As an IR librarian, I’m constantly dealing with faculty signing away their copyrights to publishers — and I’m always faced with challenges of deciphering publisher author agreements. As such, I found Jeff Pomerantz’s chronicle of negotiating his rights as a scholar extremely telling and insightful. He’s now boycotting the publisher — but isn’t it the luxury of a tenured faculty member?
News
In a stunning turn of cultural and professional stereotyping, librarians “shushed” at information desk.
“We’re trying to study in here and it’s kind of loud …!” says finals-stressed student. “Can you please be more quiet?”
The librarians are speechless as they contemplate this new reality. Luckily, I regain composure to murmur — “Sure we’ll be more quiet.”
–Thanks to Mike P. for being an innocent bystander
“The future of campus computing belongs to the librarians and the libraries, and that is a very good thing. ” Learn why: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/5_reasons_librarians_are_the_future_of_ed_tech
“Google Exacycle for Visiting Faculty is a new grant program for high-performance, CPU-intensive computing. In its first year, the program invites proposals for large-scale, computationally intensive research projects. The program awards sizable allocations on Google’s computing infrastructure to address grand challenges in science and engineering. We will award a total of approximately one billion core-hours to drive transformational research in diverse fields such as astronomy, biology and medicine, earth sciences, mathematics and physics.
Google Exacycle for Visiting Faculty is not a conventional grant program. We aim to stimulate advances in science and engineering research by supporting the computational needs of projects that push boundaries and reach for remarkable breakthroughs.”
Deadline is May 31st, 2011 for applications. More at: http://research.google.com/university/exacycle_program.html
A coworker mentioned f1000, an interesting for-fee service that has scholars rank scholarship in their field.
“The core service of Faculty of 1000 (F1000) identifies and evaluates the most important articles in biology and medical research publications. The selection process comprises a peer-nominated global ‘Faculty’ of the world’s leading scientists and clinicians who rate the best of the articles they read and explain their importance.”
The Research Information Network (RIN) has completed a second series of case studies to provide a detailed analysis of how humanities’ researchers discover, use, create and manage their information resources.
Eric Morgan conducted an informal survey of library folk involved in Data Curation, asking them who are the involved parties at their campus. The results are interesting: http://blogs.nd.edu/emorgan/.
After a quick search of eBay, artist Paul Richmond discovered many of his prints were being ripped off and sold en masse from China. Copyright violation, anyone??
Instead of getting mad, Richmond decided to get even, with a detailed (and comical) account of how he punked the conman.
Read more at Paul Richmond’s blog
Several major research institutions are partnering to develop a flexible online tool to help researchers generate NSF data management plans. Read more at: http://blogs.library.ucla.edu/sel/2011/02/15/cdl-press-release-online-data-management-planning-tool/
JISC infoNet has launched a learning and teaching upgrade to the Digital Repositories infokit.
This upgrade, written by Lou McGill, augments the Repositories Support Project outputs that formed the basis for the toolkit.
