Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2011/09/digital-scholarship-introduction.html

"Although the “mass media era now looks like a relatively brief and anomalous,” it is seen as normal by those who have spent their careers in those organisations. Those stuck in the “old paradigm” have great difficulty imagining and accepting the “new paradigm.”

Scientific journals are lagging behind newspapers, but they are surely on the same course. Many find unacceptable the domination of a few journals and the huge profits made by some publishers from the scientific value produced by others, and the open access has begun for these and other reasons. Open access articles are increasing rapidly, and just in the past few years we have seen the appearance of many “megajournals” like PLoS One and BMJ Open, which are aiming to publish rapidly after light peer review that does not attempt the largely impossible job of “spotting winners” but leaves readers to decide. "

"CKAN is the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, a registry of open knowledge packages and projects (and a few closed ones).

CKAN makes it easy to find, share and reuse open content and data, especially in ways that are machine automatable."

"Scientific publishing as it stands is an inefficient way to do science on a global scale. A lot of time and money is being wasted by groups around the world duplicating research that has already been carried out. FigShare allows you to share all of your data, negative results and unpublished figures. In doing this, other researchers will not duplicate the work, but instead may publish with your previously wasted figures, or offer collaboration opportunities and feedback on preprint figures."

"For a while now, I've been advancing the philosophical construction of artifacts, a practice I've given the name carpentry. Taking up that philosophical hobby horse, I wonder what a writing and discussion system would look like if it were designed more deliberately for the sorts of complex, ongoing, often heated conversation that now takes place poorly on blogs. This is a question that might apply to subjects far beyond philosophy, of course, but perhaps the philosopher's native tools would have special properties, features of particular use and native purpose. What if we asked how we want to read and write rather than just making the best of the media we randomly inherit, whether from the nineteenth century or the twenty-first?"

"The decision highlights a tension between the need for rigorous peer review of scientific research and the desire to provide as much data as possible to the scientific community.

"More data, in and of itself, is always a good thing -- if there aren't adverse effects," said Maunsell, who is also a neuroscientist at Harvard University. But peer review was becoming less effective because many reviewers failed to evaluate the supplemental materials, which the journal wasn't even required to provide, he explained. "We were taking a hit on peer review for something that wasn't formally our responsibility." "

Presentation and paper by Dorothea Salo - "Who Owns Our Work?"

"This paper presents the first meta-analysis for the inter-rater reliability (IRR) of journal peer reviews. IRR is defined as the extent to which two or more independent reviews of the same scientific document agree."

"Which academic articles get published in the more prestigious journals is a pretty random process."

Articles receiving the Open Access treatment received significantly more readership (as measured by article downloads) and reached a broader audience (as measured by unique visitors), yet were cited no more frequently, nor earlier, than subscription-access control articles. A pronounced increase in article downloads with no commensurate increase in citations to Open Access treatment articles may be explained through social stratification, a process which concentrates scientific authors at elite, resource-rich institutions with excellent access to the scientific literature. For this community, access is essentially a non-issue. The real beneficiaries of Open Access are the communities that consume, but do not contribute to, the scientific literature.

Around the world, key scientific data are at risk of being lost, either because they are held on fragile or obsolete media or because they may be destroyed by researchers who are unaware of their value. Now a team of scientists is planning to scour museums and research institutes to draw up a global inventory of threatened data. Launched on 29 October, shortly after the biennial conference of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology in Stellenbosch, South Africa, the project aims to publish the inventory online in 2012.

OASIS aims to provide an authoritative ‘sourcebook’ on Open Access, covering the concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieving it. The site highlights developments and initiatives from around the world, with links to diverse additional resources and case studies. As such, it is a community-building as much as a resource-building exercise. Users are encouraged to share and download the resources provided, and to modify and customize them for local use. Open Access is evolving, and we invite the growing world-wide community to take part in this exciting global movement.

Welcome to the Directory of Open Access Journals. This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages.

Award winning SHERPA is investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication. It is developing open-access institutional repositories in universities to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research. SHERPA services and the SHERPA Partnership are both based at the Centre for Research Communications at the University of Nottingham.

My Data Management Plan - a satire

On August 11, the Journal of Neuroscience published an Announcement Regarding Supplemental Material by Editor-in-Chief John Maunsell. In it John Maunsell announces that the journal in November will stop accepting supplementary material in article submissions. The announcement has lead to an extensive discussion in the science blogosphere with a number of relevant posts listed below

The professoriate may be more liberal politically than the most latte-filled ZIP code in San Francisco, but we are an extraordinarily conservative bunch when it comes to scholarly communication.

We don’t need more filters or better filters in scholarly communications – we don’t need to block publication at all. Ever. What we need are tools for curation and annotation and re-integration of what is published. And a framework that enables discovery of the right thing at the right time. And the data that will help us to build these. The more data, the more reseach published, the better.

No, these ideas are worthy, but they don't get to the real problem. It's not like all the crappy papers are coming from younger faculty who are bucking for tenure, you know. Plenty more are emitted by well-entrenched groups who just generate things that no one ever really wants to read. I think we've made it too possible for people to have whole scientific careers of complete mediocrity.

It may not be structured like a journal paper, but "On the Origin of Species" was written according to classical rules of rhetoric.

Alma Swan, in a report well worth reading, posits four kinds of data-curation staff: data creators, data managers, data librarians, and data scientists. I'm not sure how far I can go with that. I agree with the skillsets as Swan lays them out; I'm just agog at the idea that any institution or research shop will be able to divvy up these tasks among four whole people!

at First Monday by Brian Whitworth and Rob Friedman
"While current computing practice abounds with innovations like online auctions, blogs, wikis, twitter, social networks and online social games, few if any genuinely new theories have taken root in the corresponding “top” academic journals. Those creating computing progress increasingly see these journals as unreadable, outdated and irrelevant. Yet as technology practice creates, technology theory is if anything becoming even more conforming and less relevant. We attribute this to the erroneous assumption that research rigor is excellence, a myth contradicted by the scientific method itself. Excess rigor supports the demands of appointment, grant and promotion committees, but is drying up the wells of academic inspiration."

A hierarchy of needs for data-curation: acquisition, physical medium, bitrot, format viability, usability, fidelity to original.

A strong commitment to research in any relevant area of e-librarianship such as: e-learning, digital collections, collaborative web spaces, social software, interactive and integrative online services, semantic web or cyberinfrastructure is required.

"Data curation," as it is often called, is my major professional interest in the e-research firmament, so you can expect to see it discussed often here. I am partial to Melissa Cragin's definition: "the active and ongoing management of (research) data through its lifecycle of interest and usefulness to scholarship, science, and education."

Together, computerized writing environments (e.g., physical spaces, hardware, software, and networks) and the humans who use and support such technologies comprise complex ecologies of interaction. As with any ecology, a human-computer techno-ecological system needs to be planned, fostered, designed, sustained, and assessed to create a vinbrant culture of support at the individual, programmatic, institutional, and even national and international level. Local and larger infrastructures of composing are critical to digital writing practices and processes. In academia, specifically, all writing is increasingly computer-mediated

The Mission of SSP is to advance scholarly publishing and communication and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking among individuals in the field.