scholarly publishing

Yes, as promised I'm going to start workshopping the book I'm working on: My Job in 10 Years: The Future of Academic Librarianship. (Note title tweak.) First of all, this is all just provisional; I'm at a point where I need to stop tinkering if I just going to get something out the door. Some parts are over-developed for an outline, others are under-developed. I'm still thinking bout the book structurally. I'm also still thinking about what kinds of topic areas belong in or out. I've been picking nits with the TOC for a while now, moving bits here and there, and that probably won't stop,…
Via Lance Fortnow's Twitter post, it's interesting to see Communications of the ACM editor Moshe Y. Vardi on Open Access: First, a point of precision. Open-access experts distinguish between "Gold OA," described earlier, and "Green OA," which allows for open access self-archiving of material (deposit by authors) that may have been published as non-open access. ACM Copyright Policy allows for self-archiving, so ACM is a Green-OA publisher. Still, why doesn't ACM become a Gold-OA publisher? *snip* As for ACM's stand on the open-access issue, I'd describe it as "clopen," somewhere between open…
A thought experiment. It all started with this Ray Bradbury quote in the New York Times: "Libraries raised me," Mr. Bradbury said. "I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years." I've bolded the chunk that has resonated most strongly around the Internet, especially Twitter where it was widely tweeted and retweeted. The tweeter that most piqued my interest was…
Ok, that's a slight exaggeration. It isn't built yet. But if York space scientists and engineers have anything to say about it, it sure will be. Check it out from our internal newsletter, Space elevator designed at York University would reach 20 km above Earth: "For decades, scientists have been grappling to find a more efficient means of getting payloads into space," says Brendan Quine (right), professor of space physics and engineering in York's Faculty of Science & Engineering, who is heading the project. A paper detailing the design was recently published in the journal Acta…
My brain is completely overloaded at the moment after the two absolutely fabulous conferences I've attended in the past week. I'm going to do individual posts about each conference, but I thought I'd give some initial impressions in this post first. As a reminder, the conferences were BookCamp Toronto and Managing Data for Science. First of all, BookCamp Toronto, an unconference attended mostly by people from the trade book publishing industry, the Canadian version of which is centred here in Toronto. There were quite a few authors in attendance as well as some publishing people from other…
After last year's success, the organizers put on a another great SciBarCamp show! It was this past May 8th and 9th at the University of Toronto's Hart House. What is SciBarCamp, you ask? SciBarCamp is a gathering of scientists, artists, and technologists for a day of talks and discussions. The second SciBarCamp event will take place at Hart House at the University of Toronto on May 9th, 2009, with an opening reception on the evening of May 8th. The goal is to create connections between science, entrepreneurs and local businesses, and arts and culture. I'll just do some fairly detailed…