Open Access
jdupuis | December 9, 2010...Instead of a different Creative Commons license, such as CC-BY? Or just with normal copyright restrictions?
(You can get an explanation of CC0 here: it implies relinquishing all rights and essentially means releasing something into the public domain.)
A good question, one that I attempted to answer as part of my Exploring Open Science session at Brock University several weeks back. While I was talking about the importance of Open Data within the Open Science movement, one of the audience members very properly pressed the point of why it's important for data to be open.
I think I gave…
jdupuis | November 29, 2010Via Bora Zivkovic, I see that there's a new blog in town -- this one devoted to the joys of scientists blogging to advance their work.
It's called Science of Blogging and it's by Peter Janiszewski and Travis Saunders who blog at Obesity Panacea.
I'll let them explain their mission:
Social media provides a tremendous outlet by which to translate and promote scientific knowledge and engage the public discourse. All scientists, researchers, clinicians, government and not-for-profit organizations have much to gain by adopting an effective and viable social media strategy.
Science of Blogging will…
jdupuis | November 24, 2010A portentous-sounding title for a not-so-portentous post, full of half-baked thoughts and idle musings.
I was just thinking about the recent Jounal of Electronic Publishing issue on Reimagining the University Press and without actually reading very much of the issue in question (ignorance is so liberating sometimes...) the most pressing question in my mind was:
So what exactly do we need university presses for anyways?
And I got to thinking some more and figured that there are probably tons of people in university presses thinking to themselves,
So what exactly do we need academic libraries…
jdupuis | November 23, 2010A terrific new edition of The Journal of Electronic Publishing (v13i2), focusing on the future of university presses and, by extension, of scholarly publishing as a whole.
A lot of terrific-looking articles:
Editor's Note for Reimagining the University Press by Phil Pochoda
Reimagining the University Press: A Checklist for Scholarly Publishers by Peter J. Doughtery
Reimagining the University Press by Kate Wittenberg
Stage Five Book Publishing by Joseph J. Esposito
Next-Generation University Publishing: A Perspective from California by Daniel Greenstein
What Might Be in Store for Universities…
jdupuis | October 22, 2010As I mentioned a few days ago, the kind librarians of Brock University in St. Catherines, ON invited me to give a talk as part of their Open Access Week suite of events.
I've included my slides for the presentation below. There was a small but engaged group of mostly librarians that turned up.
Please don't let the high number of slides deter you from zipping through the presentation. A good chunk of the slides only have a couple of words on them and another good chunk are screen shots of xkcd strips.
The slides are in our IR here and on Google Docs here.
I'd like to thank Barbara…
jdupuis | October 18, 2010The kind librarians at Brock University in St. Catherines, Ontario have invited me to help them celebrate Open Access Week!
Their rather impressive lineup of OA Week events (and I'm not just saying this because I'm involved, believe me) is here.
My part is a talk I'm giving on Wednesday:
Wednesday, October 20 2-3:30
Exploring Open Science
Join John Dupuis, Head of the Steacie Science & Engineering Library, York University, for a discussion of how Science and Technology academics and publishers are responding to the growing open access movement and the changing nature of research in…
jdupuis | October 18, 2010It's Open Access Week this week and as part of the celebrations I thought I highlight a recent declaration by the Open Bibliographic Working Group on the Principles for Open Bibliographic Data. It's an incredible idea, one that I support completely -- the aim is to make bibliographic data open, reusable and remixable. Creating a bibliographic data commons would lead to many opportunities to create search and discovery tools that would be of great benefit to scholarship, education, research and development.
I won't try and explain the details of the declaration since it's released under a CC…
jdupuis | September 1, 2010Yes, YASBC. Yet another science blogging community.
Welcome to PLoS Blogs!
From the introductory post:
Today we are pleased to announce the launch of PLoS Blogs a new network for discussing science in public; covering topics in research, culture, and publishing.
PLoS Blogs is different from other blogging networks, because it includes an equal mix of science journalists and scientists. We're excited to be welcoming our new bloggers, including Pulitzer Prize winner Deborah Blum to the network.
*snip*
Our scientists:
Take As Directed:
David Kroll, Ph.D. is a cancer pharmacologist who…
jdupuis | August 25, 2010The latest issue of ISTL has just been released and, as usual, it's filled with very interesting-looking articles.
The table of contents is below:
Metrics and Science Monograph Collections at the Marston Science Library, University of Florida by Michelle F. Leonard, Stephanie C. Haas, and Vernon N. Kisling, Ph.D, University of Florida
Zoo and Wildlife Libraries: An International Survey by Linda L. Coates and Kaitlyn Rose Tierney, San Diego Zoo
How Much Space Does a Library Need? Justifying Collections Space in an Electronic Age by Nancy J. Butkovich, The Pennsylvania State Universitty…
jdupuis | July 20, 2010What with the recent blogospheric developments, I thought it would be a great idea to reprint a post from a couple of years ago where I turned the tables on Bora and interviewed him about science blogging, science and ScienceOnline. The original post is from March 13, 2008. I'd also like to point you to the interview Bora did with my son Sam after the 2009 conference.
