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I use Zotero a lot, but not as much as some. For those of you out there who find your 300 MB of free file storage dwindling, connecting Zotero to a cloud storage service via its file sync feature is a great way to avoid paying Zotero for additional storage. The solution detailed in this post uses Box. If you don’t have an account with Box through your institution, then you can sign up for a personal account, which provides 10 GB of file storage.

Once you have set up your account with Box, you will need to install Box Sync on your machine. Login to your Box account. Click on your profile name in the upper right hand corner and select Get Box Sync:

As Sunshine Week comes to a close, I cannot help but think about the similarities between open access to scholarly information and the push for increased transparency in our government. I am certainly not the first person to draw parallels between the two, but the conversion usually focuses on public access plans for federally-funded research, such as those required by the NSF and the NIH. The similarities I see run deeper than funding agency mandates.

For those unfamiliar with Sunshine Week, it is a non-partisan effort that seeks to improve the lives of individuals and strengthen communities through increasing access to government information. This is a goal that I am sure many of us in academia find laudable, but what about access to our own scholarship? Surely people stand to benefit from access to this scholarship in many of the same ways that they benefit from open access to government information.

The new Journal of Brief Ideas is publishing scientific "articles" which are short statements of 200 words or less.  The journal was created to provide a place for brief scientific ideas to be "archived, searchable and citable".

http://www.nature.com/news/journal-publishes-200-word-papers-1.16925

Like many faculty across campus, I am in the process of completing my FAR (faculty annual review). This product is something created solely for university purposes and only slightly overlaps with my personal process for reflecting on the previous year and planning for the next. I'm going to skip past the criticisms of the system to get to my point - that this process exists to help us improve. Most of the year, I rush from deadline to deadline, rarely meeting or exceeding my own expectations in this frantic pursuit of accomplishment. Last year in particular, this feeling was prevalent. Looking back, I am proud of what I accomplished but not of the path I chose to get there. This year, I resolve to do better, to achieve a better balance of work, home, and social life. These are some of the things that have inspired me and tools I will be trying out. I hope these are helpful for those of you who, like me, are not entirely satisfied with how your life progressed in 2014.

Like many others I’ve fallen into the rabbit hole that is Serial.  For those not yet hooked, it’s a spinoff of NPR’s This American Life.  A real life who-done-it or perhaps better, a real life are-we-sure-the-State’s-case-proves-that-the-guy-who got convicted-actually-done-it. Serial’s creators describe the podcast as, “we’ll follow a plot and characters wherever they take us. And we won’t know what happens at the end til we get there.” Its first season presents a riveting 12-episodes that examine past and new evidence for the now 15 year-old murder trial of Adnan Syed, with some of the new “evidence” surfacing only as a result of the podcast.

Ever wondered what the top 10 cited academic articles of all time look like?  How about the top 100?

A study (Van Noorden et al.) investigated this very topic using citation data provided by Thomson Reuters.  According to their analysis, the top cited paper of all time is an article on protein research written in 1951 and has been cited 305,000 times.  The second most cited article also focused on protein research and received about 200,000 citations.  To make it into the top 10 cited articles, one needs about 40,000 citations… the top 100, about 12,000.

On the other side of the spectrum, about half of all articles indexed by Thomson Reuters have been cited 1 or 0 times.

Want to increase your citation rates?  Deposit your  publications into IUPUI Scholarworks, IUPUI’s institutional repository.  Articles placed in institutional repositories are more likely to be read as well as cited.

Perhaps the reality of inhabiting a structure for which the assembly of requires “minimal formal skill or training” would be less than ideal. Nonetheless, the WikiHouse project is one of my favorite examples of something made available under a creative commons license. Part of why I find this project so intriguing is its potential as a unique entry point for talking to people about open-access and the creative commons. The ubiquity of makerspaces are proof, people love this kind of stuff. Imagine teaching a classroom full of students about open access publications they can use for their research and digital media they are free to use in their projects, all while they sit on open-source stools. This scenario could demonstrate to students, in a very tangible way, the power of creating something and sharing it openly under a creative commons license.

-TP

My last post examined a tool for exploring current Census data and exporting it in an easy to use format. Now what about historical Census data? Not the data from a few decades ago – we’re talking about the really old stuff.  Finding this type of historical Census data is notoriously difficult, more so than finding new data. Sifting through the Decennial Censuses that have been digitized is overwhelming for your average library user. Propriety services that offer access to some historical census data with added value, such as GeoLytics, are typically expensive and not always chronologically comprehensive. Fortunately for us, as is often the case, libraries fill the void between the unpolished raw data and the propriety systems that add costly value to this data.

The University of Virginia Library’s Historical Census Browser offers a way to interact with data from the U.S. Decennial Census 1790 to 1960. The original source of the data is the U.S. Census Bureau and was then compiled in an electronic format by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), available here. The Historical Census Browser provides a nice way for your average library user to interact with this data. Users can build queries and generate tables to answer specific questions. The tool even provides a basic mapping function for one variable at the state level. Unfortunately, the tool does not provide a way to export the data. For users keen to manipulate this data, there is an extension for Google Chrome, DataMiner, which allows content to be scraped from web pages and converted into spreadsheets.

It would be great to see more libraries offering services similar to the Historical Census Browswer, built on publicly-available data and shared widely. After all, if the data are freely available, why should libraries pay gobs of money for proprietary services that add minimal value?

We are pleased to announce another step forward for open access at IUPUI.

Yesterday afternoon the IUPUI Faculty Council passed a campus-wide open access policy based on the Harvard opt-out model. This policy is an outcome of several years of persistent and creative work at IUPUI.

The policy will be implemented by IUPUI University Library Center for Digital Scholarship with support from subject liaison librarians as well as all four of our campus libraries. IUPUI's campus includes 17 schools, including the second largest medical school in the United States. This policy will increase access to a wide-range of important scholarship authored on the IUPUI campus.

The policy, which passed “unanimously,” is available from the IUPUI Faculty Council website in draft form as it was approved.

A core multidisciplinary science journal, Nature Communications, is set to become fully open access on October 20, 2014.   Read more here.

This is just in time for Open Access Week, October 20-26!