scholarly publishing
jdupuis | January 9, 2012Note: this post is superseded by: Around the Web: Research Works Act, Elsevier boycott & FRPAA.
Following on my post from yesterday on Scholarly Societies: It's time to abandon the AAP over The Research Works Act, I thought I'd gather together some of the recent posts on the issue.
The Wikipedia article is here, full text of the bill here and status here.
2012.01.04. New US Publisher Anti-OA Legislation by Cable Green
2012.01.04. A Threat to Open Access: the Research Works Act by Lisa Federer
2012.01.05. Update on publishers and SOPA: Time for scholarly publishers to disavow the AAP by…
jdupuis | January 5, 2012So, The Research Works Act, H.R. 3699 is a new piece of legislation that is being introduced in the US.
Not surprisingly it's supported by the American Association of Publishers and its Professional and Scholarly Publishing (AAP/PSP).
The legislation is aimed at preventing regulatory interference with private-sector research publishers in the production, peer review and publication of scientific, medical, technical, humanities, legal and scholarly journal articles. This sector represents tens of thousands of articles which report on, analyze and interpret original research; more than 30,000 U…
jdupuis | November 10, 2011Welcome to the latest installment in my very occasional series of interviews with people in the scitech world. This time around the subject is Michael Nielsen, author of the recently published Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science and prolific speaker on the Open Science lecture circuit. A recent example of his public speaking is his TEDxWaterloo talk on Open Science.
You can follow his blog here and read his recent Wall Street Journal article, The New Einsteins Will Be Scientists Who Share.
I'd like to thank Michael for his provocative and insightful responses. Enjoy…
jdupuis | October 28, 2011As reported here and elsewhere, Amazon is actually dipping its toes into the world of publishing.
Which of course is an interesting challenge and threat for traditional trade publishers. And who knows, maybe academic publishers too, if Amazon decides it wants to disrupt that market as well.
In any case, The New York Times has a nice set of four essays debating the topic, Will Amazon Kill Off Publishers?.
Amazon is getting a lot of heat these days over its attempts to push its way into the hearts and minds of readers, writers and the larger book culture -- even comic books. Indeed, the news…
jdupuis | October 26, 2011Ah, #OccupyScholComm.
The perfect Open Access Week topic!
And just like the broader Occupy protests movement, the aims and policy pronouncements of the "movement" are perhaps not as vague as they might seem to the casual observer.
Basically, #OccupyScholComm is about scholars rejecting profit-driven toll-access publishing and taking back the control of their own scholarly output.
Or something like that.
Anyways, it all started with this tweet from OpenAccessHulk:
OA HULK WANTS TO KNOW WHO TO OCCUPY! ELSEVIER!? ACS!? HARPERCOLLINS!? YOU NAME IT, OA HULK WILL OCCUPY AND SMASH! #…
jdupuis | October 24, 2011For your reading and collection development pleasure!Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them. Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy's future and an…
jdupuis | October 19, 2011I've long been a believer in the power of blogs to drive and aggregate conversations at every level. Frivolous, for sure. But also serious and scholarly.
The rise of science blogs over the last few years has certainly demonstrated that. In librarianship as well, blogs are a powerful source of comment, theory and practical advice. I've always thought that the practical side of the library world was ripe to be the first field to truly leave journals behind and embrace blogging as a kind of replacement. It would be messy, sure, but it would be democratizing and re-invigorating.
The kinds of…
jdupuis | October 12, 2011Waaaaay back on September 20, I flew down to New York City to take part in one of the Science Online New York City panel discussions, this one on Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils (and here).
Ably organized and moderated by David Dobbs, the other panelists were Evan Ratliff, Amanda Moon, Carl Zimmer and Dean Johnson.
Here's a description of the panel:
Enhanced ebooks and tablet apps clearly offer new ways to present material and engage readers. Yet some of the software restrictions and rights deals that these ebooks, apps and their platforms use can make them unfriendly…
jdupuis | September 30, 2011w00t!
It's Ig Nobel Prize season again!
A brief description:
The Ig® Nobel Prizes
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.
"Last, but not least, there are the Ig Nobel awards. These come with little cash, but much cachet, and reward those research projects that 'first make people laugh, and then make them think'" -- Nature
The video of last night's ceremony is archived here.
Here are some highlights…
jdupuis | August 29, 2011The theme at the upcoming Science Online NYC panel is Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils and I guess I'm the perils guy. The purpose of this post is helping me to get some of my thoughts down on pixels and, as a by-product, I guess it's tipping my hand a little bit for the other participants on the panel.
This session and my role as skeptic comes out of the Science Online session on ebooks in North Carolina this past January. I believe I may have refereed to the emerging ebooks app ecosystem as "The Dark Side."
