“If you discount the increasing number of spam invitations clogging up your email in-box, predatory journals are mainly a minor nuisance for us academics, the biggest problem being when you are doing a literature search and have to sift out the crap. In the long-term, work published in the predatory journals will mostly go unrecognised and uncited by the relevant academic communities. The problem arises when a non-expert member of the public or worse still, a journalist comes across what looks like a legitimate paper when searching the internet and takes what they read as gospel. After all, it has been published in a journal, it must be right….”
Monthly Archives: August 2018
Digital Initiatives Projects Librarian – University of Alberta Libraries | Competition No. A101736855
“…The University of Alberta Libraries (UAL), with a long tradition of technological innovation and service excellence, seeks a dynamic and engaged professional to play a key role in the planning and execution of a growing program of digital library initiatives. Reporting to the Head, Library Publishing and Digital Production Services, and working within a highly engaged team-based environment, the successful candidate proposes, guides, monitors and assesses a variety of digital library projects, with a particular focus on the UAL’s digitization program and library publishing activities, eg. open journal publishing and open educational resources (OER). The successful candidate will participate in and shape all phases of the planning and development of digital library projects in these areas, including the development of business cases and project plans, organizing and implementing workflows, coordinating project activities, communication planning and delivery, training, outreach, quality control, and assessment. The successful candidate will liaise and collaborate with Canadian and international communities of practice in order to establish, enhance and improve publishing and digitization services at UAL….”
CSI Tromsø: Where Forensics meets Vikings
Insect remains have their own tale to tell in the mystery that surrounds the Øsknes Viking burial boat, as Eva Pangiotakopulu and colleagues investigate in their recent PLOS ONE study. Over the years many
History of open access – Peter Suber
“Analogy. Suppose a small town began to grow in a former wilderness. Early in its history it had a newspaper. In time it had a phone book, tax roll, town hall, post office, telegraph office, public library, school, church, cemetery, train station, doctor, surveyor, bartender, and private eye, each accumulating records in its own idiosyncratic, incomplete way. None of these caches of information is a history of the town. All are useful for studying the history of the town. Someone who knew where a good fraction of them were located would do a service by pointing them out. In this sense, I [Peter Suber] haven’t written a history of OA. But I’ve created materials, alone or with others, useful for studying the history of OA. And here I’m pointing them out, with some notes on their scope, preservation, and searchability. Needless to say, the history of OA is still unfolding. The small town didn’t disappear except in the sense that it grew into a large city….”
michael_nielsen on Twitter: “Open access is often argued about in the abstract. I want to talk about a specific case study where I have detailed data – usage patterns for my (open access) online book/monograph “Neural Networks and Deep Learning” https://t.co/Kwy23b9E11″
“Open access is often argued about in the abstract. I want to talk about a specific case study where I have detailed data – usage patterns for my (open access) online book/monograph “Neural Networks and Deep Learning” http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html …
Would any of this have been possible closed access? Of course some of it would have. I might have made more money. But on nearly every other metric, I suspect being open access was a 100x or more multiplier on the impact….
To sum up: open access makes material freely available to people who would otherwise never even hear about it. This amplifying effect is not small, it is enormous. And it applies in parts of the world woefully underserved by the existing publication system….
Some additional calibration data: an editor at a major academic press tells me great sales figures for a similar technical textbook in a “hot” field are typically about 5,000-10,000 a year. So open access has a factor 200x or more here….”
The Unitary Fund: a no-strings attached grant program for Open Source quantum computing
This is a Guest Post written by Will Zeng. Editorial Note: As part of our ongoing efforts to support Open Source projects in quantum computation and simulation, we have invited Will Zeng to pen a
Scholarly communication and bibliometrics – Borgman – 2002 – Annual Review of Information Science and Technology – Wiley Online Library
“At the time of writing, very little of the current digital library development work in open linking, cross?referencing, etc., involves the use of bibliometric (i.e., quantitative) methods. Studies in which some kind of link or citation analysis is applied with a view to improving our understanding of the ways in which open link structures are created or used are currently few and far between; nevertheless, reports of the ways in which these structures are being built are of definite relevance in the present context, in the sense that they are indicative of the kind of arena in which we might expect bibliometric methods to be applied in the future….
