dsalo

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March 23, 2010
This is my blog post for Ada Lovelace Day, on which we celebrate technical achievement by women. I'm writing it the day before, and setting it to post at midnight. I hope someone is writing a biography of Henriette Avram. I will be first in line to buy it. I desperately want to know how she did…
March 23, 2010
I was reading the latest issue of the Journal of Digital Information today, and I found myself wishing I could turn the Readability bookmarklet loose on half its PDF-only articles. I'm sorry, authors. I know you tried, but those PDFs are terrible-looking. Times New Roman, really? (The one in Arial…
March 22, 2010
OASPA is starting to get its act together, posting a concise summary of its membership procedures and making a new procedure for complaints relevant to the quality measures OASPA wishes to maintain among its members. I think OASPA is right not to offer to police every OA journal in existence. There…
March 18, 2010
First, a small warning: I am having an extremely crowded and busy week, so blogging here (even the catchup I need to do to the many excellent comments on the Battle of the Opens post) will suffer. Something for folks to chew on in the meantime: can anybody explain to me what this tool (if it is a…
March 17, 2010
John Dupuis asks some provocative questions; I thought I'd take a stab at answering them, and I encourage fellow SciBlings to do likewise. I quite agree with John when he says that the ferment over publishing models disguises a larger question, "the role of scholarly and professional societies in a…
March 14, 2010
I'm committed to a lot of different kinds of "open." This means that I can and do engage in tremendous acts of hair-splitting and pilpul with regard to them. "Gratis" versus "libre" open access? Free-speech versus free-beer software code? I'm your librarian; let's sit down and have that discussion…
March 11, 2010
We have a guestblogger today! At my request, Peggy Schaeffer kindly sent me the following introduction to Dryad, which I reproduce as I received it (save for minor formatting details). I will happily pass any questions in the comments on to Peggy for response. ---- Dryad is a repository for data…
March 10, 2010
One of the truisms in data curation is "well, of course we don't let sensitive data out into the wild woolly world." We hold sensitive data internally. If we must let it out, we anonymize it; sometimes we anonymize it just on general principles. We're not as dumb as the Google engineers, after all…
March 9, 2010
I interrupt your regularly-scheduled blog to ask for some help... comments closed on this post so that you'll comment where it'll do the most good. --- Apologies for duplication, and please forward/repost as appropriate... We are working on comparing four digital-repository software packages (…
March 5, 2010
I'm in Urbana-Champaign this weekend to teach an in-person day for my online collection-development class. I'm looking forward to it; every time I teach I am reminded that students are smarter than I am. For now, tidbits! As world plus dog probably knows already, The Economist tackled the data…
March 2, 2010
One of the latest institutional open-access policies comes from Harvard Business School (hat tip to Stuart Shieber). This is the same school that plays horrendous anti-library, anti-education games with their flagship Harvard Business Review. My head hurts.
March 1, 2010
So the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is mired in a rapidly heating controversy over a report that apparently let some dubious information slip through the cracks. Here's the money quote: The discovery of the glaciers mistake has focused attention on the IPCC's use of so-…
February 26, 2010
It's Friday! Snack on some tidbits. In the "didn't anyone teach you to show your work in grade school?" department, we have NIWA unable to justify official temperature record, as well as the radical notion of using actual data to gauge the effectiveness of review boards in stopping unethical…
February 26, 2010
So the backstory of the truly horrific murders at the University of Alabama at Huntsville has taken an open-access turn: the perpetrator (not being a journalist, I don't think I need to say "alleged") got a rather dubious-looking article published in an open-access journal. Further investigation…
February 23, 2010
I've been interviewed by Bora Zivkovic, apropos of many things. Click over if you've a mind.
February 22, 2010
The journal impact factor is a sham and a crock and a delusion, let's just take that as read. (If you don't care to take that as read, which is a healthy and sane attitude—take no one's word as gospel, especially not mine!—start here or perhaps here and keep going.) Using it to judge individual…
February 19, 2010
I've altered the tagline on this blog slightly, to reflect where it seems to be going. (I am not in control here; I am merely the author-function! Sorry, sorry, lit-crit joke.) At the same time, I've been thinking a lot about library collections, what's in them and how it gets there. (I'm teaching…
February 18, 2010
I'm home sick today, and not precisely looking forward to giving my class tonight because I really do feel wiped out. Fortunately, tidbits posts are easy… Denmark ponders the future of the research library. A thoughtful read for librarians; a good skim for scientists wondering how libraries will…
February 16, 2010
I have a very lengthy post in pickle that is taking me some time to work through. Forgive me; sometimes that's what blogging is for, though it's tough on the posting rate. In the meantime, a small thought about improving interaction patterns between scientists and librarians, something I still very…
February 9, 2010
Since early days indeed, it's been possible to bypass journal publishers and libraries in a quest for a particular article by going directly to the author. Some publishers have even facilitated this limited variety of samizdat by offering authors a few ready-made offprints. I've even had…
February 2, 2010
Perhaps shockingly, I don't plan to so much as try to wade through all seven-hundred-odd pages of this report on scholarly-publishing practices. It's thorough, it's well-documented, it's decently-written… and based on the executive summary (itself weighing in at a hefty 20 pages), it won't tell me…
February 1, 2010
Happy Groundhog's Day Eve! Or something. Jennifer Rohn discusses how suboptimal data management makes downstream tasks such as submitting papers to journals a bit harder. The bit about proprietary image formats is particularly cringe-inducing. Why Cameron Neylon is disappointed with Nature…
January 30, 2010
I'm getting quite a few more comments here than when I started, which is lovely! To keep the conversation lively and civil, I've put together a comment policy, which you can find on the blog's About page. (I'll link to it from the sidebar momentarily.) It's mostly common sense. Moreover, I haven't…
January 29, 2010
(My apologies; this post inadvertently went up prematurely. If you were wondering where I was going with it, please read on!) I met Steve Koch at Science Online 2010, where he wowed me showing off his students' open-notebook-science work. I love, just love, teachers who do that. I wish the sort of…
January 26, 2010
Back in the day, Time Warner merged with AOL. It turned out to be one of the worst merger ideas in the history of merger ideas, and I believe the evidence suggests that most mergers actually turn out to be clunkers! AOL was simply at the top of its orbit, nowhere but downhill to go. I wonder, I do…
January 26, 2010
It's odd to wake up in the morning to discover that I've earned a new Nerd Merit Badge. I for one welcome our new Boing Boing overlords readers, and I thank the marvelous Jessamyn West for the shout-out. Now. To clear some things up. It was pointed out in a lengthy comment to the BoingBoinged post…
January 25, 2010
I don't hear as much curiosity from the research community as I'd like to about what a librarian knows and does, but I do hear some. For that some, I suggest poking through the fourth annual iteration of Librarian Day in the Life. A wide variety of librarians blog, tweet, photograph, and vid about…
January 22, 2010
Because I scanted you on tidbits for quite some time, have a second tidbits post in a single week! A little library advocacy: Five library resources you should be using. Otherwise-closed data tend to open up in direct proportion to the perceived importance of the problem: GlaxoSmithKline opens up…
January 21, 2010
Again in no particular order, some thoughts and ideas that came to mind during Science Online 2010: I did quite a bit of library advocacy during the conference, and not just during the session dedicated to it! I noticed that I had the best luck when I could define a library service in terms of…
January 20, 2010
Making headlines in libraryland is EBSCO's announcement of exclusive access to several popular periodicals in electronic form. (See also this reaction, which includes a partial list of the publications that will be exclusive to EBSCO.) Essentially, libraries who want their patrons to be able to…