Category Archives: oa.blogging

Guidelines for Scholarly Blogs | Front Matter

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by Martin Fenner

These guidelines are recommendations for authors of scholarly blogs to help with long-term archiving, discoverability, and citation of blog content.
They are modeled after the publication A Data Citation Roadmap for Scholarly Data Repositories, where many of the same guidelines apply, and where I was the first author and co-chair of the corresponding Force11 working group.

These guidelines focus on the required or recommended work for scholarly blog authors. For scholarly blog archives such as the Rogue Scholar, additional guidelines are in development.

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Building Blocks for a Scholarly Blog Archive

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“If reading this post feels like it is 2006 – the year James Brown (used for the feature image of this post) died – again with talk about blogs, RSS, Markdown, Creative Commons, and related technologies (I for example didn’t mention Zotero, XML, or WordPress), you are right. This is intentional, these technologies are not as sexy as using artificial intelligence or cryptocurrencies to drive this, but I want the Science Blog archive to become a scholarly resource that is useful, open, and inclusive.”

Building an archive for scholarly blog posts

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“This blog post is a follow-up to a post in September (Fenner 2022a), where I announced that I had started working on an archive for scholarly blog posts based on the InvenioRDM open-source repository software. In the last two months, I focussed on two activities – besides lots of physical therapy and other training following a stroke earlier this year (Fenner 2022b): helping to make it easier (and safer) to run InvenioRDM in Docker container infrastructure, and working on converting the bolognese metadata conversion Ruby gem (Fenner 2017) to Python (work in progress on GitHub) to enhance InvenioRDM functionality.

Building an archive of scholarly blog posts faces the same fundamental challenges as repositories for other types of scholarly content, whether data, software, preprints, or journal articles. You have to collect metadata and content, and that approach only scales with standardization and open licenses….”

Upstream

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“Today we are announcing Upstream. And if you’re reading this, you’re already a part of it!

Upstream is a community blogging platform designed for Open enthusiasts to discuss… you guessed it: all things Open. It’s a space for the whole community to voice opinions, discuss open approaches to scholarly communication, and showcase research….

Supported by FORCE11, this is a global and inclusive blog, bringing together diverse perspectives from all corners of scholarly communications from institutions to libraries to researchers to publishers to funders and policy-makers. Of course, there are lots of niche blogs out there, for example, at the university level or the stakeholder level, but our wider community has never had a central place to exchange in writing ideas about open research and all that it encompasses: open metadata; open code; open research data; open infrastructure; the culture of open; social justice and diversity in our community; open metrics; open citations; open access… You get the picture….”

 

Front Matter officially launches today

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“I sincerely believe that there is a need for more venues that talk about emerging scholarly content types such as research data, research software or preprints as scholarly outputs. The Front Matter Blog hopes to become such a venue. As a starting point I have added (almost) all my blog posts since 2007, collected from my previous blogging locations (Nature Network, PLOS Blogs, my Personal Blog, and the DataCite blog), and I hope at least some of them still make an interesting read all these years later….

But Front Matter is more than a blogging platform. It is also a consulting business, which will help with building and hosting scholarly infrastructure. To kick this off, I am involved with development work for the invenioRDM data management repository platform. More on that in the next blog post on Thursday.”

Preservation of Digital Blog-Posts | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs

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The goal of this literature review was to gain an understanding of the current status of research on the topic of digital blog preservation. After conducting a series of searching within the database LISTA (Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts), one can determine that there are little to no recent developments in technology or research specifically for the access/preservation of digital blog posts. Unsurprisingly, much of the scholarly conversation about blog/microblog preservation took place between 2002 and 2010. 

by Katie Pelland

Open Interview launches Open Commentaries

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“On this special occasion, we are happy to launch ‘Open Commentaries’*, *yet another initiative by the team of ‘Open Interview <https://openinterview.org>’. ‘Open Commentaries’ is an exclusive blog of short-commentaries to discuss trends and developments in academic communication and research. We could come up with this new blog all because of your splendid support and encouragement for our ‘Open Interview’ which is well received in academia. For ‘Open Commentaries’ too, your critical appreciation and best wishes will double our efforts. Launching https://opencommentaries.in with the postings of the following four thought provoking articles. Hope you will enjoy reading them….”

Welcome to the OA Books Network – Open Access Books Network Blog

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“During the ElPub conference, a group of OA book experts — including members of SPARC Europe, OAPEN, OPERAS and ScholarLed — were discussing all things OA books over post-conference beers. If only we could do this more often, they thought!

Well here, they do.

A very warm welcome to everyone who would like to join our OA books community (if you are not yet a member, you are more than invited to join the conversation)!

We hope that this will be a space where we can test ideas and exchange information about the current issues in OA books, events to attend (physically or virtually) and texts to read and reflect upon. Whether you consider yourself a grizzled expert on OA book publishing, or if you’re just trying to find out more, please join the discussion boards, check out the events in the calendar, read the latest blog posts — and make this space your own.

Let us guide you through the site and how to use it….”

