Hughes Institute’s Deal With Elsevier Will Open Up Access to Its Researchers’ Work, from The Chronicle The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the nation’s largest private supporter of biomedical research, announced on Thursday that it would pay the publishing giant Elsevier to open up access to papers that scientists affiliated with the institute have published in any of the 2,000 journals in the Elsevier family… According to the agreement, Elsevier would.. Read More
Yet another commercial, non-expert Ask service
I got this email today from Amazon: You’re Invited! As a valued Amazon customer, you’ve been specially picked to get an early look at a new website Amazon has just launched called Askville. Askville is a place where you can ask any question on any topic and get real answers from real people. It’s a fun place to meet others with similar interests to you and a place where you.. Read More
The influenza market
A question, or really a related set of questions, has been bugging me for going on 2 years now: How to avoid the free rider problem? What are the incentives for individuals to participate in and contribute to an open project? (e.g., an open source development project, or a digital reference consortium — that is, a project for which expertise is required but not rewarded, in that participants receive no.. Read More
Re-search
I was thinking about the word research yesterday. It is not, I suppose, unusual for me to be thinking about research, but it’s usually that I’m thinking about my research. It’s that whole signifier/signified thing. Anyway, it’s a weird word, when you think about it. Re-search. As in, searching again. I mean, replication is desirable in research, and replicated research surely is re-search. But the research being replicated, I suppose.. Read More
dLIST feeds my ego
I’ve recently discovered the joys of dLIST. This is particularly slow on the uptake of me, since Kristin has been telling me about it for over a year, & Scott is on the Advisory Board. Well, I’m slow but I get there eventually. Anyway I’ve started depositing preprints on dLIST. (See my author page.) Actually Scott beat me to it for the three papers we’ve co-authored. I mean, we know.. Read More
LRRT Ingenta Award: Thwarted
I’m on the ALA Library Research Round Table. The LRRT offers the Ingenta Research Award every year, & the deadline for submitting proposals has just passed, on March 31. Yesterday I got an email from the LRRT Chair that included this: I regret to advise you that we cannot award an Ingenta grant this year. Unfortunately, no one applied for the Ingenta grant and it is clear that we need.. Read More
Trying out StoryStarters
My last post, in case you were wondering, was me testing out the StoryStarters system, currently under development by the Information Institute of Syracuse, & currently in beta. My response appears on the StoryStarters site here. Critique of using StoryStarters from the point of view of an answerer: pretty damn good, guys. Nice work by the IIS, once again. So far there’s only a plugin for WordPress, though more are.. Read More
Carnival of the Infosciences
A pleasant surprise from the blogsphere today: yesterday’s post was selected as one of the Ringmaster’s Choices for the Carnival of the Infosciences #9. See the comments for that post. That’s cool, but what the heck does it mean? From my brief investigations, the Carnivals of the Infosciences seem to be a floating, more or less weekly compilation of interesting things in the library blogsphere. Floating in the sense that.. Read More
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
I’m reading Cory Doctorow‘s latest novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Actually I’m reading it on my Palm: I downloaded the plain text, used DropBook to convert it to Palm Reader format, & synched it up with my Palm. I’m reading it on the bus, mostly. And it’s amazing to me how little reading I can actually get done on the bus, because people keep asking me what.. Read More
Blogs & Dig Ref
The latest news out of the IIS is that they’re working on linking WordPress to QABuilder (QABuilder is the IIS’ web-based dig ref app), as a project for AskNSDL. They’re calling this “Story Starters.” The idea of a reference blog is of course something that Fred and I have been thinking about for a while now. But Story Starters has an interesting twist that we never considered. Fred and I.. Read More