Open Access
jdupuis | November 20, 2014
Science 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 22, 2014I find the whole idea of a "sharing economy" where people barter and exchange and free up excess capacity in their own lives and situations to make others' lives a little easier and cheaper an interesting notion. And worthwhile. After all broadly speaking the open access and open source movements do partake of this same spirit. Libraries too, in that we pool the resources of a community to acquire stuff for the benefit of all the members, so that everyone can share the wealth.
But is there a dark side to sharing?
With the advent of companies like AirBnB and it's ilk not to mention the whole…
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 | 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, 2014
A 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 | May 26, 2014Faithful readers of this blog may recall that back in March I posted a set of slides I had prepared for a presentation to a class of undergraduate computer science majors, basically outlining what open science is and challenging them to use their talents to make science work better.
Usually I don't post the presentation slides I use for my everyday work as a librarian, when I appear in classrooms to talk about how to find and evaluate sources in science or when I talk about science communication. But in this case I spent a fair amount of time preparing and revising this particular iteration…
jdupuis | April 14, 2014As part of the celebrations for Canada's upcomming 150th birthday, the Canadian federal government has released its Digital Canada 150 strategy paper, and while it`s not all bad, at the same time there is not an awful lot to recommend it. Especially considering it was four years in the making.
My sense is that its main purpose is for the Harper Conservative government to be able to say it has a digital strategy during the next election campaign in 2015. The most telling thing about the strategy, of course, is which department it originated in: Industry Canada. Not Culture, not Heritage, not…
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 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…
aardvarchaeology | February 6, 2014The list of misdemeanours that identifies an Open Access science journal as predatory and not bona fide is long. One of them is attempts on the part of the publisher and editors to manipulate the journal's citation index, for instance by demanding that authors cite earlier work published in the same journal. If many scholars cite papers in a given journal, then that journal's index improves -- even if the citing only goes on inside the covers of the journal itself.
When I first read about this criterion I was a little embarrassed, because I do that all the time when editing Fornvännen. I don'…
gregladen | January 18, 2014Copernicus Publications is an Open Access enterprise that provided the ability for an academic entity of some sort or another to create a new Open Access journal. In March 2013 the journal “Pattern Recognition in Physics" was started up and added to the Copernicus lineup. The journal apparently put out a few items, and then, recently, produced Special Issue 1, called “Pattern in solar variability, their planetary origin and terrestrial impacts." The special issue editors were Nils-Axel Mörner, R. Tattersall, and J.-E. Solheim. Readers of this blog will recognize R. Tattersall as TallBloke,…
aardvarchaeology | December 12, 2013Fornvännen 2013:1, last spring's issue, is now on-line in its entirety on Open Access.
Joy Boutrup et al. on openwork braids of silk and metal thread that decorated 15th century elite fashion garments.
Påvel Nicklasson on zoologist and archaeological trailblazer Sven Nilsson's travels in England and France in 1836.
Nils Harnesk on High Medieval log canoes from a farming frontier site in Norrbotten.
Soon-to-be-Doctor Ny Björn Gustafsson on Viking Period bronze and silver craft sites on Gotland (in English).
Mats G. Larsson on geophys in the Meadow of Mora where Medieval Swedish royal…
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…
jdupuis | October 25, 2013It's been kind of a crazy week for me, so I haven't really had much of a chance to contribute to or even read a lot of the Open Access Week calls to arms out there right now.
So I thought I would kind of commandeer my Friday Fun silly lists habit and redirect that energy to open access.
So here it is, from Peter Suber:
Open access: six myths to put to rest
The only way to provide open access to peer-reviewed journal articles is to publish in open access journals
All or most open access journals charge publication fees
Most author-side fees are paid by the authors themselves
Publishing in a…