Group items tagged

I'm just surprised that it took academic libraries so long to catch on-- public libraries were really at the forefront of this movement.

Time Magazine reported on how even Harvard is having trouble affording academic journal subscriptions, and how it may be time for an open access model. Some journals cost up to $40,000 a year, and single articles cost $30-$40.

A look at the logistics how an open access journal may be set up-- as you can see, it's both cheap and easy, which which may give pause to some people who would otherwise submit articles.  For that reason, the first thing that Eve stresses is to place high priority on the quality of your board and reviewers, to give your new title some legitimacy.

Scholr.ly looks like a very interesting tool. They describe it as "Making Academic Search Social". Here is a description of the search engine: "Undergraduate physicists and comparative literature postdocs have very different search needs. We're building an academic search engine that takes these individual differences into account. The more we know about what you do, the better we can tailor our results to fit your needs. Sometimes, though, it's good to look at a problem from another perspective. Maybe you're doing research in an area you aren't familiar with and want an insider's view. Maybe you're doing interdisciplinary work, or want to better understand your colleague's work. To address these cases, Scholr.ly offers you the opportunity to search as another author- literally. You can search as your professor, a famous linguist, or the highly cited scholar in the department next door- and get the same results they would." It's a very interesting idea...

PeerJ on the surface sounds like an interesting concept where members pay to have their materials published and therefore have a lower overall cost to use and still allows academics to publish. However, this sounds similar to another article I read a few months ago of an explosion of "scholarly" journals that were little more than vanity presses. In particular I'm concerned about how a "qualified academic editor" will find peer reviewers, with little details on how the process will work or the qualifications of everyone involved.

SUNY Potsdam is intending to cancel subscriptions to the American Chemical Society's journals as they would consume 10 percent of the library's acquisitions budget. The article looks at one of the biggest problems facing academic libraries and serials, namely journals they are required to carry because of accreditation or approval, yet they either can't afford or carry to carry to the detriment of other departments they try to serve.

A very interesting article about a former mainstream academic who had taken to developing his own press, and sued a librarian because of blog posts he had made that were critical of the press. The Wikipedia entry on the press shows the press has also sued a magazine and a website.

Really great article about how to lead change in academic libraries. Apparently, trust and authenticity is the key.  "Building trust through authentic action helps lay the foundation upon which leaders can sell their vision for change." 

A fairly brief article that cites the benefits of on-site book publishing (supporting independent and creative authors), formatting and self-publishing academic material, and supporting in a limited manner a patron driven acquisitions model, offset by the machine's high price of $125-$150,000. I think it would be interesting to see numbers on printing volume and overall operating costs, as well as whether any leasing options are available for the book machine.

I'm glad to see the Espresso is starting to get press. It's been around for awhile, and has the potential to be very useful.

"A wide range of academic research across the country, from sophisticated biomedical experiments at the National Institutes of Health to undergraduate political science essays, was being interrupted Wednesday as the federal government shutdown continued for a second day -- with no clear path to a resolution. In addition to forcing the closure of government buildings where research is conducted -- such as the Library of Congress and presidential libraries -- the shutdown was also cutting off access to myriad electronic resources on which many researchers depend."

A little out of date, but an examination of how the recent partial government shut down affected research, both in physical libraries and online research.

MOOCs - Massive Open Online Courses. There are multiple potential roles for libraries in MOOC development, support, assessment, and the preservation process.

An article about Diederik Stapels, a formerly well known behavioral scientist who was outed for for falsifying much of his data and research, even though it pass peer review. What is more interesting is his justification--that a lot of it was because he wasn't finding clear conclusions in his research so he made them appear.

This one is just for fun on Friday, but makes a lot of good points.

Free courses from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and more...

Academic Earth is pretty awesome too. http://www.academicearth.org/

I'm taking Stanford's CS101 course, actually, and I recommend it. There are some nice exercises, and the lectures allow you to toggle back and forth between an interactive study guide.

"The consequences many libraries have feared-loud objections from faculty members and financial penalties from publishers-have not come to pass."

"Approximately 400 to 600 libraries worldwide have switched to a patron-driven system for purchasing new works, and that number is likely to double over the next year and a half, according to Joseph Esposito, a digital publishing consultant who has spent the last nine months studying the implications of PDA with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation."