Academic librarians and research: a response

Before you read this post, go here and read Mark Rabnett’s blog post, ““For academic librarians what’s hard to reach is time for research.”
I started leaving a comment there, but soon realised that my comment was likely to challenge the original post in length. Thus, I figured I’d just post a response here and link back. [...]

“Fake” journals and recent CMAJ article on librarians

“Fake” Journals
In late April, when the Scientist broke the “Merck/Elsevier fake journal” story, my initial reaction was cynical surprise that this story was getting so much attention.
Honestly, we see “fake” (i.e. sponsored) journals and “fake” (i.e. ghostwritten) articles all the time. Every week.
And that’s not even mentioning the articles that are “merely” subject to gigantic [...]

Hark – PubMedCentral Canada on the horizon!

Thanks to Dean Giustini for the original heads-up on this:
In a press release titled “Canada joins international effort to provide access to health research,” the NRC (parent organization of CISTI, the de facto Canadian national library of science & medicine)

PubMed Central repository will open new pathway to Canadian health research
July 06, 2009, [...]

Conflating OA with other issues we like

At the 2nd International Public Knowledge Project Conference’s CLA pre-conference, a bunch of librarians and a few assorted others got together to talk about open access (OA).  One thing I kept finding myself coming back to is something I’ve been thinking about for several months now: whether we who are advocating open access should perhaps [...]

And Tango Makes Three: anti-ethnic penguins?

It was recently called to my attention that on the ALA’s list of the “10 Most Challenged Books,” And Tango Makes Three is listed as being challenged not only for the to-be-expected reasons such as “homosexuality” (although at least one of those penguins could probably be considered bi), being “anti-family” (ironic, yes, when alleged regarding [...]

YouTube videos on CanWest info issues

I don’t have a television, but I do love to watch stuff on my computer.  Back in the last millenium, when I did have a TV, I didn’t have cable anyway, so I am easily impressed with the amazing diversity of media to which I have access via the Internet.
As you may have noticed from [...]

DOAJ: Continued Growth (plus a Creative Commons bonus)

Over at the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, librarian Heather Morrison has been tracking the Dramatic Growth of Open Access over the past couple of years in a series of blog posts.
On Friday, Morrison noted that the growth rate of the DOAJ (directory of open access journals) has almost doubled in the past year. She [...]

Tomorrow’s History & the Role of Public Libraries

I’ve been thinking about digitization and history; specifically the trusim that history is written by the victors (aka the privileged), and what that means for our current era.
With literacy and war-conquests-slash-oppression on the part of literate groups, orality became devalued as “official” history in most of the mainstream, dominant, Western societies.  Non-literate or illiterate people [...]

Irresponsible health news reporting redux: the CBC on bone density & breast cancer

Can you stand to hear me kvetch again about irresponsible health reporting?
Today it’s the CBC (among others), whose health headline screams: Bone density level may act as predictor of breast cancer
It’s one of those articles without a byline, and the nameless reporter who penned this brief article clearly has no idea what they are [...]

By the way

If anyone was wondering, you can apparently get a bunch of new blog traffic if you write about both Harry Potter and naked human vaginas.
Is that disturbing?