scholarly publishing
jdupuis | July 6, 2010Nice article by Vit Wagner in Sunday's Toronto Star, Tough times, but some bookstores have a different story.
A couple of different independent bookstore owners/managers in the Toronto area talk about some of the challenges faced in surviving and even thriving in what should be a period of death and decline for bricks and mortar bookstores.
But while some of the competition is retrenching or worse, BakkaPhoenix, which recorded a double-digit increase in sales last year, is expanding. In stark contrast to the recently shuttered This Ain't the Rosedale Library, BakkaPhoenix is readying a fall…
jdupuis | June 13, 2010And that's Nature as in Nature Publishing Group rather than the narrative strategy.
I missed the story when it broke earlier this week in The Chronicle -- I was attending the absolutely fantastic Canadian Engineering Education Association conference in Kingston from Monday to Wednesday. And when I got back, Thursday and Friday weren't the types of days that were conducive to blogging. I'm still feeling a bit behind on the whole issue so doing this post is helping to feel a bit more up-to-speed.
The story, from the Chronicle article that more-or-less started it all, U. of California Tries…
jdupuis | May 25, 2010Another terrific issue. I'm going to list everything but the book & database reviews & reports so as not to clutter the post too much.
Five Voices, Two Perspectives: Integrating Student Librarians into a Science and Engineering Library by Eugene Barsky, Aleteia Greenwood, Samantha Sinanan, Lindsay Tripp, and Lindsay Willson, University of British Columbia
Collection Assessment in Response to Changing Curricula: An Analysis of the Biotechnology Resources at the University of Colorado at Boulder by Gabrielle Wiersma, University of Colorado at Boulder
Browsing of E-Journals by…
jdupuis | May 13, 2010By some strange coincidence given yesterday's post, this post on Raising your internal profile as an academic liaison librarian by Emma Woods came across my Twitter feed this morning.
As part of a task and ï¬nish group on internal marketing of academic liaison librarians at the University of Westminster, I posted a message to a couple of JISCmail lists to see what other librarians do in this respect. As ever, I was delighted by the number of responses I received and the amount of interest there is on this topic.
In the current ï¬nancial climate where every penny counts, raising our internal…
jdupuis | May 11, 2010I have a few conferences coming up and I thought I'd share my schedule just in case any of you out there in sciencelibrarianblogland will also be attending.
I'll list them in order, along with whatever I'll be presenting.
BookCamp Toronto, May 15, Toronto
9:30: eBooks in Education and Academia -- the glacial revolution
John Dupuis (York University)
Evan Leibovitch (York University)
Description: Despite growing public acceptance of eBooks, two areas in which they could offer the most benefit -- education and academia -- are far behind the eBook mainstream. This session will discuss issues…
jdupuis | April 15, 2010A month or so ago I posted on Scholarly Societies: Why Bother?, basically on the challenges that scholarly societies face in the digital age. I got a few good comments, getting a nice discussion going.
I also posed a few questions directly to scholarly societies but unfortunately didn't get any comments from any of the various societies themselves. I did find that a bit disappointing in that the public conversation seemed to be happening without them. Never a good thing in the digital age.
Today, however, Kevin Marvel of the American Astronomical Society added a comment to my original…
jdupuis | April 14, 2010From Twitter, here's the announcement:
Have you ever sent out a "tweet" on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress.
That's right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter's inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That's a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.
We thought it fitting to give the initial heads-up to the Twitter community itself via our own feed @librarycongress. (…
jdupuis | April 14, 2010This is one of those books that I just seemed to argue with constantly while I was reading it. You know, "Hey, you, book, you're just plain wrong about this!"
But, as much as I argued with it, as much as I wanted all of the main points to be wrong, as much as I disagreed with many of the details, by the end I grudgingly accepted that Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price might just have a few very valid things to say about the way the economics of online content is evolving.
This is the Google generation, and they're grown up online simply assuming that everythng digital is…
jdupuis | March 30, 2010The second Book Camp TO is coming up in about 6 weeks or so: Saturday, May 15, 2010 from 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM.
Last year's edition was terrific and I'm really looking forward to another great conference.
What's it about?
What: BookCampTO is a free unconference about the future of books, reading, writing and publishing. Ebooks have arrived, and with them great changes are afoot. BoomCampTO 2010 will focus on what happens next, how this big shift to digital is changing different parts of the book business, and how we are adapting. Our focus is not so much on ebooks as everything else.
When:…
jdupuis | March 18, 2010I received an email a couple of weeks ago from Daniel Cromer of the Hrenya Research Group located in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His group was interested in expanding their online presence and had stumbled up the presentation I'd given a couple of years ago on Academic Blogging: Promoting your Research on the Web. He asked me if I could explore those same ideas in a short presentation to the group.
