Month: January 2013
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The growing monopoly of academic IP by Elsevier
Just a quick post. I happened to see @wisealic Tweet about her “new Atira/Pure colleagues” yesterday. I didn’t know what Atira was, but I’d heard of PURE. I googled it to find out more… and soon found the official Elsevier press release , dated August 15, 2012 (so this isn’t really new news). But combined with recent rumours…
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The Ecological Society of America wants ‘input’ on Open Access
The Ecological Society of America (ESA) would like your input on how to expand access to their publications and what they should do if *gasp* the USA also mandates some form of public or open access …like the rest of the world seems to be doing at the moment. The official call is here in this…
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My submission for the House of Lords inquiry
Here’s my submission for the House of Lords inquiry. I rather ran out of steam writing it so you’ll see it tails off towards the end. There’s probably loads of things I should mention too. But alas, I have lots of other work to be getting on with right now. Ironically, I highlight the excellent…
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From card catalogs to computers: databases in vertebrate paleontology
Anyone who knows me, knows I’m very passionate on the subject of data sharing in science, and after all the relevant conferences I’ve been to and research I’ve done – I don’t mind saying I’m fairly knowledgeable on the subject too. It’s part of the reason I got this Panton Fellowship that has helped me…
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Twitter tips for Systematists
I wrote a piece for The Systematist newsletter last year which has now been published & disseminated to members. The official version won’t be freely accessible from the website until next year (instant access is currently a perk of Systematics Association membership only) so in the meantime I’ll re-blog it here: Is this the first…
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PDF metadata: different tool, same story
So a week ago, I investigated publisher-produced Version of Record PDFs with pdfinfo and the results were very disappointing. Lots of missing metadata was found and one could not reliably identify most of these PDFs from metadata alone, let alone extract particular fields of interest. But Rod Page kindly alerted to me the fact that…