Helping Ukrainian Scholars, One Book at a Time – Internet Archive Blogs

“The Internet Archive is proud to partner with Better World Books to support Ukrainian students and scholars. With a $1 donation at checkout during your purchase at betterworldbooks.com, you will help provide verifiable information to Ukrainian scholars all over the world through Wikipedia.

Since 2019, the Internet Archive has worked with the Wikipedia community to strengthen citations to published literature. Working in collaboration with Wikipedians and data scientists, Internet Archive has linked hundreds of thousands of citations in Wikipedia to books in our collection, offering Wikipedia editors and readers single-click access to the verifiable facts contained within libraries. 

Recently, our engineers analyzed the citations in the Ukrainian-language Wikipedia, and were able to connect citations to more than 17,000 books that have already been digitized by the Internet Archive, such as the page for ???????? (English translation: Genomics), which links to a science textbook published in 2002. Through this work, we discovered that there are more than 25,000 additional books that we don’t have in our collection—and that’s where you can help! …”

How the Wayback Machine Is Saving Digital Ukraine – IEEE Spectrum

“When the Ukrainian invasion began, the Internet Archive launched several efforts to capture the Ukrainian Internet. Its archivists launched a high-volume crawl through hundreds of thousands of websites ending in “.ua.” They selected specific sites to archive as completely as possible, including government, education, and library sites. And they targeted journalism, particularly Ukrainian news sites and aggregators. The organization has also been supporting others working to save Ukraine’s digital resources, including SUCHO (Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online) and the Archive Team.

Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, explained this dive into Ukraine’s Internet and how it differs from the Wayback Machine’s usual approach to preserving digital history. …”

Preserving Ukraine’s Cultural Heritage Online | Tufts Now

“The effort started in late February, just days after Russia invaded Ukraine, when Kijas mused on Twitter about launching a project to save digitized music collections, her area of expertise. The project soon attracted more than 1,000 volunteers from around the world—librarians, archivists, researchers, and programmers, some of them fluent in Ukrainian—and is now co-organized by Kijas, Quinn Dombrowski of Stanford University, and Sebastian Majstorovic of the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage.

The group is crawling websites, digital exhibits, and open access publications of Ukrainian cultural institutions with automated computer programs that search sites and collect data. The group also manually archives pages and files. Volunteers have added more than 10 terabytes of data to servers outside the country and saved almost 15,000 files to the Internet Archive,  where it has a collection. (One terabyte is equal to 1,000 gigabytes, or about the amount of data that could be stored on 16 iPhones.)…”

Universities UK statement on Ukraine: 3 March

“We do not support the application of blanket academic boycotts that prevent academics collaborating with other academics as a means of protest against the actions of their governments. We are therefore advising our members to make decisions about whether to continue collaborations on a case-by-case basis, informed both by UK Government guidance and appropriate due diligence. We have requested the government’s support for universities as they do this….”

Universities should not carry out ‘blanket academic boycotts’ of Russia

“Universities should not carry out blanket boycotts of Russian academics over the invasion of Ukraine, a leading sector body has said.

Universities UK (UUK), which represents 140 universities across the United Kingdom, said in a statement on the situation in Ukraine, published on Thursday, that it does “not support the application of blanket academic boycotts that prevent academics collaborating with other academics as a means of protest against the actions of their governments”. …”

Journal editor explains ban on manuscripts from Russian institutions – Retraction Watch

“First of all, let me say, because there is some misunderstanding circulating in some social media regarding the issue you asked me for information, that the editors of the Journal of Molecular Structure did not decide to implement any sort of ban to articles submitted by Russian authors. This would be something I, or my colleagues, could never accept. Our Russian colleagues, as all our colleagues from all around the world, deserve us maximum respect.

However, it was decided by the editors of the journal to not consider manuscripts authored by scientists working at Russian Institutions, in result of the humanitarian implications emerging from the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. This position is temporary and shall apply until the refugees (whoever they are, Ukrainians, Russians, or of any other nationality) have conditions to return to their homes, their jobs, and join their families….”

Scholarly publishing and journal targeting in the time of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic: a cross-sectional survey of rheumatologists and other specialists | SpringerLink

Abstract:  The evolving research landscape in the time of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic calls for greater understanding of the perceptions of scholars regarding the current state and future of publishing. An anonymised and validated e-survey featuring 30 questions was circulated among rheumatologists and other specialists over social media to understand preferences while choosing target journals, publishing standards, commercial editing services, preprint archiving, social media and alternative publication activities. Of 108 respondents, a significant proportion were clinicians (68%), researchers (60%) and educators (47%), with median 23 publications and 15 peer-review accomplishments. The respondents were mainly rheumatologists from India, Ukraine and Turkey. While choosing target journals, relevance to their field (69%), PubMed Central archiving (61%) and free publishing (59%) were the major factors. Thirty-nine surveyees (36%) claimed that they often targeted local journals for publishing their research. However, only 18 (17%) perceived their local society journals as trustworthy. Occasional publication in the so-called predatory journals (5, 5%) was reported and obtaining support from commercial editing agencies to improve English and data presentation was not uncommon (23, 21%). The opinion on preprint archiving was disputed; only one-third believed preprints were useful. High-quality peer review (56%), full and immediate open access (46%) and post-publication social media promotion (32%) were identified as key anticipated features of scholarly publishing in the foreseeable future. These perceptions of surveyed scholars call for greater access to free publishing, attention to proper usage of English and editing skills, and a larger role for engagement over social media.

 

“Тексти” запрошують на Open Data Story Camp в Одесі

From Google Translate: “Welcome to the three-day immersion in the details. We conduct data-dive data analysis and search histories based on open data.

Hop on board!

What: Open Data Story Camp – a three-day intensive training on teamwork, analysis and visualization of data from the Unified State Register of court decisions Ukraine and other publicly available data.

Where: Shvartuyemosya on the Black Sea, m. Odesa.

When immersed: 21-23 August 2017.”