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Librarian site from New Zealand. It's still far from comprehensive but it can provide a good start if you're looking for stuff to try. FOSS4LIB is a much larger directory of library-specific open-source projects you might also look at.

I've used Greenstone, Koha, and Wordpress, and while Wordpress is the easiest to use, I find it the least "library-esque" of the three. Koha is excellent once you get started, and has barcode-scanning built in, which can be very useful. Greenstone I've only just started to look at, but is fairly user-friendly once you get started and has a huge community of users that can help with any number of add-ons and tutorials. Great article!

Thanks, great stuff. I created a blog using WordPress.

Of the 255 papers that underwent the entire editing process to acceptance or rejection, about 60% of the final decisions occurred with no sign of peer review. For rejections, that's good news: It means that the journal's quality control was high enough that the editor examined the paper and declined it rather than send it out for review.

This article is certainly controversial, and I believe in some way did a service to the Open Access community by highlighting the practice of predatory journals. However, the irony of Bohannon's article, being an example of the kind of "bad science" he describes in his own article is inescapable. First, there is no randomization of his "experimental group", and there is no control group; second, there was elimination of non-responders; third, there was no application of the intention to treat principle in the analysis; and finally there were no inferential statistics and no references! Using his own standard, there is nothing that can be concluded from his study. For the criticism regarding Bohannon's targeting of OA journals exclusively, it is important to note that this experiment has been done before with 'traditional' journals as well- and many of them failed the test of peer review. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/02/27/how_nonsense_papers_ended_up_in_respected_scientific_journals.html

I think Bohannens "study" should be considered more "investigative journalism" than scientific study. While it may have some flaws if held against the standards of a scientific study, as a journalistic piece it goes a long way to justify its central accusation that there are predatory open access journals. He does not claim that there are no or evwen less predatory journals in the tradional sector (although it seems reasonable to believe that it might seem easier to predatory publishers to dupe unsuspecting scientists rather than subscription paying librarians). It demonstrates that open access is not a cure for all the problems besetting acacemic publishing. I think more deeply about it, it shows that author fees for publication may create a buisiness model just as open to abouse as the traditional subscription system. One answer might be to make the peer-review process more transparent, i.e. name the reviewers But that of course has other drawbacks.

Compares the cost of articles from society and non-profit publishers to those of the major commercial publishers.

Its crazy. The numbers (of profit and control) for the publishing companies is astronomical!

Universities have received a poor deal from the system of private, subscription-based access to knowledge production since the port WW2 commercialization of the scientific publishing industry. It is absurd that the university or research funder supplies the content (the research), pays for the authoring (the time of the researcher writing the article), and provides and pays for the time of peer reviewers and academic editors. In addition, it often pays page charges or formatting charges to publishers. It then cedes copyright and finally buys back its own research at prices that have escalated at four times the rate of inflation in the past decade and a half! Considering most of this research is conducted using public funds, it becomes a moral argument when public resources are used once again to purchase access to the outputs of this research. The commercial model of disseminating research does not obey the rules of supply and demand. A relatively small number of 'core' journals occupy monopoly positions, in that university libraries have to subscribe to access their content, whatever the cost, because these journals have been established as 'must-have' resources. While the practice of 'bundling' offers the advantage of bulk pricing, it reduces room for choice, as bundles consume large chunks of library budgets, making it difficult to subscribe to smaller, individual titles. In addition, the inflexibility of indexing systems makes it difficult for new journals to establish themselves; thus compromising the potential for smaller niche subjects and newer interdisciplinary areas. Thankfully the global inequalities engendered by the commercialization of scholarly publishing are being challenged by open access.

This year, the fifth annual Publishers for Development (PfD) conference explored current developments in scholarly communication including their impact on publishers, researchers and information professionals in the global South. The rapid growth in open access, the potential for social media to increase communication of research and also new measures for the way research is used were all topics viewed from a Southern perspective. The one-day conference was held in London on 15 October and titled 'Forward Thinking: Developing a global research cycle which fully engages South and North'. It brought together publishers from 16 publishing houses, librarians and researchers from universities in Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Also present were representatives of organisations involved in research access, production and use such as the World Bank, African Journals Online, Research4Life, Development Research Uptake in Sub-Saharan Africa (DRUSSA), Talloires Network and Partnerships in Health Information.

Interesting lecture on citizen science given at UBC. Professor Jennifer Preece gives several interesting examples of recent citizen science projects, and the research being done on citizen science. She also presents some of the roles computer scientists and librarians can have in citizen science projects.

This list is a helpful tool for authors who are publishing their work in Open Access Journals. It is also helpful for librarians who are acting as advisors for Open Access publishing. Beall's List: Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers. This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. It is recommended recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards.