Welcome to the OA Books Network – Open Access Books Network Blog

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“During the ElPub conference, a group of OA book experts — including members of SPARC Europe, OAPEN, OPERAS and ScholarLed — were discussing all things OA books over post-conference beers. If only we could do this more often, they thought!

Well here, they do.

A very warm welcome to everyone who would like to join our OA books community (if you are not yet a member, you are more than invited to join the conversation)!

We hope that this will be a space where we can test ideas and exchange information about the current issues in OA books, events to attend (physically or virtually) and texts to read and reflect upon. Whether you consider yourself a grizzled expert on OA book publishing, or if you’re just trying to find out more, please join the discussion boards, check out the events in the calendar, read the latest blog posts — and make this space your own.

Let us guide you through the site and how to use it….”

Launching our blog series on the State of Open Monographs 2020 – Digital Science

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“With this blog series we aim to:

Further the goals of the original report to bring a community together to discuss many topics important to books
Educate, inform, and serve as a platform for sharing ideas that will be instructional for book publishers
Work with a variety of people who care about book-specific topics and are experts in certain areas of book publishing
Discuss ideas for overcoming certain challenges in the book space….”

I’ve been an idiot for three years; or, goodbye Brexit, hello Open Access! | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

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“I’m not going to rehearse all the reasons why Brexit is awful — not now, not ever again. (If you have a taste for that kind of thing, I recommend Chris Grey’s Brexit Blog, which is dispassionate, informed and forensic.) I’m not going to follow Brexit commentators on Twitter, and read all the desperately depressing analysis they highlight. I’m certainly not going to blog about it myself any more. More importantly, I’m not going to let the ongoing disintegration of my country dominate my mind or my emotions. I’m walking away: because obviously absolutely nothing I say or do about it can make the slightest bit of difference.

But there is an area of policy where I can hope to make some small difference, and that is of course open science — including but not limited to open access, open data, open reviewing and how research is evaluated. That’s where my political energy should have been going for the last three years, and it’s where that energy will be going from now on….”

I’ve been an idiot for three years; or, goodbye Brexit, hello Open Access! | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

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“I’m not going to rehearse all the reasons why Brexit is awful — not now, not ever again. (If you have a taste for that kind of thing, I recommend Chris Grey’s Brexit Blog, which is dispassionate, informed and forensic.) I’m not going to follow Brexit commentators on Twitter, and read all the desperately depressing analysis they highlight. I’m certainly not going to blog about it myself any more. More importantly, I’m not going to let the ongoing disintegration of my country dominate my mind or my emotions. I’m walking away: because obviously absolutely nothing I say or do about it can make the slightest bit of difference.

But there is an area of policy where I can hope to make some small difference, and that is of course open science — including but not limited to open access, open data, open reviewing and how research is evaluated. That’s where my political energy should have been going for the last three years, and it’s where that energy will be going from now on….”

Blogging as an Open Scholarship Practice | W. Ian O’Byrne

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“I’ve found that blogging helps me in my scholarship in a variety of ways. There are also challenges as I strive to embed these practices in my everyday work….

When I submitted my materials for third year review at UNH, the first page of my binder included the URL and a QR code to the address for my main blog. I indicated that my binder would contain my publications, teaching evaluations, and service documentation. But that I believed my best work lived on my website, and it was an example of how I viewed my role as a scholar. My dean at the time ripped out the page at my review meeting and threw it away. She indicated that none of that mattered, and would only serve to confuse reviewers and my colleagues.

I learned a lesson that day. My work blogging as an open scholar was set aside from my work at the institution. If I chose to continue this work, it would (for the most part) not be valued in most/all of my evaluations. I have continued this practice, and have been motivated by others as they continue to write, share, and document their thinking….”

Hiring Policy at the LMU Psychology Department: Better have some open science track record

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“Our department embraces the values of open science and strives for replicable and reproducible research. For this goal we support transparent research with open data, open materials, and study pre-registration. Candidates are asked to describe in what way they already pursued and plan to pursue these goals.”

Social-media-enabled learning in emergency medicine: a case study of the growth, engagement and impact of a free open access medical education blog | Postgraduate Medical Journal

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Abstract:  Background Clinicians are increasingly using social media for professional development and education. In 2012, we developed the St.Emlyn’s blog, an open access resource dedicated to providing free education in the field of emergency medicine.

Objective To describe the development and growth of this international emergency medicine blog.

Method We present a narrative description of the development of St.Emlyn’s blog. Data on scope, impact and engagement were extracted from WordPress, Twitter and Google Analytics.

Results The St.Emlyn’s blog demonstrates a sustained growth in size and user engagement. Since inception in 2012, the site has been viewed over 1.25?million times with a linear year-on-year growth. We have published over 500 blog posts, each of which attracts a mean of 2466 views (range 382–69?671). The site has been viewed in nearly every country in the world, although the majority (>75%) of visitors come from the USA, UK and Australia.

Summary This case study of an emergency medicine blog quantifies the reach and engagement of social-media-enabled learning in emergency medicine.