My point was not to explicitly demonize app developers or…
jdupuis | August 17, 2011I'll be speaking at the upcoming Science Online NYC event on September 20th.
Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM (ET)
New York, NY
Weiss 305
Rockefeller University
E66th and York Ave.
New York, NY
Enhanced ebooks and tablet apps clearly offer new ways to present material and engage readers. Yet some of the software restrictions and rights deals that these ebooks, apps and their platforms use can make them unfriendly to librarians, archivists, and future users. How can authors, designers, and publishers best exploit these…
jdupuis | July 15, 2011The latest D-Lib has a bunch of really interesting articles:
Services for Academic Libraries in the New Era by Michalis Gerolimos and Rania Konsta
Digital Librarianship & Social Media: the Digital Library as Conversation Facilitator
Article by Robert A. Schrier
Building a Sustainable Institutional Repository by Chenying Li, Mingjie Han, Chongyang Hong, Yan Wang, Yanqing Xu and Chunning Cheng
Music to My Ears: The New York Philharmonic Digital Archives by Cynthia Tobar
jdupuis | July 14, 2011As usual, a wealth of interesting articles in the latest ISTL:
Faculty of 1000 and VIVO: Invisible Colleges and Team Science by John Carey, City University of New York
E-book Usage among Chemists, Biochemists and Biologists: Findings of a Survey and Interviews by Yuening Zhang and Roger Beckman, Indiana University, Bloomington
Look Beyond Textbooks: Information Literacy for First-Year Science Students by Gabrielle K.W. Wong, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
The Changing Role of Blogs in Science Information Dissemination by Laksamee Putnam, Towson University
Life Science Data…
jdupuis | July 5, 2011Yet another science blogging community. The more the merrier.
We've had another quiet period in the science blogging universe these last couple of months. It seems that the rapid evolution that kicked off with the founding of Scientopia in the wake of Pepsigate is continuing.
And this is the big one: Scientific American Blogs. This is easily the biggest and most important science blogging community launch since ScienceBlogs itself launched back in 2006.
Of course, it was engineered by the master of us all, Bora Zivkovic.
Here's what he has to say about the makeup of the network:
Diversity…
jdupuis | June 21, 2011A couple of odd ones from last week's Inside Higher Ed, both related to the way scholarship, higher education and the intelligent design/creationism movement intersect.
First up, Blasphemy of a Different Kind, involving people possibly being fired for teaching evolution at an Adventist school. Although the university involved claims that the firings weren't related to the teaching of evolution, it's hard to imagine that there wasn't some connection.
The president of La Sierra's board of trustees on Friday asked for the resignations of Jeff Kaatz, the vice president for university…
jdupuis | June 13, 2011I'll be at the 2011 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries at the University of Ottawa for the next few days. I plan on doing a bit of tweeting while I'm there but probably no live blogging.
I hope to have a summary post up here sometime after the conference with my impressions. Taking advantage of the relative proximity of Ottawa, this will be my first time at JCDL and I'm really looking forward to it. It's probably a bit more technical than I've been getting into recently but stretching the mind is always a good thing.
I hope to see some of you there. Definitely if you're…
jdupuis | June 8, 2011As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I did a short presentation on Scholarship in the Public Eye: The Case for Social Media as part of a panel for a York Faculty of Graduate Studies Scholarly Communications Series.
And yes, I was the Twitter guy, although some of the other presenters did talk about their use of Twitter. Basically, my point was that Twitter and blogs can be part and parcel of the research and research outreach life of academics. I mostly concentrated on Twitter, but I did try and make the same sorts of points about blogging as well as I spoke.
Anyways, I thought I would share…
jdupuis | June 6, 2011Sometimes we Open Access advocates tend to assume everybody is already on our side. You know, all our librarian and scientist colleagues out there. Surely by now they've seen the light. They understand the main issues and flavours of OA, can ably summarize the major arguments for OA and refute the major complaints against.
Of course, reality is a lot more complicated than my dreamy, unrealistic wishes.
Convincing librarians to support Open Access, either directly or indirectly, is usually fairly easy but even we have a number of misconceptions and misunderstandings about what OA really…
jdupuis | May 31, 2011Twitterers of the world.
We've all heard the questions. The murmurs. The doubts and whispers.
"Twitter is a waste of time," they say.
"People are just talking about what they ate for breakfast, or what their dog is doing."
"No good can come of it, no way to spend work time, turning us all into ADHD cases."
The mother of all social media doubter articles came out a little while back, The New York Time's Bill Keller on The Twitter Trap:
I don't mean to be a spoilsport, and I don't think I'm a Luddite. I edit a newspaper that has embraced new media with creative, prizewinning gusto. I get that…
jdupuis | May 29, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, is from August 14, 2007.
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This one of those very rare books, books that make you truly smarter and more…