The long list of predatory publishers and journals by Beall is quite daunting. Is this another indication of how cynical a person has to be in every aspect of life - even scholary pursuit? Thankfully there's a record to alert stakeholders of potentially unscrupulous publishers and unvalidated journals.

As I was working on my final project I found myself only able to name 1 OA Journal: PLOS. I wanted to know if there were any other big players in the game, much like the top commercial journals. As a result, google came up with the above site, which works like an index or directory for OA Journals. It's good to see in light of the difficulties that closed access journals have been causing in countries that are digitally divided from affluent ones. Hopefully with the growth of open access titles we will see the digital divide and information gap close. Happy browsing! And please post any other open access titles you have come across! Lets popularize them in our network! One more: http://doaj.org/

Alison Hicks uses the example of foreign languages to explore the integration of critical information literacy into the curriculum of various disciplines. The paper provides an example of a librarian who integrated critical information literacy into curriculum and proposes that this approach could be effective in global learning initiatives.

"Have you ever wondered just what the difference is between digital and information literacy? Or how they are connected to each other? Those are important questions because for librarians, the conversation is almost always about information literacy, and digital literacy sometimes takes a backseat to that."

Two of the articles might be considered as "position papers". Leah McEwen and Ye Li highlight opportunities for librarians as curators across the entire research life cycle, beyond ELNs and data sharing. Jeremy Frey and Colin Bird present a viewpoint on data sharing, addressing the reluctance of researchers to share information with their peers, and examining the processes of data exchange from the perspective of a trading environment.

On October 17, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed and remanded a key fair-use ruling in a long-running case over digital course readings on college campuses. But while on the surface the decision is a legal victory for the plaintiff publishers, two major library associations say the ruling is in fact a win for libraries, and for a popular practice known as "e-reserves."

Very relevant for our academic librarians.

"By leveraging technology, we can open new doors to scholarly inquiry for ourselves and our students. Through new collaborations, we can create exciting shared spaces, both virtual and physical, where that inquiry can take place. The library is a natural home for these technology-rich spaces.

This article is fantastic, and speaks to just about everything I'm passionate about as an aspiring academic librarian. I'm somewhat worried about how smaller universities-my chosen workplace-will adapt to these newer models of scholarly communication and publication, and generally with how the academic conversation is changing. These exciting developments in what the university means have the potential to widen the already extensive divide between smaller and larger schools. I know the challenges section at the end talks a little bit about convincing decision makers to fund these projects, but has anyone read anything about how these changes can be made specifically by smaller or poorly funded universities?

En el contexto de la proliferación de información y nuevas tecnologías se ha fortalecido la idea de que estamos en la sociedad de la información y del conocimiento. Pero estos términos no gozan de la claridad y el consenso que se requieren para dar pasos firmes. Ambos tienen varios significados e interpretaciones y hacen referencia a diversas realidades y posibilidades de la sociedad. Veamos qué implicaciones tiene la creciente explosión de la información en la misión y el trabajo de los bibliotecarios actuales.

The guidelines provides a conceptual template to guide the creation of information literacy (IL) programs in academic and school libraries as well as public libraries. It is meant for the educators, librarians and information facilitators at the international level to help them to frame the IL efforts. In fact it is also of value to anyone who may need to start an IL program and would like a general conceptual framework. The document is divided into ten chapters that comprise the organizational spectrum of information literacy work, including a definition of concepts, a proposal for information literacy standards, a section on obtaining institutional commitment, the management of the learning process, including personnel development, educational theories, among other basic topics on how to implement the program, plus a list of key IL terms with their definitions, and a bibliography for further reading.

Thank you very much for sharing this document that even if not updated is still valid in its fundamental ideas and framework

Today, on the one hand we have the Internet that allows access to information worldwide and at any time on the other hand librarians are facing tremendous pressure with the exorbitant price rise of the subscriptions to academic journals and unable to meet their responsibility of providing information. Simultaneously. This has called for the development of new models of information provision to meet user demands. Open Access is one of the models under discussion that has implications for educational, research, legal and economic policy. This handbook is designed to contribute to this debate and provides an interested public with information on Open Access, a subject which, despite its great social importance, has hitherto been mainly discussed by experts. The handbook is the outcome of a workshop that brought together 25 experts coming from German Federal Ministries, the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany, the European Commission, the academic community,major academic organisations, the publishing sector, and the Open Access community This handbook presents the various views of major stakeholders and covers a wide range of issues relevant to open access.

I found this is quite useful for open access! It kinda of introducing open access in depth. Thanks for sharing!