Top Non-Fiction Books: a consensus cloud

From Information is Beautiful, another visualization of top non-fiction titles from various sources

Non-Fiction Books everyone should read:

See Novels everyone should read.

Librarians and Impact

Elsevier's infographic "tells the story of how librarians are working with researchers and the research office to measure research impact and to explore the application of these measurements"

See more 

Journal Subscription Costs

Cambridge mathematician Tim Gowers who had launched the 2012 Elsevier boycott movement digs deeper into the publishing giant business practices and the various ways it charges universities and schools . 

Read his entire blog entry: Elsevier journals — some facts

Source: http://neurodojo.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/cost-of-elsevier-journals-by-university.html 

Google Scholar Library

A new initiative from Scholar:

"Google Scholar library is your personal collection of articles. You can save articles right off the search page, organize them by topic, and use the power of Scholar search to quickly find just the one you want "

Read this page detailed help to get started.
This could potentially become a threat to free citation management software such as Zotero and Mendeley as mentioned in a post from 'The Distant Librarian' .

Google Book Scanning Project is Fair!

Big success for the Google Book project and the libraries involved in this initiative. Yesterday a judge ruled that the project did not break any fair use regulations and dismissed the lawsuit.

Access full text of the ruling here, thanks to Karen Coyle's blog entry.

HBR's fee policy questioned

Found on Flickr - CC

Joshua Gans, chaired professor at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto questions whether changes to Harvard Business Review article fee policy should impact their participation to the FT's business school rankings.

While this is a long shot - FT has already said that they would keep HBR on the list of publications used for their ranking - the article raises good questions about access to research content.

Links to his original post, his article in FT and HBR's answer are available from his Digitopoly blog.

Update: Librarians chime in via Chris Flegg's [Bodleian Business Librarian at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford] article in the Financial Times (Oct. 23, 2013):
Access to research comes at a price

Registry of Research Data Repositories lauched

"The goal of re3data.org is to create a global registry of research data repositories. The registry will cover research data repositories from different academic disciplines. re3data.org will present repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions. In the course of this mission re3data.org aims to promote a culture of sharing, increased access and better visibility of research data."

 

UK Survey of Academics

In partnership with the US Ithaka Survey of Academics, JISC and Research Libraries UK, the UK Survey of Academics 2012 has recently been released.

Starting point for research

The National Digital Public Library is now live

Launched on April 18, 2013 the Digital Public Library of America aims to "make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge" .

This ambitious and long time in the making project (see this post), is discussed at length by Robert Darnton, main leader of the initiative and Professor and University Librarian at Harvard, in this NY Review of Books article.

Faculty Survey on Research & Teaching Practices

The Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey focused on research and teaching practices broadly, as well as the dissemination, collecting, discovery, and access, of research and teaching materials.

Download PDF Report

Major topics covered by the survey include:

• Research processes
• Teaching practices: 
• Scholarly communications:
• The library: 
• Scholarly societies

Ebook Trends in 2013

E book prices continue to fall:

In the past few months, pricing of ebooks and issues of competition are coming into sharper focus. Changes are coming much faster in the publishing world today—prices for titles are dropping and we are seeing the development of new models and channels for publishing, distribution, and sales.

Read full article by N. K. Herther.

Taken from http://goo.gl/D0QAY   

170 billion tweets archived

The Library of Congress has "an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets and growing. The volume of tweets the Library receives each day has grown from 140 million beginning in February 2011 to nearly half a billion tweets each day as of October 2012."

Click to view a a white paper [PDF] that summarizes the Library’s work to date and outlines present-day progress and challenges.

American Publishers and Google reach an agreement

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Google announced a settlement agreement that will provide access to publishers' in-copyright books and journals digitized by Google for its Google Library Project. The dismissal of the lawsuit will end seven years of litigation.

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Researchers of Tomorrow

Researchers of Tomorrow is the UK’s largest study to date on the research behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students (born between 1982 and 1994). JISC and the British Library jointly commissioned the three year study in 2009, which involved 17,000 doctoral students from 70 universities at various stages in the project.

