As I write this, Open Access week is still many months away. But it never hurts to plan ahead right? Sure you could organize talks to promote open access but why not switch it up and try to educate users with a fun interactive game?

I was recently invited to the Changing Landscape of Science and Technology Libraries (CLSTL) 2019 conference. This would have been my second time speaking there but unfortunately due to personal reasons I had to give it a miss. Still I contributed a recorded talk for the event . My talk was about how compared to a decade ago,  the tons of Scholarly metadata that is now freely and openly available to be leveraged by API.

There is something in the air right now around datasets. Increasingly, datasets are being made visible and shared online in data repositories. Undoubtedly getting researchers to deposit their datasets whether open or even closed to data repositories is a difficult task, but once that is achieved the next challenge lies with making the datasets discoverable.

Note : Jan 2019 - I wrote the bulk of this in July 2018, when Scopus announced a deal with Unpaywall.

Historical note : This was written before the launch of APA 7. Some of the specific examples about APA 6 like the need to add place of publication no longer hold for APA 7, but the general arguments in this essay do not hinge on any specifics. People outside academia are often struck by how odd things are in academia.

I was recently invited to the OCLC Asia Pacific Regional Conference Meeting 2018 in Bangkok to speak. The conference had the theme "Game Changer" and I gave my thoughts on how I see the game changing for libraries in the years to come. For the past 2-3 years, I have been blogging on various trends and technologies like  analytics, open citations, open data, linked data,

I expect that most readers of this blog are familar with  Lorcan Dempsey's idea of distinguishing between  "outside-in" vs "inside-out" activities for libraries.  I have argued that with open access gaining ground, the traditional role of academic librarians where they own or acquire access to books and journal articles for their community (the outside-in approach) is likely to decline in importance.

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It's not big secret that Machine learning and AI is an increasingly important topic to study. But I was again reminded of this again when I recently attended a talk on Microsoft Academic , entitled "What Can We Expect from Machine Cognition " The talk began simply enough, recapping some of the latest triumphs by AI in conquering games like Go and Video games like DOTA, Pacman.

As the battle for open access , or more accurately the route taken to open access rages on, I have become aware of the rise of a new type of "open" - the quest for "open infrastructure". My understanding of it is very limited, but I first seriously took note of it when I saw people tweeting about the Joint Roadmap for Open Science Tools (JROST). One of the reasons why open access is in such a mess is because we have given up the

I have been recently thinking about dataset discovery, most recently on the possible impact of Google Dataset search.  One of the areas I've been investigating is the linkage between the article and the associate dataset. In particular, one of the more eye catching areas where this link appears is in Scopus, where there is a "related research data" link section.