scholarly publishing
jdupuis | March 2, 2015Finally, the Canadian government's Tri-Agency funding councils (SSHRC, NSERC, CIHR) have released the consolidated final version of it's open access policy. The draft version came out some time ago. The consultation process garnered quite a few responses, which the Tri-Agencies were kind enough to summarize for us.
And finally it is here. I have to admit I was getting a bit concerned. The final version was rumoured to have been kicking around the various departments waiting for final sign-off for months. With the rumours of the Conservatives possibly dropping the writ and calling a spring…
jdupuis | February 11, 2015Why Science Journal Paywalls Have to Go
Authors or journal editors: Who faces more pressure in the academic publishing system?
STM Consultation on Article Sharing (Draft principles here)
ICOLC Response to the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical (STM) Statement
A second front
STM’s new publishing licenses raise antitrust concerns amid wider efforts to pollute open access standards.
Scientists have the power to change the publishing system
The costs for going Gold in the Netherlands
Springer and universities take key step towards open access (The Netherlands)
CERN and…
jdupuis | January 27, 2015On 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. The post is my most popular by an of magnitude, with around 10 times more page views that the…
jdupuis | January 26, 2015I'm doing a presentation at this week's Ontario Library Association Super Conference on a case study of my Canadian War on Science work from an altmetrics perspective. In other words, looking at non-traditional ways of evaluating the scholarly and "real world" impact of a piece of research. Of course, in this case, the research output under examination is itself kind of non-traditional, but that just makes it more fun.
The Canadian War on Science post I'm using as the case study is here.
Here's the session description:
802F Altmetrics in Action: Documenting Cuts to Federal Government…
jdupuis | November 20, 2014Science Journals Have Passed Their Expiration Date -- It's Time for the Publishing Platform
An interview with Anurag Acharya, Google Scholar lead engineer (2006)
Google Scholar pioneer on search engine’s future
Google Scholar Is Doing Just Fine, Says Google
What if Google killed Scholar?
Making the world’s problem solvers 10% more efficient: Ten years after a Google engineer empowered researchers with Scholar, he can’t bear to leave it
A Decade of Google Scholar
On the Shoulders of Giants: The Growing Impact of Older Articles
Rise of the Rest: The Growing Impact of Non-Elite Journals
The…
jdupuis | October 9, 2014So what do I mean by Big Deals.
In the world of academic libraries, a Big Deal is when we subscribe to the electronic versions of all (or almost all) of a journal publisher's offerings. Usually for it to qualify as a Big Deal, the publisher in question is going to be one of the larger ones out there, like Elsevier or Springer or even a big society publisher like IEEE or the American Chemical Society. The whole idea of the Big Deal is that we should theoretically get a better price for a large volume commitment than for paying on an individual basis for just the ones we think we really want.…
jdupuis | October 1, 2014I'm always interested in the present and future of libraries and higher education. There's a steady stream of reports from various organizations that are broadly relevant to the (mostly academic) library biz but they can be tough to keep track of. I thought I'd aggregate some of those here.
Of course I've very likely missed a few, so suggestions are welcome in the comments.
I've done a few similar posts recently here and here.
NMC Horizon Report 2014 Library Edition
SPARC Article-Level Metrics Primer
Reed Elsevier: Goodbye to Berlin - The Fading Threat of Open Access
Ithaka S+R: Does…
jdupuis | September 22, 2014Melissa K. Aho and Erika Bennet's anthology The Machiavellian Librarian: Winning Allies, Combating Budget Cuts, and influencing Stakeholders is pretty good for what it is, in some ways better than I expected. It's a guide for maneuvering office politics and advancing your agenda, big and small, with the stakeholders and influencers that matters in your environment. Sadly, this book fails for what it isn't: a book that tackles the issues and trends where librarians really need to advance our agendas and make ourselves key "thought leaders" and "influencers."
The book is a collection of 25…
jdupuis | September 10, 2014A Creative Commons Guide to Sharing Your Science
Why do some academic publishers think they should charge extra for more liberal licenses (CC BY)?
The opportunity cost of my open access was 35 hours + $690 (UPDATED)
The future of open access and library publishing
Sick of Impact Factors
Making a spectacle of scientific research
Open for Business – Why In the Library with the Lead Pipe is Moving to CC-BY Licensing
The tone goes up on the open front
No Need To Only Send Your Best Work To Science Magazine
Why I am a product manager at PLOS: Linking up value across the research process
Are…
jdupuis | September 4, 2014Yes, it has become a trilogy. The two Twitter rants I recapped here sparked more angst and anguish in me, prompting me to write a third rant.
As it became ready for Twitter publication and approached 800 words, it also became clear that this particular rant was fast outgrowing what I could reasonably expect people to follow on Twitter, easily over 40 tweets worth of text. As many epic fantasy series can attest, these things can get out the control of the author quite easily. At least I'm not pulling a GRRM and taking 6 or more years in between installments!
