Open access is a complicated business. Everytime I think I understand it (and I've blogged a lot on it, trying too get to gripes with it - in particular this post), some new nuance appears to make me realize I don't really understand at all. In this case, my mind was blown when I learnt that there was wall of shame for posting preprints on Bioarxiv! But let's back up a bit and talk a bit about preprints first.
In the heyday of Web Scale Discovery (2009 to the early to mid 2010s), library discovery was a big issue that was front and center in our profession's sights.
4 years ago in 2014, I wrote about the coming disruption to academic libraries due to Open Access.
I've been reading up lately about the idea of making research reproducible and replicable.
2018 appears to be the year of the voice assistants and smart speakers.
Update 2023: Since I wrote this, Knowtro was discontinued. The closest tool I know of that is similar is System Pro, though as of time of writing (May 2023) it extracts only from PubMed. Another tool that can create a research matrix of papers with preset and even custom variables is Elict.org.
This is a roundup post of some new services , tools and odds and ends that I could not fit into other posts.
Recently, someone reached out to me and asked me if I had a list of academic libraries that chose not to go with their own branded discovery services.
When I first came to my current institution, I remember meeting a faculty who kindly explained to me how he worked and what struck me was how unimportant journal articles and how important relatively speaking datasets were to him .
The "inside-out library" was a concept coined by Lorcan Dempsey as an interesting way to capture the change in the function of libraries today.
Life and libraries is always changing and evolving. A lot of our standard practices date back decades, but as the environment changes, we librarians should always consider if our tools or practices are in the need of a change or if they can be reused to tackle the same problem in a different form. I've recently being inspired by the arguments and evidence from various blog