Jeffery Beall has flown a crusading flag against those who want to exploit naive (or game-playing) researchers into paying for publishing in low impact/ low quality journals.  Unfortunately, his attempts, as well meaning as they might be, have over simplified a truly complex environment into goodies and baddies – where the truth is far more nuanced.  His supervisor lays a few myths about how his infamous list of ‘predatory’ publishers was withdrawn to rest, and eloquently sketches out why such a reductionist approach to scholarly communication business models fails to work in the real world.

“In June 2017, Jeffrey Beall published an opinion piece in Biochemia Medica titled “What I Learned from Predatory Publishers.”1 While there are several elements of this publication that I find inaccurate or problematic, I’m choosing four specific themes within his piece to critique. In the interest of full disclosure, I am Jeffrey Beall’s direct supervisor at the University of Colorado-Denver’s Auraria Library and have been since I began working there in July 2015.”

…Link to the rest http://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/16837/18435

After a tea time discussion, and a perceived need for a laugh.

The Annual Last Day at Work Picnic will be held on the 21st of December 12:30pm.  Bring picnic stuff to share, and we’ll celebrate that we’re the ones holding the fort at the end of 2017.

Interested in how we go about assessing a journal to see if it could be ‘predatory’?  Here’s a report I wrote for Sara R. on request.  Very happy to do this for anyone, and talk through the process.

http://www.anton.angelo.nz/2017/11/07/assessing-questionable-journals/ 

Anton

The Internet Archive, along with some researchers have found an odd loophole that lets libraries copy (scan) books that are out of print.  This may be worth remembering if people are looking for some between-the-wars material that is out of print.

https://blog.archive.org/2017/10/10/books-from-1923-to-1941-now-liberated/

{meet in Poutama – Puaka James Hight 388 at 2pm , 26th of October – Anton]

Thursday 26th October

As part of international Open Access week activities, AOASG is especially pleased to have SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph as our special guest presenter for this month’s webinar.

Heather is currently leading charge to get the issue of Open Access through the US Congress via the bipartisan Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act. She is a world leader on the issues surrounding open access and an exceptionally engaging speaker.

The theme of Open Access Week 2017 is a question: “Open in order to….. ” is an invitation to answer the question of what concrete benefits can be realized by making scholarly outputs openly available. It amis to serve as a prompt to move beyond talking about openness in itself and focus on what openness enables—in an individual discipline, at a particular institution, or in a specific context; then to take action to realize these benefits.

2pm NZ

https://aoasg.org.au/webinar-series-2017/

Click here for registration page

This is a really thoughtful piece from someone reflecting on 10 years of library innovation.  Second Life?  Remember Second Life?

http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.co.nz/2017/08/3-things-about-librarianship-after-10.html

ORCID is a world wide researcher identification number.  Because referencing systems over simplify our identities to things like “Smith, J.”, “Singh, J” or “Chan, T.” we need a much better way of Identifying or ‘disambiguating’ ourselves.  ORCID, set up relatively recently, and supported by all the major publishers and academic institutions does that well.  You can set up a profile, link your work, education, funding and employment to it, and everyone knows that you are in fact you.

But there is a fly in the ointment.  I’ve set myself up (and this was on my official ORCID record) as a professor at MIT.  ORCID believes what you tell it, and though it clearly states what the source of the information is, it could be misleading.  Worse, a bad person could try to steal my identity by creating a false ORCID record for some nefarious purpose, imitating me.

The way around this is for institutions to verify the information that ORCID record holders have put into their profiles.  Notice above I have two employment records (both truthful) for The University of Canterbury.  One I put there, and the other the University added.  For my employer to do this, I had to give permission to them through the ORCID system so they could update my record.  They can’t change anything else, just edit and remove records they have added themselves.  ORCID lets me delete records they have added, but not edit them.

In New Zealand we are building a system, the ORCID Hub, to nationally manage this process for research institutions.  The plumbing behind the system is a little complex, but the idea is reasonable simple.

1. Researcher signs into the NZ nationwide academic authentication system (Tuakiri) through the ORCID hub.
2. Then they sign into ORCID, and give permission to their institution(s) to be able to verify their affiliation with them (as a staff or student, or both).

So, ORCID is a little broken at the moment, but we can get genuine affiliation records, which will go further to doing what ORCID was intended to do: trustworthy disambiguation for researchers.

As the web team are building our new University website, they are finding pockets of material departments have made available over the years.  All of the research reports and bibliographies created for the Graduate Certificate in Antarctic Studies was one: over 500 items over the last (nearly) 20 years.

Seeing the importance of the work, the team lent us some help in the form of Ashish Naicker, who slaved away loading them up.  He thinks it took him 1-5 minutes to load each one, so he worked for about 25 hours to get them all up.

https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/handle/10092/13757

Now all of these works are being indexed by Google Scholar, and will hopefully prove useful to Antarctic scholars around the world.

A really great collaboration between the library and the web team.