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Did you go get some Open Data this week? You need OpenRefine! A wonderful tool that lets you manipulate data files in amazing ways, i love working with it. Open source project spun off from google "OpenRefine : A free, open source, power tool for working with messy data"

A list of Citizen Science projects. Do you want to get involved?

I'd totally love to do the SETI@home one! WOW!

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.

ZBW Website German National Library of Economics - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ZBW is the largest library for literature in economics world-wide. This is one great example of "open access" whereby access for data is openly made available to users nationally and internationally. ZBW was is recently honoured by the German Library Association as the 2014 Library of the Year for its "a radically modern library whose customer- and innovation-oriented approach is exemplary for other libraries". Through its Econbiz Open project, ZBW was able to partner and create participatory culture among its partner countries.

I believe that one of the best ways to look for truthful information happens through the specialized free access library Julia.

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/

This article is an interesting take on how public libraries can participate in empowering patrons to develop a personal information management strategy. This can in turn strengthen a sense of community in the digital realm and support the development of community repositories.

Libraries are under threat from large commercial aggregators who provide services which are in many cases challenging the role of libraries. Information technology is also, however, an enabler for valuable collaboration between libraries to provide their own information-rich resources. Libraries can also collaborate in providing services, software and communities. Software communities supporting libraries (including open source) Technology projects for libraries featuring multi-institution collaboration The role of the library in increasing service reach through institutional collaboration (eg multi-institution MOOCS) Use of aggregation with distributed services to form rich data services

"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?

Wikipediocracy.com hosts articles examining Wikipedia's editorial failings and the governance flaws that lead to them, as well as a forum dedicated to criticism of Wikipedia's administrative culture.

Wikipediocracy's mission is so negatively stated, that one wonders when someone will have to create a site to examine it: "We exist to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia and its related projects; to examine the corruption there, along with its structural flaws; and to inoculate the unsuspecting public against the torrent of misinformation, defamation, and general nonsense that issues forth from one of the world's most frequently visited websites, the 'encyclopedia that anyone can edit.'" Oversight of Wikipedia et al is a good thing. A more open minded approach is needed. As I've not yet read any of the articles in depth, I reserve judgment of the site itself. I'm only critiquing the mission statement.

"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?

In a region where transparency is often scarce, a new initiative is working to foster an open and more collaborative society in the Middle East. OpenMENA is a project that aims at opening access to information, knowledge and data and creating an atmosphere of openness and transparency in the Arab World.

An investigation into the low levels of published African scholarly research by Emerald. Although this study is from 2008, the findings are still valid even in 2014.

So, you need an image for your blog? We've spent some time categorizing our favorite sources for free images and organizing them in such a way as to help you find what you're looking for. Here are the criteria we've examined: Subjects: Does a site focus on specific genres of images, or is it a mass collection of various image types?

Very helpful resource. The categories help to narrow one's search.

Nice! Thanks for sharing. Both useful IRL, and pertinent to the course.

"At the same time, a fair amount of resistance to OA practices still exists. Publishers object to OA on economic principles, as it undermines the revenue generated by journals. Some researchers feel that it devalues their work as well, lowering it to the level of "a database to be consulted," in Eve's words. He believes the academic community is over-reliant on scholarly publishing's status quo; as he told the crowd at Columbia, "the system reinforces itself through economies of prestige." Even as interest in altmetrics grows, the quality of research continues to be gauged by the number of citations an article gathers and the status of the journal it appears in."

This is a good overview of a project that seeks to demystify and break down resistance to open educational resources.

What happens when you troll Tor developers hard? You get unmasked. Towards the end of last week, a troll who had sent various aggressive tweets to a host of security experts and privacy advocates associated with the Tor project and browser, which enables online anonymity, had his identity exposed.

It is important to stand up against all kinds of bullying, in this case it is cyberbullying. But what is the difference when it comes to someone bullies you, and you bully that person back? It is still bullying. Although I think some actions should be taken to tackle the people trolling, it is difficult because of the massive amount of people who are leaving angry or horrible responses. To monitor every netizens activity is impossible and inefficient, it also violates privacy rights (even when we know we are monitored at some point). What do you think about creating filters? I think that will restrict the freedom of speech people have. So is having freedom and open access such a brilliant thing? Would it not cause moral conflicts? Education and moral standards would not always relate, because emotions is one of the measures too.

Thanks for your sharing. A lot of people have been the victim of cyberbullying, the reason of cyberbullying has become increasingly common might has some relationship with the advanced technology and also due to people can say whatever they want to say by hiding behind their digital identities, so they do not care about moral standard any more. And it's true that it's really hard to take action to everyone who involved in cyberbullying because the amount is huge.

This video is the project that I made with my partner. We tried to explore the business and sustainable model of MOOC. Hope it will be useful! And yes you can reuse and remix it.

In sharing knowledge and learning, research data must be included. I agree that there must be incentives to motivate researchers share the data and its result. we are not what we are now if we have not learned what, who, why and how we were.

thank you very much for sharing this document that effectively connect the dots on an economic ground and made me know the LARM audio research project that might be helpful for this one field of research of mine