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

9 Useful Educational Tools

Ned Potter is an Academic Liaison Librarian at the University of York and has created this great Prezi to suggest 9 educational tools to be used in research or teaching by academic (including Prezi itself).

Read the full article from the LSE blog

THE Global Gender Index

Read the Times Higher Education article on THE Global Gender Index done in conjunction with Thomson Reuters.

From THE article

Questionable or Predatory Open Access Journals

As of January 2017, J. Beall has shut down his blog.

A few recent articles around a growing number of 'predatory' open access journals.

• Beall's List: Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals(University of Colorado Denver, librarian)
• Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too) (New York Times article, April 7, 2013)
• Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing The explosion in open-access publishing has fueled the rise of questionable operators (Nature 495, 433–435, 28 March 2013)

Google updates its Transparency Report

The latest update reveals more government removal requests than ever before.
From the official blog post:

"...for the seventh time, we’re releasing new numbers showing requests from governments to remove content from our services. From July to December 2012, we received 2,285 government requests to remove 24,179 pieces of content—an increase from the 1,811 requests to remove 18,070 pieces of content that we received during the first half of 2012."

Google Transparency Report

MIT Tech. Review lists 10 Breakthrough Technologies in 2013

MIT 10 Breakthrough Technologies in 2013

"Think of the most frustrating, intractable, or simply annoying problems you can imagine. Now think about what technology is doing to fix them. That’s what we did in coming up with our annual list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. "

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.

Elsevier buys Mendeley

While acknowledging Elsevier's recurrent issues in Academia the Mendeley team gives the reason behind the deal.

Press Release from Mendeley.

Press Release from Elsevier.

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

From Academia to Society: the Commercialization of Research

Science article: The Many Ways of Making Academic Research Pay Off

Research universities are under growing pressure to play a more active, entrepreneurial role in commercial innovation. They increasingly regard tech transfer as a prerequisite for luring top faculty members and students, raising research funds, and potentially cashing in on lucrative inventions. But efforts to turn universities into commercial hothouses often don't succeed: Many advise schools to focus instead on "knowledge transfer"—helping society benefit from the discoveries and skills of faculty members and students without focusing just on finances. 

Science,15 Feb. 2013,vol 339, issue 6121.