Tag: scholarship

Posted on

How we know what we know: The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) helps unlock millions of connections between scholarly research – Wikimedia Blog

The Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with 29 publishers and a network of organizations, including the Public Library of Science (PLOS), the Internet Archive, Mozilla, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and many others, announced the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), which aims to make citation data freely available for anyone to access.

Scholarly publishers deposit the bibliographic record and raw metadata for their publications to Crossref. Thanks to a growing list of publishers participating in I4OC, reference metadata for nearly 15 million scholarly papers in Crossref’s database will become available to the public without copyright restriction.1 This data includes bibliographic information (like the title of a paper, its author(s), and publication date), machine readable identifiers like DOIs (Digital Object Identifier, a common way to identify scholarly works), as well as data on how papers reference one another. It will help draw connections within scientific research, find and surface relevant information, and enrich knowledge in places like Wikipedia and Wikidata.

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/04/06/initiative-for-open-citations/

Posted on

ArXiv preprint server plans multimillion-dollar overhaul

A multimillion-dollar funding drive is being readied to transform arXiv, the vastly popular repository to which physicists, computer scientists and math­ematicians flock to share their research preprints openly.
But the results of an enormous user survey published this week suggest that researchers are wary of drastic changes to a site that has become an essential part of the infrastructure of modern science.

Source: ArXiv preprint server plans multimillion-dollar overhaul

After the recent sale of SSRN to Thomson Reuters there was some discussion among law faculty about the possibility of launching a new service based on ArXiv or something like it. This article serves to remind us that such a project is feasible, but likely requires strong backing of a major law school or university.

Posted on

Paper Badger looks to provide digital badges to contributors to scholarly papers

Exploring the use of digital badges for crediting contributors to scholarly papers for their work

Source: Paper Badger: Contributorship Badges

This seems a lot more fun than a mention in a footnote. I could collect these on my CV as a highly visible means of showing my work. This initial work is being done in the sciences but it is open source so some enterprising soul could make it work for legal scholarship.

Posted on

Are Open Access and Traditional Publishers in the Same Business?

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2011/11/08/are-open-access-and-traditional-publishers-in-the-same-business/

There are industries that use the same raw materials, yet are not the same. Commercial firms that deliver purified water to companies consume water, fuel, and vehicles. Yet, not a single one is in competition with the local swimming pool company.

Guys trucking 5-gallon water jugs around to offices are doing something with the same materials that is completely different than what the other company — digging, lining, and purifying your swimming pool — is doing.

So, are open access publishers and traditional publishers really in the same business?