Things I've been reading lately...

Scholarly Societies: Why Bother?

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 03:30 GMT

An interesting and provocative article in The Scientist by Steven Wiley iof the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, To Join or Not to Join.

The thrust of the article is that scholarly societies are having trouble offering true value to their members in the Internet age, that their business models and even their raisons d'etre are being disrupted.

In years past, the answer was easy because being a member came with tangible benefits, such as inexpensive journals and the ability to submit abstracts to annual meetings. Nowadays, these perks don't seem very important. Most society journals are freely available online [1], and the proliferation of scientific meetings has made it easier to find venues to present my current research. Thus, the frequency with which I ask that question--"should I bother?"--has steadily increased.

*snip*

Clearly, I am not the only scientist who is ambivalent about societies. Judging from their newsletters, many of the larger societies are struggling with stagnant or declining memberships, especially among young scientists. Although it is the youngest scientists who potentially have the most to gain from a scientific society because of networking opportunities, they are the ones who usually are most poorly served by those societies. This is because scientific societies generally cater to the status quo, not to the new and emerging elements of a field.

*snip*

Currently, many different fields in biology are undergoing a revolution in approach, driven by genomics, computationally intensive data analysis, and mathematical modeling. Once again, these new trends are being driven mostly by young scientists, who likely see the potential to make new discoveries and avoid competing with their elders. Not all scientific societies are embracing these changes, as evidenced by the relative absence of talks highlighting new approaches at their annual meetings and the dominance of their editorial boards by traditional scientists.

*snip*

If scientific societies truly want to promote their field of research and the careers of their members, then they should embrace new perspectives and approaches. If a society were helping me deal with the rapidly increasing rate of innovation and discovery in biology, then it would give me a great reason to bother remaining a member.
We live in interesting times. A lot of the posts I've done recently on scholarly publishing in computer science have really been about the role of scholarly and professional societies in a changing publishing and social networking landscape.

Here are some examples of those posts:

I don't have any answers about the future of scholarly and professional societies nor do I have any special insights on how they will change and evolve or perhaps even disappear.

But, not surprisingly, I do have some quesions.

Questions for all of you library and science people:

What societies do you belong to?(Me: Ontario Library Association & American Society for Engineering Education.)
What value do you get from your membership? (Me: I do appreciate the print magazines I get. I also attend their conferences with some regularity and I really appreciate those.)
Is how you're thinking about your membership and the society's role in your professional life changing? (Me: Not yet, but I can see it coming, especially if conference attendance becomes significantly more expensive.)
Do you think societies should be in the scholarly publishing business? (Yes, I do. Most societies are more-or-less on the side of the angels -- they want to promote scholarship and add value to their fields and treat their authors, members and subscribers fairly. We all just have to figure out the best way into the future.)

Questions for scholarly societies:

Does your society subsidize member programs with profits from it's publications program
What kind of outreach do you do to the next generation of scholars?
What do you tell them is the "value proposition" for joining your society?
Do you facilitate your members online networking and professional development?
What are your thoughts on an Open Access business model for scholarly society publishing?
Do your members often mumble your name under their breath with the words to the effect of "just don't get it" or "waste of money?"
Do librarians often mention your name in the same sentence as Elsevier?
Do you have a librarian advisory group to work on issues of mutual interest?
What's your biggest competition?

Better yet, if you are an administrator or officer at a society and want to answer some of these questions (and more) at greater length, drop me a line and we can set up an interview.

(Via Frank Norman.)

[1] I assume here the author really means that the societies' publications are available online without additional payment to members and people at subscribing institutions. Few societies have all their publications truly Open Access.

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Numbers

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:00 GMT

03/12/10 PHD comic: 'The Rising Cost of Public Higher Education'

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:48 GMT

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com

title: "The Rising Cost of Public Higher Education" - originally published 3/12/2010 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

Profile: Dryad : The Book of Trogool

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:18 GMT

U. of Chicago Press Joins JSTOR Program

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:00 GMT

The online journal archiving system JSTOR announced today that it has signed on the University of Chicago Press to its Current Scholarship Program — a project that aims to supplement JSTOR's deep repository of back issues from over a thousand journals. The idea behind the project, which is scheduled to open next year, is to help academic publishers leverage JSTOR’s connections to libraries in 145 countries in order to broaden their subscriber bases. Meanwhile, JSTOR will be able to increase its own appeal by advertising itself as a portal to current publications, not just back files. (The publishers would set the prices and collect the revenue from the subscriptions to current publications.) Chicago is the 11th university press to sign on to the project, joining the University of California Press, among others.

Profile: Dryad

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:03 GMT

We have a guestblogger today! At my request, Peggy Schaeffer kindly sent me the following introduction to Dryad, which I reproduce as I received it (save for minor formatting details).

