knowledge: Researchers taking a stand against…
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 15, 2012We have here what is sometimes known as a wicked problem.
On the one side, communities would like to be able to pool the resources of their members to acquire digital content that may then be shared and consumed by everyone in that community.
On the other, content creators and publishers would like to maximize their revenue from the content they produce and distribute.
Libraries want to pay the least amount possible but still have the maximum rights to share it among their communities.
Publishers want to make sure every possible reading transaction is monetized, so as a result want to…
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 | January 24, 2012Well, I survived.
Science Online 2012 took place this past weekend and it was a blast. There's already been quite a bit of discussion in blogs and on Twitter about how it went.
A very small selection of the them bits are:
Scattered reflections about ScienceOnline 2012 (#scio12)
Science Online North Carolina (a nice Storify)
Scientists have .... (impressions from #scio12)
Sex, Gender, and Controversy, a #scio12 WRAPUP
Science writing, in context
But there's way more that I've missed, I'm sure.
One of the things the stellar organizing committee of Bora Zivkovic, Anton Zuiker and Karyn…
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…