1. Liberating Data: How libraries and librarians can help researchers with text and data mining.
With advances in computational methods and the proliferation of data sources, text and data mining offers exciting new directions for research. In their post in The Impact Blog, Neil Stewart, Jane Secker, Chris Morrison and Laurence Horton look at the role of libraries in providing support to researchers for these projects, particularly to help with rights issues and to digitise material for scholarly re-use. Librarians should be bold about the advice they give to researchers and encourage them to use the new copyright exceptions.
The blog post says (quote): TDM is generally performed on corpora of text or data in electronic form. For example, a body of chemistry research literature might be mined by running TDM software on it to discover then create a database of molecular structures, a valuable resource for molecular chemists, crystallographers and other scientists. Alternatively, to use an example from the Digital Humanities, a large body of newspapers from the Victorian era can be mined to extract jokes, which can be used to analyse aspects of Victorian culture and social history……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. Guest Post, Darrell Gunter: Accessibility Is The New Innovation
Recently, the Center for Publishing Innovation held a conference on Accessibility, with the goal of helping publishers, academic institutions and the general public understand the legal necessity and appreciate the great opportunity of making all forms of content accessible to everyone. Writing about the conference, Darrell Gunter in his guest post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, discusses the great opportunities available in making all forms of content accessible to everyone.
The blog post says (quote): The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires "equally effective communication" with people with or without disabilities. ADA Title II requires that all public and private schools, colleges, universities, and other educational content providers are required to make all their online offerings accessible. Per Ms. Hill's address she stated that, "schools must ensure that a student who is blind or has low vision acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted services with substantially equivalent ease of use." In June 2010, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights of the Department of Education wrote to college presidents throughout the country explaining that requiring the use of inaccessible emerging technologies in the classroom violates the ADA……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. Will Citation Distributions Reduce Impact Factor Abuses?
Publishing a histogram of a journal's citation distribution won't alleviate Impact Factor abuse. At best, it will be ignored. At worse, it will generate confusion, notes Phil Davis, in his post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog.
The blog post says (quote): If their primary complaint is about skewed distributions, then advocate for reporting median citation scores (understanding that it will result in a lot of ties, especially at the low end). If their issue is about the range of citation scores, report the Interquartile Range (IRQ). If their issue is about precision, then advocate for the reporting of the journal's quartile or percentile. Readers who routinely use citation indexes will understand that these metrics are already available, although almost universally ignored.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. The "Big Change" era in trade book publishing ended about four years ago
Book publishing is still very much in a time of changing conditions and circumstances. There are a host of unknowables about the next several years that affect the shape of the industry and the strategies of all the players in it. But as publishers, retailers, libraries, and their ecosystem partners prepare for whatever is next, it becomes increasingly evident that - from the perspective of trade publishing at least - we have already lived through the biggest period of transition, notes Mike Shatzkin, in The Shatzkin Files Blog.
The blog post says (quote): Coinciding with and enabled by all of this was the huge growth in author-initiated publishing. Amazon had bought CreateSpace, which gave them the ability to offer print-on-demand as well as Kindle ebooks. The combination meant that a huge audience could be reached through them without any help from anybody else. When agency happened (2010), they started to offer indie authors what amounted to agency terms: 70 percent of the selling price for ebooks. This was a multiple of the percentage an author would get through a publisher……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
5. The Altmetric Score is Now the Altmetric Attention Score
You're probably already familiar with the Altmetric score (that handy number seen inside an Altmetric "donut"). The score is a weighted count of all of the mentions Altmetric has tracked for an individual research output, and is designed as an indicator of the amount and reach of the attention an item has received. Guest author Cat Williams, in her post in the Digital Science Blog, discusses Altmetric score as it gets a new name - Altmetric Attention Score.
The blog post says (quote): We'd always advise that you use the score only as a very preliminary indicator of the amount of attention an item has received. It can help you identify where there are 'mentions' that would be worth digging into, and signifies where an item has achieved a high level of engagement. In CVs, performance reviews or grant applications, it might be useful to provide information. At the institutional level attention score makes it easy to identify where there is a lot of activity taking place - to help find influencers or departments that are doing a particularly good job of communicating their research more broadly, or where they may need support from a scholarly communications office or similar……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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