That was Monday. Sadly, I wasn't able to actually go to Colorado for the presentation -- it was all online using the…
jdupuis | March 17, 2010An interesting and provocative article in The Scientist by Steven Wiley iof the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, To Join or Not to Join.
The thrust of the article is that scholarly societies are having trouble offering true value to their members in the Internet age, that their business models and even their raisons d'etre are being disrupted.
In years past, the answer was easy because being a member came with tangible benefits, such as inexpensive journals and the ability to submit abstracts to annual meetings. Nowadays, these perks don't seem very important. Most society…
jdupuis | March 15, 2010ISTL is a great resource for those of us in science and technology libraries. I'm happy to report on the tables of contents from the last two issues.
Winter 2010
Evaluation of an Audience Response System in Library Orientations for Engineering Students by Denise A. Brush, Rowan University
Open Access Citation Advantage: An Annotated Bibliography by A. Ben Wagner, University at Buffalo
Information Portals: A New Tool for Teaching Information Literacy Skills by Debra Kolah, Rice University and Michael Fosmire, Purdue University
Are Article Influence Scores Comparable across Scientific…
jdupuis | March 4, 2010I'm away for a couple of days, so I thought I'd fill in a bit with an oldy-buy-goody from February 4, 2009. It ended up being the first of three parts, with the other two being here and here. As usual, the first part got the most readers and comments, with the two after that being decidedly less popular. Go figure.
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I was just going to call this post "On Blogging" but I decided I like Robert Scoble's rather provocative statement better. This is not to say that I agree with his rather extreme stance, because I definitely don't, but I think it's an…
jdupuis | March 2, 2010Continuing the ongoing discussion about the publication habits of computing researchers that I've recently blogged about:
Time for computer science to grow up?
ACM responds to the blogosphere
The Association for Computing Machinery on Open Access.
Conferences vs. journals in computing research
This time around, we have Moshe Vardi Revisiting the Publication Culture in Computing Research in the latest Communications of the ACM.
The May 2009 editorial and the August 2009 column attracted a lot of attention in the blogosphere. The reaction has been mostly sympathetic to the point of view…
jdupuis | February 25, 2010My Lakehead University colleague Janice Mutz and I reprised the session I did at OLA two years ago this morning for an active and engaged crowd of about 50 librarians -- a great crowd for the very first session of the conference since a lot of people are still trickling in after arriving and registering.
This time around, we really put the emphasis on engagement and conversation, running the session like a combination Information Literacy and unconference session. Overall, we were really pleased with how it went and enjoyed the input from so many great librarians. Of the 20 or so "…
jdupuis | February 24, 2010Queen's University engineering librarian Michael White runs The Patent Librarian's Notebook, a very important resource for anyone interested in finding and making sense of patent information.
He's done a very comprehensive review of the important 2009 developments in public patent databases and related websites.
An example:
Canadian Patents Database (CIPO)
The Canadian Patents Database, which is maintained by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, contains more than two million Canadian patents and published applications from 1869 to the present. Full-text images are available from 1920…
jdupuis | February 22, 2010Here's what they're about:
The first draft of Panton Principles was written in July 2009 by Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, Rufus Pollock and John Wilbanks at the Panton Arms on Panton Street in Cambridge, UK, just down from the Chemistry Faculty where Peter works.
They were then refined with the help of the members of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Open Data in Science and were officially launched in February 2010.
Here they are:
Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge.
For science to effectively function…
jdupuis | February 16, 2010As a follow up to my previous posts about the situation at Canada's national science library, NRC-CISTI, here, here and here, this was in the Ottawa Citizen today, NRC to lay off 86 workers in April.
The National Research Council is laying off 86 people as part of cuts announced last year to reduce costs at the country's leading research organization.
The layoffs begin in April and will affect employees at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI), the country's national science library and leading publisher of scientific information. By the time it is over, CISTI…
jdupuis | January 22, 2010Horror author Cherie Priest has a very nice post from a couple of days ago called Control. It's basically about what mass market fiction authors do and don't have control over in the book production process. Now, the mass market fiction publishing niche is hardly the main concern on this blog, but I also think it's interesting to see what she comes up with and compare it with the list of things academic authors both do and don't have control over.
On some points it's strangely the same but mostly starkly different.
It's also worth contemplating how this list would be affected by an…
jdupuis | January 14, 2010Following along in the tradition of Bora's introductions of the various attendees for the upcoming Science Online 2010 conference, I thought I'd list all the library people that are attended. I'm not going to try and introduce each of the library people, I'll leave that to Bora, but I thought it might be nice to have us all listed in one place.
I did a quick list in my post a while back, but I revisited the attendee list after it closed and noticed a couple of people that weren't in the first list.
As I said in the earlier post, there's been a good tradition of librarians and library people…