Coffeehouse – A collection of data blog posts from around the web

Academic Publishing, bibliometrics, Citations, Cristin, Featured, free, Higher Education, Libraries, MTMT, national bibliographic database, ORCID, Persistent Identifiers, research evaluation, Research funding, research output, Scopus, Web of Science

Towards more consistent, transparent, and multi-purpose national bibliographic databases for research output

by Blog Admin • November 13, 2018

National bibliographic databases for research output collect metadata on universities’ scholarly publications, such as journal articles, monographs, and conference papers. As this sort of research information is increasingly used in assessments, funding allocation, and other academic reward structures, the value in developing comprehensive and reliable national databases becomes more and more clear. Linda Sīle, Raf Guns and Tim Engels outline […]

Academic communication, Evidence-based Policy, evidence-informed policy, free, Government, knowledge exchange, policymaking, research communication, research policy collaboration, research summaries, research to policy

Less than 5% of papers on the use of research in health policymaking tested interventions to see what worked. But those studies reveal a number of strategies for improvement

by Blog Admin • November 12, 2018

Population health policies stand a much better chance of succeeding if they’re informed by research evidence. But what are the best ways of making sure this happens? Danielle Campbell and Gabriel Moore conducted a rapid review of the literature on the subject and found that very few studies actually concerned testing interventions to see whether they worked. Those articles that […]

digital collections, Digital Content, Digital Curation, Inside the Library, metadata, Outreach and Events, Partners and Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure, training, University Librarians

Building Digital Content Management Capacity with Library Carpentry

by Carlyn Osborn • November 9, 2018

This is a guest post from Jesse A. Johnston, a Senior Digital Collections Specialist for the Library of Congress’s Digital Content Management Section. He also holds a position as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Maryland iSchool where he teaches graduate seminars and professional development courses in digital curation and content management In […]

academic library, academic piracy, Academic Publishing, Copyright, Featured, free, free access to research, Libraries, licensing agreement, open access, piracy, pirate site, publishing licence, scholarly comms, scholarly communications, Sci-Hub

A librarian perspective on Sci-Hub: the true solution to the scholarly communication crisis is in the hands of the academic community, not librarians

by Blog Admin • November 9, 2018

Sci-Hub is a pirate website that provides free access to millions of research papers otherwise locked behind paywalls. Widespread dissatisfaction with scholarly communications has led many to overlook or dismiss concerns over the site’s legality, praising its disruptive technology and seeing justification in the free access it affords people all over the world. Ruth Harrison, Yvonne Nobis and Charles Oppenheim […]

data curation, Featured data

Dryad celebrates international data

by Elizabeth Hull • November 8, 2018

There’s been important discussion lately about how to make research more inclusive, equitable, diverse, and global. See the recent 2018 International Open Access Week, and International Data Week, happening now in Gaborne, Botswana, with the theme “Digital Frontiers of Global Science.” Dryad is among these organizations seeking to provide sustainable, open scholarly infrastructure that is accessible to […]

Academic Publishing, Featured, free, Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary, interdisciplinary research, interdisciplinary studies, pseudo-interdisciplinarity, Research funding, research methods

“Interdisciplinary, like everyone else.” But are you being interdisciplinary for the wrong reasons?

by Blog Admin • November 8, 2018

Interdisciplinarity is the talk of the town. Funding agencies favour interdisciplinary research proposals, teaching programmes focus on developing interdisciplinary courses, and the publication of interdisciplinary studies has surged over recent decades. Lakshmi Balachandran Nair considers whether interdisciplinarity remains a strategy to surpass the limits of the methodological tools, theories, and views offered by a single discipline or has instead become […]