Content

In a collaborative application from the Indianapolis Public Library, the Indiana State Library, the IUPUI University Library, and the Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis has been selected to host the next DPLA Fest, April 17-18, 2015.  

DPLAfest 2015, a two-day public event set to coincide with DPLA’s second birthday, will bring together hundreds of people from DPLA’s large and growing community of librarians, archivists, and museum professionals, developers and technologists, publishers and authors, teachers and students, and members of the public for community-oriented public workshops, presentations, hackathons, engaging discussions with community leaders and practitioners, fun events, and more.

Finding government information can be challenging, even for those of us practiced in the task. Uncovering government data in a form that is easily usable can be even more difficult, graying the hair of many a social scientist.

Investigative Reporters & Editors had built an interface (census.ire.org) that facilitates locating and downloading data from the U.S. Census. Along with connecting users to Census data, the site provides concise descriptions of the geographical units over which the Census is measured. The project is supported by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University Of Missouri School Of Journalism.

Amy Rudersdorf, Assistant Director for Content at DPLA, will be presenting in Emily Gore’s stead at ILF in November 2014.

IUPUI's Faculty Council is currently considering the adoption of a campus-wide, opt-out open access policy. I think that's great news! If you're reading this on a screen, you should think it's great news too. Why? Because this is IUPUI; we do great work here--really. In addition to the second largest medical school in the United States, the IUPUI campus includes a lot of scholars with a passion for civic participation and community engagement. Here's a chance for us to honor those values and to give access to IUPUI's research and scholarship to any reader on the Internet. The good news is that this can be done at no cost to authors and while respecting academic freedom. For the details, read the policy: https://openaccess.iupui.edu/

If you're not familiar with the Harvard (2008) model open access policy, it's likely that you have some questions about how all this works. Such as: What about copyright? Will this hurt my favorite journal? Why not just use PubMed Central? (Tip: check the policy documentation--where the FAQs are succinctly answered.)

A working group of the Research Data Alliance has proposed a case statement to develop the BioSharing Repository into a registry. Admittedly, I wasn't clear about the distinction until I read through the report a couple of times. Now that I have a better understanding of what the working group is trying to accomplish, I am eager to see how this plays out and if it can adapted in other fields. Personally, I can attest to how hard it is to find relevant standards and repositories for a particular research project. There are simply too many to know and no good way to find the ones that you or your colleagues don't know.

On Tuesday, September 9^th I will be teaching a workshop on data visualization for the IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute, “Introduction to Data Visualization I: Visualization with Gephi.” For the uninitiated, Gephi is an open-source network visualization program. The tool is ideal for networks of any size. It offers a vast array of network analysis and visualization options, including geospatial layouts for data, statistical measures for social network analysis, and dynamic network visualization. Gephi handles a variety of data formats and allows the construction of datasets within the tool itself, perfect for those working with smaller amounts of data. Gephi runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.

At the beginning of this month the International Association of Science, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) released a suite of model licenses "for a variety of uses within open access publishing." If that sounds like reinventing the widely used Creative Commons, don't be suckered; it's far worse. Rather than merely wasting our time and trying our patience with superfluous model licenses, STM is promoting licenses that decrease the "commons" and stifle "creative" opportunity. While STM insists that the model licenses will "be complementary to Creative Commons licenses," these "complements" are restrictive in nature. Furthermore, three of the five models are "Full" licenses; only two were written to supplement other licenses.

Chemical Science, a journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), will become openly accessible to all beginning January 2015.  In addition, for two years the society will waive all articles processing charges (APCs) for authors.

Read more at the RSC Publishing Blog