OA in the USA

Research funded by US taxpayers must be made available to the American public for free within a year of publication, as outlined in a recent article published on Inside Higher Ed.  In addition to posting the research itself, this new legislation requires publishing bodies to post metadata -  including relevant information related to the research -  so it will be discoverable through search engines. In Canada, depending on the funding body, the rules can be similar. For example,  starting January 2013, publications receiving funding through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research are required to make their peer-reviewed research publicly available within 12 months of publication (see here).  One more step down the road toward Open Access.  And, thinking practically about all of this, in a time of fiscal uncertainty, should taxpayers really be paying twice for access to important (government-funded) research?

Just in case you’re not done your shopping yet…

…here’s an idea for the word-lover in your life.  Cambridge University Press recently published Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary, a book that has ignited some controversy by asserting that one of its former editors “surreptitiously expunged hundreds of words with foreign origins.”

The Guardian and The Atlantic Wire have both published nice pieces on the book and its assertions, in addition to the New York Times article quoted above.  Take a look and see if you think there is a scandal here.

Does this book make your Christmas list?  If not, what books are on your list this year?

New Ideas in the World of Peer Review

Peer review has long been a standard measure of credibility for academic articles.  However, the system has also long been criticized for a variety of reasons, including the length of time it takes for research to be published.

An article in Inside Higher Ed last week highlighted a couple of new ventures in the world of peer review aimed at speeding up the process and opening it up to more people.

Mad Women on Mad Men

On Sept. 26, RDC Library hosted a book launch to celebrate the publication of a book of academic essays edited by Heather Marcovitch and Nancy Batty, Mad Men, Women, and Children: Essays on Gender and Generation. RDC faculty members Heather Marcovitch, Nancy Batty, and Joan Crate each contributed essays to the book, and each of them read from their essays at the launch event. This book continues the rich tradition of scholarly publication at Red Deer College. A copy will soon be available at RDC Library, or you can purchase it from the RDC Bookstore.

Santa 2.0

Just in time for the Christmas decorations to start going up in stores, news came out last week that a new version of The Night Before Christmas is being released.

In this revised version, all references to Santa having a pipe or smoking have been removed, so that they do not offend modern children or encourage them to take up smoking.

The new book has met with criticism from a number of different groups, who object to modern revisions of classic literature to remove now offensive content.  A similar debate arose last year over news that a revised version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was going to be released.

Take a look at the article, and then let us know what you think.  Do you prefer your Santa old-school, or are you excited about the new Santa 2.0?

For those of you curious about how books are (or used to be) made…

Glen Milner has made a lovely 2 minute video showing the printing of a book from start to finish.  I was fascinated at how much of it is done by hand.  Enjoy!

Encyclopedia Britannica Stops the Press, Goes Digital

After 244 years, Encyclopedia Britannica is stopping the press, and will publish only online editions of its 32-volume encyclopedia set.

“The final decision to put it all online makes sense, of course. It’s costly and painstaking to produce a new edition of an enormous print product, a cultural symbol though it may be; meanwhile, a database is boundless and can be continually updated (and corrected) for relative peanuts. The company will concentrate on digital publishing and educational products, developing apps to make sure it’s everywhere you want to be. The brand may become the equivalent of Wikipedia with fact-checking: Britannica Online allows readers to revise its entries “which are then published after editorial review and revision if necessary.” —Time NewsFeed

Luckily for RDC students and instructors, RDC Library already subscribes to the online edition!

To access this wonderful resource, visit any of our Subject Guides, then go to the Find Background Info page, and look for the General Encyclopedias & Dictionaries box.

Playing with Google Books’ Ngram Viewer

I just came across a link to a fascinating new Ted Talk via Library Link of the Day.  What we learned from 5 million books is a 15-minute video of researchers Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel talking about what they’re learning about culture by charting the frequency of words over time in the books so far digitized as part of the Google Books digitization project.

They call the study “culturomics,” which they define as “the application of massive-scale data collection analysis to the study of human culture.”  What it lets them do is chart things like how frequently the words “God” or “aargh” appear in books over time.  They argue that this allows them to get a clear picture of what people are talking about at any particular point in time, and also trace the importance of a concept over time.  Jump down to the comments posted below the talk and you’ll see that a lot of people feel this is flawed theory because it ignores word context.  I’m not sure yet what I think, but I know I’m intrigued.

The cool thing is that Google liked the tool Michel and Lieberman Aiden have been using for data analysis so much, they made a version that’s available to all of us.  So now you can go in and do your own analysis, for any word that you like.  And you can see a sample of the books the word appears in.

Try it out, and see what you think.  Just “nerdy fun” or a useful tool for looking at how culture develops and changes?

Just as a side note, it’s possible Michel’s graphs for “awesome vs. practical” are the best graphs I’ve ever seen, and the quickest visual summary of how realistic an idea is.

 

One person’s experience with web publishing

A recent article on Inside Higher Ed describes one person’s experience with web publishing.

Professor Douglas Amy had written a new book, Government is Good – one that, he felt, would appeal to a broader market than his previously published academic books. He had difficulty, though, in finding a mainstream publisher. So, he decided to publish the book himself on the web.