Group items tagged

"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?

This library is a tool to help instructors find affordable, quality textbook solutions. All textbooks in this library are complete and openly licensed. I found the site difficult to search. The available books are not useful for the courses that I teach but the site is probably useful for numerous courses and educational levels.

"The Macaulay Library is the world's largest and oldest scientific archive of biodiversity audio and video recordings. Our mission is to collect and preserve recordings of each species' behavior and natural history, to facilitate the ability of others to collect and preserve such recordings, and to actively promote the use of these recordings for diverse purposes spanning scientific research, education, conservation, and the arts." A great example of what citizen science can build!

It's absolutely shameful that so few library and information science journals are open access: if any professional associations have a professional imperative towards improving the scholarly and cultural communication processes, it is librarians and other information professionals. This substantial (but still woefully short) list of open access journals that publish on library and information science will be a great resource for those of us in this course who are aspiring or practicing librarians. As we've heard over and over again throughout this course, advocacy is absolutely essential if open access principles are ever to receive wider acceptance and implementation; that's why it's important that, as practicing information professionals, we use open access publications for our research whenever we can. Lists like this one allow us to streamline our research in ways that align most closely with our professional values, though of course currently there just isn't enough published to allow us to rely exclusively on open access material for our own work. But having lists like this also allows us to determine where our research should be submitted; otherwise, by publishing in paid journals, we are only making things worse. This all being said, most lists like this that I could find online were either outdated and incomplete, part of a larger database that made hyperlinking difficult, or-like this one-they lacked any explanation of what sorts of articles could be found within; even this one hasn't been updated in eighteen months. But as is so often the case with open access, we must take what we can get.

Hi, thank you for sharing the link! I agree with your comments. However, I am very pleased that I found my professional journal on the list :)

"New technology and innovative business models offer proven opportunities for enhancing the sharing of scholarly information - research papers, primary data and other evidence, creative activity and other products of research and scholarship - across institutions and audiences. This scholarly communication - understood as the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use - promotes a shared system of research and scholarship. ACRL sees a need to vigorously re-orient all facets of library services and operations to the evolving technologies and models that are affecting the scholarly communication process. There is wide variance in the background understanding of and engagement in scholarly communication as a critical perspective and worldview for academic librarians. This Scholarly Communication toolkit was designed by ACRL's Scholarly Communication Committee as a resource for education and advocacy efforts in transforming the scholarly communication landscape."

The report was released as part of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Technology Watch series. Title Preserving eBooks (DPC Technology Watch Report 14-01; June 2014) Authors Sheila Morrissey Ithaka S+R Source Digital Preservation Coalition Abstract This report discusses current developments and issues with which public, national, and higher education libraries, publishers, aggregators, and preservation institutions must contend to ensure long-term access to eBook content.

While attending another work-related webinar, I heard about this web site and thought about this class. On the surface, this site looks like a portal to many, many other image and video repositories about the history and geography of the United States. Many are contributed by local public libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies. What caught my attention and connect to this course is that all the metadata of the repositories are open access, so that developers can take advantages of the metadata and create additional apps. In this sense, this site becomes a platform. The contents from the various repositories have different degrees of rights and restrictions for reuse, some are under CC, some are protected by copyright, but the metadata is all open!

It's one of those almost invisible infrastructures that we start to notice only once they go extinct. A place where all people can get access to all knowledge that can be collected seemed for a long time a dream beyond reach - dependent on the limited resources of rich patrons or unstable budgets of (welfare) states.

"11 academic publishers, including major players like Taylor & Francis and Oxford University Press, would be raising the cost of short-term e-book loans effective June 1. In some cases the increase would be as much as 300 percent."

This Hack Library School post popped up today, offering some tips for discussion posts. 

This is a great set of suggestions. I'm sharing with my students--even for face-to-face classes, I use discussion boards as homework, so etiquette is important.

"Heather Joseph, Executive Directory, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, talks to the University of Maryland community about the evolution of open access and how trendlines are pointing up. Change is accelerating in the push to make information openly and freely available."

"It turns out that students are poorly trained in college to effectively navigate the Internet's indiscriminate glut of information. Another Project Information Literacy study, involving more than 8,300 undergraduates at 25 American colleges, found that most make do with a very small compass. They rely on tried and true resources such as course readings, library databases, Google, and Wikipedia....The skills that students cultivate through traditional assignments-writing essays based on library research-are far different from those required to perform efficient, high-level, accurate research in the digital world. All of those types of research skills take practice under the eye of experts."

This commentary emphasises the need for students to be taught within the curricula on how to be discerning when navigating the surfeit of information on the internet.

The wonderful blog, Hack Library School, has recently posted a piece on open access publishing. This piece is a great overview, which covers many of the basic concepts covered in Module 6. The article discusses what open access is (and what it isn't) and some of the biggest discussion points on the issue today. It's a great overview and well worth the read if you want an overview or a refresher on the topic!

This blog covers a lot of relevant concepts related to OA, but a finer point need to be clarified. Regarding Google Scholar, not everything retrieved from GS is OA. GS is a web crowler, it crows wherever it is allowed, including references and citations to articles behind paywalls. On the other hand, many librarians are working to make their paid journals subscriptions available to their faculty and students via Google Scholar. So when faculty/students are on their universities' network, they can search GS, find articles from journals. If their library subscribes to that journal, there is a good chance a link to the full text will be available.

I agree with the point that "findability" for green OA articles is a current problem. We need a PubMed or Web of Science for green OA articles!

We're excited to add two new titles, Writing 101 and Writing 201, to our free ebook library.

Two interesting e-books on developing writing skills, as well as many articles on various aspects of writing. Intended for those who write in English.

Open Access Library (www.oalib.com) is an academic search engine and publisher. You can download research papers for free and submit your paper to it. It is a shared academic database.

Information Research, is an open access, international, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal, dedicated to making accessible the results of research across a wide range of information-related disciplines. It is privately published and edited by Professor T.D. Wilson. It is hosted, and given technical support, by Lund University Libraries, Sweden and editorial support by the University of Borås, Sweden.