  

Top 10 journals in Management, Finance & Economics

The latest edition (2011) of the Journal Citation Reports has just been released. Academics can use this tool to rank several journals in different disciplines according to various fields such as Total Cites, Immediacy Index, Impact Factor and more.
Top 10 Journals in Management by Impact Factor

1. Academy of management review
2. Academy of Management Journal
3. Academy of Management Learning & Education
4. Journal of  Management
5. Academy of Management Annals
6. MIS Quarterly
7. Journal of Operation Management
8. Organization Science
9. Journal of Applied Psychology
10. Journal of Management Studies

Top 10 Journals in Finance by Impact Factor

1. Review of Financial Studies
2. Journal of  Finance
3. Journal of Financial Economics
4. Journal Accounting & Economics
5. Accounting  Organizations and Society
6. Journal of Banking and Finance
7. Accounting Review
8. Journal of Accounting Research
9. IMF Economic Review
10. Review of  Accounting Studies

Top 10 Journals in Economics by Impact Factor

1. Journal of Economic Literature
2. Quarterly Journal of Economics
3. Review of Financial Studies
4. Journal of  Finance
5. Journal of Economic Perspectives
6. Economic Geography
7. American Economic Journal-Macroeconomics
8. Journal of Financial Economics
9. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity
10. Journal Accounting & Economics

The Journal Impact Factor is defined as the number of citations in 2011 to items published in the previous two years, divided by the total number of items published in those same two years. 

For more categories and variables INSEAD users can login here.
Note: once on the platform, Business, Management, Finance, Economics and Psychology related fields are within the Social Sciences Edition -- Operations Research & Management is within the Science Edition.

Elsevier under fire...again -- Updated

Update February 28, 2012:

• In a press release, Elsevier announces that it withdraws its support for the Research Work Act (a bill that was threatening open public access of federally funded research).
• In parallel it has announced to the Mathematics research community that it would reduce the price of access to articles in its math journals to no more than $11 per article and that it would make the articles in “14 core mathematics journals” free to the public four years after they are first published

This Inside HigherEd article also mentions that hours after Elsevier pulled out of the RWA, lawmakers killed the bill entirely.

---

This time the action comes from University of Cambrige mathematician Tim Gowers (Fields Medal winner in 1998) Here is his entire blog post: Elsevier — my part in its downfall

I am not only going to refuse to have anything to do with Elsevier journals from now on, but I am saying so publicly.

His call has been answered and a public website The Cost of Knowledge has already received over a thousand signatures from researchers all over the world.

Academics have protested against Elsevier's business practices for years with little effect. The main objections are these:

They charge exorbitantly high prices for their journals.

They sell journals in very large "bundles," so libraries must buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all. Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting their essential titles, at the expense of other journals.

They support measures such as SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information.

Rent an Article!

Cambridge Journals has announced an article rental offer providing "Low-cost access to peer-reviewed research papers from leading academic journals"

Article Rental is open to anyone, anywhere in the world no subscription to any Cambridge title is required.

After registering on the site users may purchase articles online for just €4.49, $5.99 or £3.99 for a 24h access only. The PDF files cannot be downloaded, printed, or cut-and-pasted.

Authors sue the HathiTrust

The HathiTrust is an initiative from a variety of academic institutions to 'build a reliable and increasingly comprehensive digital archive of library materials'.

On September 12, the Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois (UNEQ), and eight individual authors filed a law suit against HathiTrust, the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University for copyright infringement. 

This page has the legal documents and various reactions to that lawsuit.

Hacking the Academy

Hacking the Academy, a book crowdsourced in one week

In May 2010 the two authors Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt asked online:

Can an algorithm edit a journal? Can a library exist without books? Can students build and manage their own learning management platforms? Can a conference be held without a program? Can Twitter replace a scholarly society?

They picked the best submissions (over 300 received in one week) and posted the volume online. Click here for more about the methodology. This initiative comes from the University of Michigan Digital Culture project.

Here are some shortcuts to the main chapters:

• Hacking Scholarship
• Hacking Teaching
• Hacking Institutions

Google Scholar Citations

Google's answer to ResearcherID?

We use a statistical model based on author names, bibliographic data, and article content to group articles likely written by the same author. You can quickly identify your articles using these groups. After you identify your articles, we collect citations to them, graph these citations over time, and compute your citation metrics.

Full Google announcement - Help & FAQ page
Sample pages:Albert Einstein, Margaret Mead, Alonzo Church

This is still in development and open only to a small number of users. You can still sign up to be notified when the service is open to all.