scholarly publishing
jdupuis | December 17, 2009Thinking about the future is very hard.
You'd think I'd know just how hard it is, having engaged in it on numerous occasions during my blogging career and even writing a book about it. But the more I think about the future -- of the climate, of society, of the economy, of information, of publishing, of libraries and, ultimately, of librarians like me -- the harder it is to pin down what I really think is going to happen. The future has a nasty way of sneaking up on you and actually happening in the past. Some things happen faster than you thought, some slower. Some things you thought were…
jdupuis | October 25, 2009Registration for Science Online 2010 is open. The conference web site is here and program info is here.
Time is running out. There are currently about 175 registered and the organizers are going to cap it at 250.
I've attended the conference for the past two years and it's a blast. I really enjoyed the sessions as well as the informal times between sessions, at the meals and in the bar.
I've registered already, as has my son, Sam, who's in grade 11. He attended last year and also had a great time. Bora even interviewed him!
There's been a good tradition of librarians attending the…
jdupuis | October 20, 2009A few weeks ago Bill Gasarch published his Journal Manifesto 2.0 on the Computational Complexity blog.
Basically, his idea was to start a scholarly publishing revolution from the inside:
Keep in mind: I am NOT talking to the NSF or to Journal publishes or to Conference organizers. I am NOT going to say what any of these people should do. I am talking to US, the authors of papers. If WE all follow this manifesto then the problems of high priced journals and limited access may partially go away on their own. To be briefer: To the extend that WE are the problem, WE can be the solution.
It's a…
jdupuis | October 19, 2009As I mentioned in my previous post, I did a little Q&A about the new outsourcing arrangement that CISTI has negotiated with Infotrieve.
Q1. What's the effect on jobs at CISTI from this move?
As you may know, NRC-CISTI is transforming itself to be well positioned to serve the needs of Canadian knowledge workers now and in the future. This transformation is a major undertaking for the organization and will require a significant transition for NRC-CISTI's workforce.
NRC is working to mitigate the effect on employees by seeking to place as many of the affected employees as possible within…
jdupuis | October 19, 2009Such is the subject line of an email I got from the NRC-CISTI people last week. NRC-CISTI is Canada's National Research Council -- Canada Institute of Scientific and Technical Informamtion. In other words, Canada's national science library. Many of you probably know them for their document delivery service.
The basic message is that the document delivery service has been outsourced to a US company:
NRC-CISTI, Canada's national science library is changing and we are energized by the possibilities as we move forward in the transformation process announced in February 2009.
Today, we are…
jdupuis | October 13, 2009I rarely mention here when Walt Crawford publishes a new issue of his very fine ejournal Cites & Insights, mostly because I sort of assume you all read it already.
Of course, that's probably not true so I'll remedy the situation partially with this post.
The most recent issue is completely (html) devoted to giving a selective overview of the last year or so's (mostly) blogospheric writing on open access -- think of it as a detailed review article from a volume of an annual review series. The emphasis is on covering important developments and interesting controversies. I was familiar…
jdupuis | October 8, 2009On October 1, 2009 librarians and archivists at York University Libraries voted unanimously to adopt the following policy:
York University Open Access Policy for Librarians and Archivists
Librarians and archivists at York University recognize the importance of open access to content creators and researchers in fostering new ideas, creating knowledge and ensuring that it is available as widely as possible. In keeping with our long-standing support of the Open Access movement, York librarians and archivists move to adopt a policy which would ensure our research is disseminated as widely as…
jdupuis | October 8, 2009The IEEE Computer Society's magazine IT Professional has a special issue on Ontologies, OWL, and the Semantic Web (v11i5). There's lots of very cool-looking stuff, mostly pretty basic.
Guest Editor's Introduction: Ontologies, OWL, and the Semantic Web by Jepsen, Thomas C.
Semantic Web Technologies: Ready for Adoption? by Janev, Valentina; Vranes, Sanja
Equal Format Databases and Semantic-Relational Encoding by Keith, Dean
Just What Is an Ontology, Anyway? by Jepsen, Thomas C.
A couple of other non-semantic web articles that look worth checking out:
Joining the Conversation about IT Ethics…
jdupuis | September 30, 2009It's time for the annual Mocking of the Thomson session.
Check out my previous iterations of this amusing pastime: 2002, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008.
Yes, I've been at this for a while, but to no avail. My main point in all this is to make clear that I don't believe that the Nobel prizes are chosen on the basis of citation count. Sure, there's going to be a correlation between the two, but the causation is extremely weak. Thomson's constant hawking of their "Citation Laureates" is, in my opinion, self-serving and wrong-headed.
And yes, they do get them right occasionally, but that's because…
jdupuis | September 24, 2009Predicting the future is tricky business. Trust me, I know.
But there's two ideas I always like to keep in mind when I put my futurologist's hat on:
The future will be at least as diverse as the present, probably more so. But not likely less.
