In Scientists Under Surveillance: The FBI Files, editors JPat Brown et al bring together obtained FBI files to offer an insight into FBI investigations into the life and research of some of the world’s most renowned scientists, showing this surveillance to be typically driven by fear, ignorance and senseless tip-offs. The collection sheds light on some of the most intrusive ways that powerful […]
Category: open source
Unpaywall: a beautiful way to help everyone Get The Research
To round off the Impact Blog’s coverage of Open Access Week 2018, Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem reiterate the beauty in appearance, ideals, and promise of Unpaywall, and also preview the team’s soon-to-be-launched GetTheResearch initiative, which will enable citizen scientists, patients, practitioners, policymakers, and millions more beyond academia to find, read, and understand the scholarly research on any topic. There’s […]
Let’s go! Explore, transcribe, and tag at crowd.loc.gov
This is a guest post from Lauren Algee, LC Labs Senior Innovation Specialist. Connect with Lauren and her fellow crowd.loc.gov Community Managers Elaine Kamlley and Victoria Van Hyning via History Hub and on Twitter, as well as GitHub. What yet-unwritten stories lie within the pages of Clara Barton’s diaries, writings of Civil Rights pioneer Mary Church Terrell, or […]
Nothing lasts forever: questions to ask yourself when choosing a new tool or technology for research
Academia has become increasingly reliant on third-party tools and technologies to carry out many of the processes throughout the research lifecycle. But there are genuine concerns about the sustainability of some of these tools and what the implications would be for users in the event they were discontinued. Andy Tattersall suggests a series of straightforward questions researchers should ask themselves […]
Funder open access platforms – a welcome innovation?
Funding organisations commissioning their own open access publishing platforms is a relatively recent development in the OA environment, with the European Commission following the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation in financing such an initiative. But in what ways, for better or worse, do these new platforms disrupt or complement the scholarly communications landscape? Tony Ross-Hellauer, Birgit Schmidt and Bianca […]
Dash: 2017 in Review
The goal for Dash in 2017 was to build out features that would make Dash a desirable place to publish data. While we continue to…
Test-driving the Dash read-only API
The Dash Data Publication service is now allowing access to dataset metadata and public files through a read-only API. This API focuses on allowing metadata…
Dash Updates: Fall, 2017
Throughout the summer the Dash team has focused on features that better integrate with researcher workflows. The goal: make data publishing as easy as possible.…
Open Access definitions vary but authors must be reminded that giving up copyright is just folly.
The heart of the debate on open access to research is over licencing. A sharp schism has emerged between those who think the no restrictions CC-BY licence is indispensable, and those who think other licences such as the non-commercial CC-BY-NC or non-derivative CC-BY-ND, is good enough. In the software world, licensing was a similar sticking point between free software and open source advocates. Glyn […]
Untangling the Knot of CAD Preservation
At the 2014 Society of American Archivists meeting, the CAD/BIM Taskforce held a session titled “Frameworks for the Discussion of Architectural Digital Data” to consider the daunting matter of archiving computer-aided design and Building Information Modelling files. This was the latest evidence that — despite some progress in standards and file exchange — archivists and the […]