Group items tagged

"The Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) aims at defining standards and/or best practices for the new generation of library discovery services that are based on indexed search. These discovery services are primarily based upon indexes derived from journals, ebooks and other electronic information of a scholarly nature. "

"Although the official press release highlights that "Open Access publishing has no negative effect on book sales, and increases online usage and discovery considerably" (which is, in my opinion, only a snapshot which will sooner or later lose validity in the course of the ongoing digitalization of the academic book market), the most interesting and valuable outcomes of the pilot arise from the attempt to quantify and itemize the costs of an OA monograph."

On data sharing in computational drug discovery and the need for data notes [v1; ref status: not peer reviewed, http://f1000r.es/4qi] Author affiliations Department of Life Science Informatics, B-IT, LIMES Program Unit Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Dahlmannstr, Bonn, D-53113, Germany Grant information: The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work.

Does anyone know about Global eJournals Library? It seems to be a subscription-based discovery service that indexes all of the open access or post-embargo journal articles it can find. The two private companies that operate this service, from the UK and India, are not very clear. It claims to have indexed many more articles (7 million) and journals than DOAJ (almost 2 million). I'm curious about the whole thing!

"the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact. Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of a library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be necessary. This new system will use modern information technology to vastly improve the filter, sort and discovery functions of the current journal system."

Talk about an ambitious suggestion! As we've talked about this in class, I'm not surprised to find scientific research that impact factor is bad scientific (not to mention business) practice. I'm also very interested in this idea of alternative scholarly communication systems; and if libraries are to play a central role, I have to assume that projects like institutional repositories would play an enormous part in this new system. I wonder what this suggests about altmetrics, though? Are we just putting a band-aid on a deep wound, and treating the symptom instead of the disease?

"The surprising story of how an experiment to automate the creation of popularity and influence became successful beyond all expectation. Sometimes fascinating discoveries are made entirely by accident. This is a good example." This article shows how digital identify can be constructed and manipulated, leading to questions around authenticity. How many of us would have also been fooled by that Spambot? This example also reinforces why information literacy is now one of the most essential skills for the 21st century.

The competencies discussed by Dr. Jenkins in the Module 3 video, for those who are interested, are: "Play - the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solving Performance - the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery Simulation - the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes Appropriation - the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content Multitasking - the ability to scan one's environment and shift focus as needed to salient details. Distributed Cognition - the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities Collective Intelligence - the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal Judgment - the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources Transmedia Navigation - the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities Networking - the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information Negotiation - the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms."

An article about Open Access Publishing for Scientific publishing.

WizFolio is an online research collaboration tool for knowledge discovery. With WizFolio you can easily manage and share all types of information in a citation ready format including research papers, patents, documents, books, YouTube videos, web snippets and a lot more.

By David Suzuki with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Communications Manager Ian Hanington. A 14-year-old boy in Donetsk, Ukraine, recently made a fascinating discovery halfway around the world and 894 metres under the sea. Kirill Dudko was watching Neptune Canada's live-stream footage of the ocean floor near Vancouver Island on his computer when he saw a creature with a "nose and moustache" eat a hagfish.

2012 was a huge year for citizen science. From microbes to Zombie Flies, from sea to space, there was no shortage of opportunities for everyday people to contribute to real scientific discovery. Each year at SciStarter, we analyze our glorious website metrics to identify the most popular projects of the year.

Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. We engage and invest in research in order to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, encourage innovation, enrich education, and stimulate the economy - to improve the public good.

It is a late discovery, but this article is very nice to understand OER movement.

The rapid growth of scientific literature is often seen as evidence, if evidence were needed, that the pace of human discovery is accelerating. On the contrary, however, it is becoming a curse - one that requires us to radically rethink what it means to publish the results of research.

VERY good point. Relates to this article, "At sea in a deluge of data" : http://chronicle.com/article/At-Sea-in-a-Deluge-of-Data/147477/

"What kinds of knowledge are we going to expect? How we going to incentivize to scientists to share?"

A radical vision of the open access and books: The Political Nature of the Book: On Artists' Books and Radical Open Access. Janneke Adema: http://tinyurl.com/kv5hg2f In this article we argue that the medium of the book can be a material and conceptual means, both of criticising capitalism's commodification of knowledge (for example, in the form of the commercial incorporation of open access by feral and predatory publishers), and of opening up a space for thinking about politics. The book, then, is a political medium. As the history of the artist's book shows, it can be used to question, intervene in and disturb existing practices and institutions, and even offer radical, counter-institutional alternatives. If the book's potential to question and disturb existing practices and institutions includes those associated with liberal democracy and the neoliberal knowledge economy (as is apparent from some of the more radical interventions occurring today under the name of open access), it also includes politics and with it the very idea of democracy. In other words, the book is a medium that can (and should) be 'rethought to serve new ends'; a medium through which politics itself can be rethought in an ongoing manner.

I read his book (Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science) and really loved it. It inspired this blog post of mine: http://www.scopeofscience.com/2014/04/the-need-for-open-science/ Highly recommend that book to anyone who enjoyed his ted talk - it is a quick read!

This blog is especially great because it talks about the motivation and mindset behind adopting an ope approach. Open is not simply about making or using open resources but open as a 'way of being'

"The only problem with off the grid living is that corporations lose their ability to control others. With a completely self-sustaining life style, no body would ever have to work. What would happen then? Think about that for a moment. We would be free to expand and create, to discover our full potential as a race and move forward into the world of exploration and discovery, all the while living in harmony with nature, not against it."

a huge citizen science project in the USA, formalizing the sharing of the traditional (and ancient) practice of Phenology. Phenology is an important way to be connected to the natural world around you--basically observation of seasonal changes. People have been collecting observations for all of human history--this project seeks to help standardize recording of the data so that it can be shared en mass, creating huge and flexible data sets for many different current and future scientific experiments. "Nature's Notebook is a national, online program where amateur and professional naturalists regularly record observations of plants and animals to generate long-term data sets used for scientific discovery and decision-making."

oh, and an important thing is that (unlike some cit sci projects) the resulting data is shared freely online, check out some stats and visualizations at https://www.usanpn.org/data

eLife is a unique collaboration between funders and practitioners of research to communicate influential discoveries in the life and biomedical sciences in the most effective way. eLife began following a workshop at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2010, where attending scientists concluded that there was a need for a model of academic publishing that better suited the needs of their community. In eLife a team of highly regarded, experienced and actively practicing scientists ensures fair, swift and transparent editorial decisions followed by rapid online publication. The editorial team are editorially independent of the funders. They rely on their scientific expertise and active research experience to identify the best papers, make scientifically based judgements and exercise leadership in steering these papers through peer review. The entire content of the journal is freely available for all to read and reproduce for unrestricted use.

Very interesting project. I spent some time exploring some of the papers. They do seem to be opening up the peer review process slightly be publishing a "decision letter" and "author response" with each paper. I also appreciate the seeming attempt to include data publication in the publication of the paper. Though it does seem to me that some of the papers don't have enough data accompanying them, so I wonder what their data publication policy is.

Why Open Access? Funders invest in research in order to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, encourage innovation, enrich education, and stimulate the economy - to improve the public good. They recognize that broad access to the results of research is an essential component of the research process itself.