I did sent out a tweet last…
jdupuis | August 29, 2014Twitter is a great place to rant and rave sometimes. You can feel free to let loose and say what you're thinking without necessarily feeling that you need to have completely well-formed ideas. The enforced brevity can sometimes also be a plus, as it forces you to distill what you want to say to the bare minimum. It it possible to string together longer thoughts across multiple tweets but it becomes a bit awkward to read.
I let loose a couple of Open Access related rants over the last few days and I thought I'd share them here, slightly cleaned up to make them more readable. Both are fairly…
jdupuis | August 18, 2014To continue the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science theme, I present the text of a recent open letter I signed to the AAAS concerning their new journal Science Advances.
Thanks to Jonathan Tennant for spearheading this effort. You can read more about the rationale behind writing the letter and the process involved at Jon's blog here. As well, he's listing the other places where the letter is being disseminated.
Dear AAAS,
This is an open letter concerning the recent launch of the new open access journal, Science Advances. In addition to the welcome diversification in…
jdupuis | August 6, 2014It seems that the American Association for the Advancement of Science has just announced the new publisher of it's flagship family of Science journals:
AAAS CEO Alan I. Leshner today announced the appointment of Kent Anderson, a past president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SPP), to serve as Publisher of the Science family of journals.
Anderson, who in 2011 received the SPP's highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award, will assume the role of Science Publisher as of 3 November.
Currently, he is the CEO and Publisher of STRIATUS/The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery in Needham…
jdupuis | August 1, 2014In a recent post on his Whatever blog, science fiction writer John Scalzi makes some very fine points related to the ongoing controversy surrounding the way Amazon treats various publishers and how this affects authors.
He makes great points throughout the post and with a little tweaking we can very easily apply his remarks to libraries and publishers.
Here's my tweaked version:
I really really really wish publishers would stop pretending that anything they do is for the benefit of libraries. They do not. They do it for their own benefit, and then find a way to spin it to libraries, with the…
jdupuis | June 17, 2014There's been a lot around the intertubes the last few months about journal pricing and who pays what and why and reactions all around. I thought I'd gather a bit of that here for posterity, starting with the Timothy Gowers post on the UK Elsevier Big Deal numbers up to the most recent item in PNAS about US numbers. In both cases, they authors dug up the numbers using Freedom of Information requests to the various institutions.
Needless to say, I'd love to see these kinds of numbers for Canada and if anyone out there is interested in working on such a project I'd love to hear from you.
The…
jdupuis | April 21, 2014Publishing may be a button, but publishing isn’t all we need
The Vacuum Shouts Back: Postpublication Peer Review on Social Media
bioRxiv: The preprint server for biology
Debt, Pensions and Capitalisation: Funding schol comms innovation
How to maximise usage of digital collections
Librarian, Heal Thyself: A Scholarly Communication Analysis of LIS Journals
How to energize scholarship for the digital age
Why universities should care about Altmetrics
Some Things Last A Long Time (How long does it take to publish a paper)
Do blog citations correlate with a higher number of future citations?…
jdupuis | March 14, 2014Earlier this week I was invited (er, invited myself, really) to give a talk to a class of first year computer science students about open access and open science. Sadly, there was a partial snow day that day and I was unable to actually give the talk. Which is too bad, because I've done similar talks before for undergrads and really enjoy the opportunity. In particular, the challenge I wanted to set forth for those budding computing professions was to be a part of developing software solutions for science on the web be they open access journals systems or web data hosting or whatver.
In any…
jdupuis | February 25, 2014I'll be at Science Online Together for the next few days. I missed last year so I'm really looking forward to getting back into the Science Online swing of things.
As is occasionally my habit, I'll be listing here some attendees that are either Canadian, librarians or, in a few select cases, both. I'm adding websites and Twitter handles in the lists, but only if they're included in the directory listing.
Librarians
KT Vaughn
Karen Ciccone
Michael Habib (Twitter)
Stephanie Brown (Twitter)
Barrie Hayes (Twitter)
Laksamee Putnam (Twitter)
Zoe Pettway Unno (Twitter)
John Dupuis
Canadians…
jdupuis | February 11, 2014Many of my readers may recall that back in October I published a post announcing the Draft Open Access Policy consultation process launched by the Canadian Tri-Councils -- Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council and Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The deadline for submissions was December 13th. Since the deadline was just before the holidays I thought it best to wait awhile before compiling all the publicly posted responses. And that was probably a good idea, as many of the responses were published in the new year. I…
jdupuis | December 10, 2013This is a tale of two companies and a bunch of not-so-innocent bystanders.
Both Elsevier and Academia.edu are for-profit companies in the scholarly communications industry. Elsevier is a publisher while Academia.edu is a platform for scholars that, among other things, allows them to post copies of their articles online for all the world to see.
Both are trying to make money by adding value within the scholarly communications ecosystem. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There is plenty of room within that ecosystem for all kinds of players, both for-profit and non-profit. It's all…