There's no guarantee that things will change for the better. There's also no guarantee that things will change for the worse. The only thing you can be sure of is that it'll be hard to get any agreement on which is which.
These two ideas are closely connected in my mind, compelling me to (hopefully) think realistically and honestly, if not always…
jdupuis | September 21, 2009That's the question asked by Lance Fortnow in a recent Communications of the ACM Viewpoint article (free fulltext).
Fortnow's article continues a discussion about scholarly communication patterns in computer science that's been going on for a while in the "pages" of the CACM. I've blogged about it a couple of times here and here.
Fortnow's main idea is that CS needs to get past the youthful stage of using conferences as the main vehicle for disseminating new ideas and move to a journal-based model, like most of the rest of scientific disciplines. In the end, it's all about peer review:…
jdupuis | September 16, 2009I haven't done one of these in a while, so there's quite a backlog to clear.
Reports
Digital Scholarly Communication: A Snapshot of Current Trends
Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity
Strategic Outsourcing and Cloud Computing: Reality Is a Sober Adversary
Library Storage Facilities and the Future of Print Collections in North America
XC User Research Preliminary Report (Extensible Catalog)
Edgeless University: why higher education must embrace technology
Beyond Scientific Publication: Strategies for Disseminating
How Teens Use Media: A Nielsen report on the myths and realities of teen…
jdupuis | September 9, 2009Just yesterday I posted on preserving the the history of the computing field, musing at the end that digitization projects could save a lot of documents.
Well, what comes along today in the latest What's New @ IEEE for Students is a note about the IEEE-USA History Project:
Digital Archives, Organization's Four Decades of Service Unveiled
IEEE-USA is building a digital archive featuring documents and photos of its 36-year history of promoting the careers and public policy interests of U.S. IEEE members. Part of the IEEE-USA History Project, the archive features:
An overview of the first four…
jdupuis | September 8, 2009An interesting article from the most recent IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Preserving Records of the Past, Today by James W. Cortada. In concerns the difficulty that scholars of the history of computing have in finding primary materials to work with, mostly in the form of documents.
Scholars examining the history of information technology run into many practical, nuts-and-bolts problems more frequently than historians in other fields that
have existed for considerable periods of time, such as diplomatic and political national history. Problems with the history of information…
jdupuis | September 1, 2009A bunch of recent journal & magazine issues to catch up on. There's lots of cool stuff to highlight, so I'll only list a couple of articles from each issue. Unfortunately, most of it will be behind the IEEE paywall.
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, v31i2
Think Piece: Preserving Records of the Past, Today by Cortada, J.W.
Anecdotes: Prototype Fragments from Babbage's First Difference Engine by Roegel, D.
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, v28i2
K-Net and Canadian Aboriginal communities by Fiser, A.; Clement, A.
Communication technology, emergency alerts, and campus safety by…
jdupuis | August 31, 2009"The past can survive only if it can beat out the future" (p. 142)
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Laurence Lessig is a great and important book, one that should be read by anyone interested in the future of the Internet, culture and expression.
This book is a plea and an argument for a business model for culture and creativity, one in which supporters of the arts are willing to pay creators directly for their output. I'm not convinced. I'm also not not convinced.
Like the best non-fiction, this book engages you in an argument. I literally found myself…
jdupuis | August 20, 2009During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from September 3, 2008. There was some nice discussion on Friendfeed that's worth checking out.
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Some recent posts that got me thinking about various escience/science 2.0/open science issues:
First, Christina gets us rolling with some definitions:
So I'm asking and proposing that e-science is
grid computing - using distributed computing power to do new computational methods in other areas of science (not in CS but in Astro, in bio,…
jdupuis | August 5, 2009During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from July 3, 2007. It's one of the most popular posts I've done, and it was linked quite widely in the science blogosphere. The interview series has lapsed a bit this year, but that's mostly due to a couple of the people I was approaching just not working out. I will definitely relaunch the series in the fall and try to do one every other month or so.
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Welcome to the most recent installment in my occasional series of interviews…
jdupuis | July 23, 2009Scott Delman, Group Publisher of the ACM, has responded to my post earlier this month on society publishers and open access. That post generated some very good discussion in the post comments that are well worth checking out.
Delman's article is in the most recent Communications of the ACM (v52i8): Responding to the Blogosphere.
Here are some excerpts, although Delman's article is so interesting that I wish I could quote the whole thing.
The fact that ACM charges both for access to the published information in its Digital Library and also extends the courtesy of "Green OA" to its authors is…
jdupuis | July 16, 2009This is a great looking afternoon here in Toronto on Wednesday July 29th, organized by Greg Wilson and taking place at the MaRS Centre: Science 2.0: What every scientist needs to know about how the web is changing the way they work.
The event is free, but registration is required. Here's an outline of the presentations:
Titus Brown: Choosing Infrastructure and Testing Tools for Scientific Software Projects
Cameron Neylon: A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook
Michael Nielsen: Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific…