Open Access Reaches the Public Through Medical News

ABC News ran a story about doctors who expect to have access to the medical literature but can’t because of publisher costs.  They also mentioned the open access movement including the NIH mandate to deposit publications funded by the federal government to PubMed Central so they can be accessed by the public for free.

This is a great opportunity to educate the public about the need for Open Access promoted by advocates like Peter Suber in the United States and Steven Harnad in the UK.  The story begins with a direct connection between the doctor who did the research that would help many people and the lack of access by most people because of commercial publication costs.

Maybe us librarians could hit the comment section with a dose of open access education?  This way more people will understand that the disproportionately rising costs of journals compared to library budgets is a danger to them as well as the “ivory tower”. That’s the ticket.

Journal TOC Current Awareness Tool

The ticTOCs Journal Table of Contents Service from Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) provides the Table of Contents from over 11,000 journals for free.  Faculty who want assistance in keeping up with new research in their field would appreciate this service.  The notification is through RSS only limting the usefulness to those who use RSS.  Librarians could email the contents of feeds for those who are less tech saavy as a servie.

Thanks to Richard Ackerman of Science Library Pad for bringing this service to my attention.

What Digital Scholarship Models Are Scholars Using?

In November 2008, a report written by Ithaka and commissioned by the Association of Research Libraries, entitled Current  Models of Digital Scholarly Communication, examined how faculty members use exclusively-digital, non-traditional scholarly resources. It identified 206 resources used by faculty that fit ARL’s category of “original and scholarly”. Those sources are aggregated in an ARL searchable database.

To be clear, “Original” means that the content was “born-digital” and appears in the chosen resource first. “Scholarly” refers to the author’s identity as a scholar and includes both peer-reviewed resources and informal sources like blogs and discussion forums.

Within the 206 resources, eight categories emerged:

1. E-journals
2. Reviews
3. Preprints and Working Papers
4. Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, and Annotated Content
5. Data
6. Blogs
7. Discussion Forums
8. Professional and Scholarly Hubs (Mixture of these categories)

Some interesting points:

• Top reason for use of these resources across disciplines was to access most current research
• Academic discipline influences which formats are considered important
  • E-journals among top choice across disciplines
  • Humanities highly value informal exchanges (blogs, discussion) more than other disciplines
  • Social Sciences highest rated – professional hubs, preprints (Social Science Research Network)
  • Science, Technical and Medical (STM) rated data sources the highest
• Some preprint sources like SSRN and arXiv (STM) have been around for a while and are established but many others are new and still must gain respect from the broader community.
• These resources have created new forms of scholarly contributions.  Are they being acknowledged by tenure committees?  Christine Borgman is interviewed about this in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bringing Tenure into the Digital Age.

This report provides a good foundation for integrating and encouraging the use of these resources for faculty.  It also gives more insight into the influence that a discipline has on their workflow.

Michael Wesch and Digital Ethnography

Michael Wesch is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University and he is doing some innovative and significant work on the impact of digital media. Many people probably had their first exposure to him through the YouTube sensation The Machine is Us/ing Us that beautifully illustrates what Web 2.0 is and its implications. The last portion of the video poses that scenario that we need to rethink some things. Two particular aspects of change for this post are scholarly communication and pedagogy.