We found less activity than expected in bibliometric research on scholars’ activities in writing, in submitting for publication, and in collaboration. Given that scholars actually make their claims in their texts rather than in their citations, and we now have direct access to their texts, this area seems ripe for bibliometric study. Some bibliometric research has been done on scholarly productivity across disciplines, boundary?crossing activities, choices in submitting to print and electronic journals, and other judgments concerning where scholars choose to place their work. We also found studies that challenged the use of coauthorship as a surrogate for collaboration, exploring other means of assessing scholars’ behavior in working together.”
Misconception about APCs deters an author from publishing open access: A case study | Editage Insights
“[N]ot all open access journals charge high APCs. In fact, some OA journals are funded by academic institutions or learned societies and do not charge APCs at all. We also explained that many journals that normally charge APCs often waive off the charges totally or partially if the author is in financial difficulty. Additionally, open access APCs are sometimes covered by the funding bodies or authors’ institutions.”
“We need to commit to and invest in the changes we seek”: Insights from the MSF Scientific Research Day
In recognition of World Humanitarian Day 2018, PLOS ONE Senior Editor Adya Misra reflects on the Medecines Sans Frontières Scientific Research Day held earlier this year. Medecines Sans Frontières (MSF) are perhaps best known for
Is Open Science a Tautology? | HIIG Blog
In our blog series on metaphors of the digital society, we uncover the vocabularies that are thrown around almost haphazardly these days. These terms are often deployed in the scholarly and societal discourse without much thought about their meaning and use. Here, Benedikt Fecher and Tony Ross-Hellauer dismantle one of these metaphors of the digital society: open science. We believe that, depending on how you look at it, open science can be understood as both a tautology and an antithesis.
Szczepanski’s List of Open Access Journals | EBSCO
“After decades of experience in acquisitions in humanities and social sciences, Jan Szczepanski began collecting free e-journal titles in the late 1990s. He was inspired first by an important journal he could not purchase, then by a study which uncovered just how many free high-quality e-journals there are.
Now Jan maintains what is probably the world’s largest list of open access journals in the humanities and social sciences, which he makes publicly available. Titles on the list come from all over the world and in many languages, and cover a wide range of humanities and social sciences disciplines, including music, philosophy, art and history.”
Meet our Editor-in-Chief at #ACSBOSTON in August | Booth 712
PLOS ONE is excited to be exhibiting at this year’s American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meeting in Boston. It’s our first year attending this meeting and if you’ll be in Boston, we hope you visit
Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science (SCOSS) hits half-million Euro funding mark – News Service
“Thanks to dozens of quick-acting universities and institutions in Australia, Europe & North America, a new effort to secure Open Science infrastructure is off to a strong start. More than 680 000 Euros have been pledged to support DOAJ and SHERPA/RoMEO already.”
Students as Active Contributors in the Creation of Open Educational Resources
“Open Educational Resources (OER) provide promising opportunities to share and create learning materials without violating copyright law. Until now, the use and creation of OER were mainly discussed with regard to faculty and instructors. Less attention has been paid to students, so this paper is focused on their perspective on OER and argues that students can and should play an important part in the context of OER. A brief introduction to the concept of OER and their advantages is followed by an overview of the principles of Service-Dominant Logic (SDL), a theoretical framework that we consider to be a useful instrument for a better understanding of the student’s role in the use and production of OER. Focusing on the creation of value in service exchanges, this theoretical approach supports the notion that students who are using OER do in fact play an active role in the value creation of OER. We also present results from a recent empirical survey conducted in Austria, which was also focused on the students’ perspective on OER. Based on the available evidence, we conclude that an OER-friendly environment for students enhances the use and production of OER at Higher Education Institutions (HEI), which benefits all involved parties in the long term. Consequently, we propose a set of recommendations that should effect positive changes, and suggest some practical means of implementing them. “
2018 Open Access Week in Zambia
Open Access Week is a yearly international celebration that aims to increase awareness about open access (OA). OA scholarship is completely free to read and reuse. Funders, universities, libraries, scholars, and students across the globe support OA.
The University of Zambia Library will lead campus celebrations during this year’s OA Week slated for October 15 – 17, 2018.
The OA advocacy team is therefore inviting the university community to this year’s celebrations. Activities will focus on public sensitization of OA activities through:
- Official launch by Deputy Vice Chancellor
- Displays (banner & posters)
- Distribution of fliers
- Slide shows in designated places
- Face to face interactions with faculty and students
- Panel discussion on UNZA Radio
For any questions about OA, contact:
Eness M.M. Chitumbo -EIFL Country Coordinator
email:echitumbo@unza.zm
Mr. Pilate Chewe- OA Coordinator
email:pchewe@unza.zm