As I reported at Open Access News, AcaWiki launched yesterday. The idea is free (gratis, libre), editable (wiki) summaries of academic papers. These summaries might be useful to scan during a literature review or when studying for a class, or they might help make an article comprehensible to a non-specialist (a researcher in another discipline, [...]
Posts under ‘Academia’
Lead, follow, or get out of the way
Harvard and 4 other universities did something neat recently: they agreed, in principle, to help finance open access publishing. Of course, the devil’s in the details (more on that in a future post), not least of which is that, at the time of the agreement, none of the schools had actually dedicated any money to [...]
The case for plagiarism
There’s been a recent tiffle about alleged plagiarism in the dissertation of a student who is now a university president. In this case, the entire research design is borrowed from an earlier study, which the author acknowledges and cites:
[T]his study replicated [...] a study [...] that had first been conducted at The University of Alabama [...]
Guest post on 1 year of NIH open access
The NIH Public Access Policy took effect on April 7, 2008. I have a guest post at Science Progress looking at the policy after a year in implementation.
LOC preserving legal blogs
Following on my recent post about preservation for scholarly blogs (and see Dorothea Salo’s take), today I found this (via techPresident):
The Law Library of Congress began harvesting legal blawgs in 2007. The collection has grown to more than one hundred items covering a broad cross section of legal topics.
Questions:
What are the criteria for inclusion [...]
Preservation for scholarly blogs
I’ve wondered about preservation for new modes of scholarly communication and ephemera, e.g. scholarly blogs, mailing lists, etc. Others have suggested it recently as well. A cursory Googling finds a few others mulling the question, but not (at first glance) anybody actually doing it.
I don’t do much with preservation, so I plead ignorance. Is anybody [...]
Why haven’t more research funders and institutions adopted self-archiving mandates? (Or: “Build it first, open it later”)
Recently, I came across this quote from Rep. Mike Honda:
Instead of databases becoming available as a result of Freedom Of Information Act requests, government officials should be required to justify why any public data should not be freely available to the taxpayers who paid for its creation.
It struck me that there’s very different politics [...]
Why not publish data?
I try to avoid writing things that may make me sound stupid, but this post falls in that category.
Recently I was reading about efforts related to data sharing: technological infrastructure, curation, educating researchers, and the like. I was struck by the thought that most of the advocacy for data sharing boils down to an exhortation [...]