I will happily pass any questions in the comments on to Peggy for response.

----

Dryad is a repository for data underlying scientific publications, with an initial focus on evolution, ecology, and related fields. It's not an institutional repository, or one focused on only a single type of data -- it's designed for the multitudes of data underlying published articles that would otherwise be scattered ineffectively, hard to find, or lost. Dryad enables researchers to archive their data at the time of publication, dedicate it to the public domain, and get a citable DOI for it. In so doing, Dryad promotes the discovery and reuse of data by others.

The Dryad repository model has these strengths:

all data is associated with a published article (this collection policy provides a qualitative measure and enables links between journal articles and their data)
data archiving is facilitated at the point of publication, when authors' motivation to share is strongest and the data are at hand
Dryad is governed and supported by a growing Consortium of major international journals and societies (see list here)
partner journals support a Joint Data Archiving Policy that requires data archiving at the point of publication
all types of data and formats are welcome; journals may specify standards appropriate for particular data types.
data submission is facilitated by Dryad's integration with the manuscript processing systems of its partner journals; authors publishing in these journals don't need to input bibliographic details
data submitted to Dryad will be also served to select specialized repositories (like GenBank), further reducing the burden on authors to submit data to multiple sites
all data is made freely available under the Creative Commons Zero waiver
data receive DataCite DOIs and receive an independent citation when they are reused
descriptive metadata will be automatically generated from the article and data content, allowing authors and curators to review & select proposed descriptors from multiple ontologies and thesauri. For more details, see the HIVE project page. Don't miss the nifty video.
Dryad plans to expose its contents through a variety of web standards, to enable metadata harvesting, remote queries, and linked-data applications.

Dryad allows future investigators to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose the data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, and perform synthetic studies such as formal meta-analyses.

The repository is being developed at the National Center for Evolutionary Synthesis, or NESCent, in collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information Science, and the Dryad Consortium of partner journals. A number of the partner journals have recently announced their intention to require data deposition in a publicly available archive as a condition of publication:

Whitlock, M. C., M. A. McPeek, M. D. Rausher, L. Rieseberg, and A. J. Moore. 2010. Data Archiving. American Naturalist. 175:145-146, doi:10.1086/650340
Rieseberg, L., T. Vines, and N. Kane. Editorial and retrospective 2010. Molecular Ecology. 19:1-22, doi:10.1111/j.1365-294X.2009.04450.x
Rausher, M. D., M. A. McPeek, A. J. Moore, L. Rieseberg, and M. C. Whitlock. Data Archiving. Evolution. doi:10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00940.x
Allen J. Moore, Mark A. McPeek, Mark D. Rausher, Loren Rieseberg, Michael C. Whitlock. The need for archiving data in evolutionary biology. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 2010 Published Online: Feb 9 2010. doi: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.01937.x
Uyenoyama, M. K. (2010). MBE editor's report. Mol Biol Evol, 27(3):742-743. doi: 10.1093/molbev/msp22

Dryad currently has a staff of about 7 (curator, repository architect, programmer, communications officer, etc.) led by

Project Director: Todd Vision, Associate Professor of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Associate Director for Informatics at NESCent
Jane Greenberg, Professor and Director, SILS Metadata Research Center School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Funding comes from the National Science Foundation, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has funded HIVE (Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering) a 3-year project that will enhance Dryad's metadata.

For more detailed information, including upcoming features, details of the metadata format, and other development plans, please see the Dryad website and the team Wiki. Also, you can follow Dryad's activities on the Dryad blog: http://blog.datadryad.org/ and Twitter: @datadryad.

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The Onion: Nation Shudders at Large Block of Uninterrupted Text

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:23 GMT

Nation Shudders at Large Block of Uninterrupted Text
"Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text...Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words."

Eat Well Live Well Team Leaders Guide

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:21 GMT

SPARC RELEASES NEW GUIDE TO EXPLORE CAMPUS-BASED OPEN-ACCESS FUNDS (SPARC)

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:00 GMT

Scholarometer: Browser Extension and Web Service for Academic Impact Analysis

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:28 GMT

Open-Access Journals Break Barriers to Academic Freedom - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 06:43 GMT

Clean Metrics from Quick and Dirty Assessment: "The SUS"

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 06:36 GMT

Embedding chat widgets within EBSCO databases - The Distant Librarian

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 02:49 GMT

Resources - Science Boot Camp 2010 - Subject Research Guides at University of Massachusetts Amherst

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:48 GMT

Cyberinfrastructure, Data, and Libraries, Part 1: A Cyberinfrastructure Primer for Librarians

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:43 GMT