So, A Digital Object Identifier is a guarantee of a unique, trusted scholarly resource? So why do porn movies have them?

Read on…

http://crosstech.crossref.org/2013/09/dois-unambiguously-and-persistently-identify-published-trustworthy-citable-online-scholarly-literature-right.html

Anton

Does anyone here have access to some system that could make a disk image of a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk? (The actually floppy floppies…?)

Anton.

In order to fix a problem with the feedback form on the UC Research Repository, it will have to be restarted. This means it will be unavailable from 8am to 8:30am on Thursday morning.

The London School of Economics blog has a great post about why they use Creative Commons licences for their research material. Though Creative Commons sounds a bit airy fairy, its a solid set of licences for sharing material, used all over the world. There are even NZ law specific ones used by various government and other institutions. Worth a read if you’re curious about the different ways you can licence work online.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/08/09/cc-by-what-does-it-mean-for-scholarly-articles/

Ars Technica (a reputable online source for technical news) reports that Google Play will be selling and renting textbooks from ‘the five major publishers’. Google Play provides software and content for almost 1 billion Android devices in use. (Yep, billion). Android tablets sell for half, or less, than the equivalent Apple product.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/07/textbooks-coming-to-the-google-play-store/

The repository is being going down for maintenance for an hour on Thursday in order to prepare for 10Gb of engineering student reports to be loaded into it! Hopefully we can get Google analytics working on it again as well. (Now I have a paper on it, I want to see who is downloading it. Enlightened Self Interest, I call it.)

Cheers,

~Anton.

Here is a good article to use as reference when coming across the usual concerns about Open Access Publishing

To summarize:
1) OA journals are peer reviewed (in the main)
2) Not all charge article processing fees (and a lot will waive them)
3) It is not a choice between impact/prestige and Open
4) OA is for first rate work, not just “stuff you can’t publish elsewhere”.
5) Archiving in repositories does not violate copyright (most of the time)

Lots of good references, and an easy, short read.

https://theconversation.com/busting-the-top-five-myths-about-open-access-publishing-14792

~Anton.

Swinburne have released a set of endnote tutorial videos under an Creative Commons licence, which means we are able to use them and embed them into our own materials.

They have been downloaded tens of thousands of times already.

From Library Journal, an article describing the new ‘impact’ indexes that include social media, ‘altmetrics’.

As scholars migrate into online spaces like Mendeley, blogs, Twitter, and more, they leave new traces of once-invisible interactions like reading, saving, discussing, and recommending. Observing these traces can inform new metrics of scholarly influence and impact — so-called “altmetrics.” Stakeholders in academia are beginning to discuss how and where altmetrics can be useful towards evaluating a researcher’s academic contribution. As this interest grows, libraries are in a unique position to help support an informed dialog on campus. We suggest that librarians can provide this support in three main ways: informing emerging conversations with the latest research, supporting experimentation with emerging altmetrics tools, and engaging in early altmetrics education and outreach. We include examples and lists of resources to help librarians fill these roles.

http://www.infodocket.com/2013/05/16/riding-the-crest-of-the-altmetrics-wave-how-librarians-can-help-prepare-faculty-for-the-next-generation-of-research-impact-metrics/