Citing data

A few links on citing data in research:

• Why cite data?
• Why not cite data?
• Out of Cite, Out of Mind: The Current State of Practice, Policy, and Technology for the Citation of Data
• Harvard's Guide to Citing your Data.

Can tweets really predict citations?

In contrast with the article 'Can tweets predict citations' a recent study finds very little correlation between the number of tweets received by articles in the biomedical literature and later citation counts obtained from more traditional methods.
Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature

See also, Nature's article:
Twitter buzz about papers does not mean citations later

Information is Beautiful - 2013 awards

The Kantar Information is Beautiful site has posted its winners for 2013

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.

Social Media for Teaching & Learning - Pearson report 2013

Pearson has released its 2013 Social Media in Higher Education survey [free registration required]

Infographic

Open Access Week - Oct 21- 27 2013.

Open Access Week "a global event now entering its sixth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they've learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research."

Publishers participation:

• Oxford 
• SAGE 
• Taylor & Francis 

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

Open Access and Peer Review issues

John Bohannon, journalist at Science, sent a fake research paper under a fake name to several open access peer review journals. He reports on the experiment in Science: Who's Afraid of Peer Review  (INSEAD community only)

CREDIT: C. SMITH/SCIENCE

Unfortunately "Acceptance was the norm, not the exception. The paper was accepted by journals hosted by industry titans Sage and Elsevier. The paper was accepted by journals published by prestigious academic institutions such as Kobe University in Japan. It was accepted by scholarly society journals. It was even accepted by journals for which the paper's topic was utterly inappropriate, such as the Journal of Experimental & Clinical Assisted Reproduction."

Some critique the paper for lack if its own academic rigor in not using a control group of subscription based journals to compare the acceptance/rejection rate, read: 

Open Access “Sting” Reveals Deception, Missed Opportunities .

Update Oct. 8, 2013: Read more reactions here or here

edX+Google = mooc.org

A new alliance in the ever growing field of MOOCs was announced on the Google Research blog:
The platform mooc.org is set to go live in the first half of 2014.

Today, Google will begin working with edX as a contributor to the open source platform, Open edX. We are taking our learnings from Course Builder and applying them to Open edX to further innovate on an open source MOOC platform. We look forward to contributing to edX’s new site, MOOC.org, a new service for online learning which will allow any academic institution, business and individual to create and host online courses.

edX press release.