And yes, I think "Crazy Uncle" is perfect. Science blogging is like family and I think Bora fits perfectly not as our father or our brother or our cousin, but as our uncle.
==============================
Welcome to the…
dsalo | July 1, 2010I would be utterly remiss in my duties were I not to point out SciBling John Wilbanks's vitally important new open-access initiative.
I pledge my full and free support. After all, my brain is basically purée anyway…
(Apologies to those who saw this briefly yesterday. John jumped the, er, gun yesterday, and so did I.)
dsalo | June 29, 2010Much is murky in open access, but this at least is clear: academic libraries have committed different amounts of money and staff toward an open-access future, from a flat zero up to hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth.
It's the zeroes and near-zeroes that concern me (why, hello there, Yale, and hello again, Yale), though I also believe quite strongly that libraries that have made significant investments of money, staff, and/or political capital should be recognized and praised for it.
The difficulty here is that it isn't just the scale of open-access investment that varies. The nature of…
jdupuis | June 13, 2010And that's Nature as in Nature Publishing Group rather than the narrative strategy.
I missed the story when it broke earlier this week in The Chronicle -- I was attending the absolutely fantastic Canadian Engineering Education Association conference in Kingston from Monday to Wednesday. And when I got back, Thursday and Friday weren't the types of days that were conducive to blogging. I'm still feeling a bit behind on the whole issue so doing this post is helping to feel a bit more up-to-speed.
The story, from the Chronicle article that more-or-less started it all, U. of California Tries…
dsalo | June 11, 2010Having inflicted at least one truly Bulwer-Lytton-contest-worthy metaphor on FriendFeed today ("The NPG/CDL thing isn't about open access; open access is just lurking there, kinda like a knife-wielding maniac in a horror movie"), I feel I must raise the stakes by linking to this Derangement and Description comic.
This is the first time anyone has dedicated a comic to me. I am honored! And still chuckling.
dsalo | June 10, 2010This morning, when Nature Publishing Group responded to the University of California library's broadside, I contemplated taking the response apart piece by piece in a bit of "... translated into English" satire.
I'm glad I didn't have the chance. I'm much, much happier for people to read the University of California library's response. (By the way, I am using "library" here as shorthand for the entire set of UCal libraries. E pluribus, unum.) I haven't words for the tart, uncompromising brilliance that is this volley in the gauntlet-throwing contest. Go, California!
Instead, I'll link to some…
dsalo | June 8, 2010This is the sort of event I can never, ever manage to predict. Like the Harvard OA mandate. Or the PRISM Coalition.
In brief, Nature Publishing Group tried the usual big-publisher contract-renewal tactics: jack the price a lot, because although librarians squeal, faculty never listen, so eventually the librarians knuckle under and sign the big fat check.
Only this time? Not only is check signage at risk, but so is all the free labor that University of California faculty provide to NPG in the form of authoring, editing, and peer review. That latter is the real boycott, and everyone involved…
dsalo | June 8, 2010I'm not a business analyst with my eye on the scholarly publishing industry, but if I were, I'd sound an awful lot like Claudio Aspesi being interviewed by Richard Poynder.
I can't speak to Elsevier's internal organizational issues, but the rest of Aspesi's words ring true to me. Libraries have kicked the serials can as far as it will go. There is no more money now, and I don't believe more is on the horizon; if anything, less is.
I do believe that there's room for the big publishers to trim operational costs by cutting journals left and right, and I expect them to try it. I don't know how…
dsalo | May 28, 2010This post is intended for Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt's crowdsourced Hacking the Academy book.
Arguments about open access usually appeal to altruism, tradition, or economics. Even arguments supposedly aimed at researcher self-interest strike me as curiously abstract, devoid of useful example. I will therefore tell my story about open access, because I hacked the academy and lived to tell about it.
I graduated from library school in May 2005, and by good fortune managed to begin employment as an institutional-repository manager in July. Knowing no better, I wrote about my experiences and…
dsalo | May 27, 2010I'm on record predicting a toll-access journal bloodbath.
Anecdotes are not data, one dead swallow doesn't mean the end of summer, and so on… but I just heard yesterday about a second small independent toll-access journal whose sponsors may be discussing winding it down.
This isn't the scenario I was quite looking for; I expected a stable-fire or two among small journals at the big publishers. That isn't happening yet. Some big publishers are still posting record profits, so the squeeze isn't on. Others are going on buying sprees hoping to trade on exclusive access.
I do think those record…
jdupuis | May 11, 2010I have a few conferences coming up and I thought I'd share my schedule just in case any of you out there in sciencelibrarianblogland will also be attending.
I'll list them in order, along with whatever I'll be presenting.
BookCamp Toronto, May 15, Toronto
9:30: eBooks in Education and Academia -- the glacial revolution
John Dupuis (York University)
Evan Leibovitch (York University)
Description: Despite growing public acceptance of eBooks, two areas in which they could offer the most benefit -- education and academia -- are far behind the eBook mainstream. This session will discuss issues…