The first month in Berkeley – and with that also with Open Humans – is slowly coming to an end. And while much of this time was spent wrangling various forms of organisational and bureaucratic ordeals (finding an apartment; making sure all visa stuff is in order; getting a Social Security Number;

Die Ausgabe #33 der LIBREAS. Library Ideas wird den Schwerpunkt “Ortstermin. Reportagen aus der tatsächlichen Bibliotheksarbeit” haben.

nnVor knapp einem Jahr klagten Wissenschaftler der Universität Konstanz gegen die Open-Access-Satzung ihrer Hochschule.

Ein Ziel des LIBREAS. Verein zur Förderung der bibliotheks- und informationswissenschaftlichen Kommunikation ist genau das: Die Kommunikation im Feld der (vor allem deutschsprachigen) Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaft und des Bibliothekswesens auf unterschiedliche Weise zu fördern. Dies geschieht vor allem durch die Publikation der Zeitschrift LIBREAS. Library Ideas und auf anderen von der Redaktion genutzten Kanälen.

In this final post about the IDRC data sharing pilot project I want to close the story that started with an epic rant a few months ago. To recap, I had data from the project that I wanted to deposit in Zenodo. Ideally I would have found an example of doing this well, organised my data files in a similar way, zipped up a set of directories with a structured manifest or catalogue in a recognised format and job done.

One of the things I wanted to do with the IDRC Data Sharing Pilot Project that we’ve just published was to try and demonstrate some best practice. This became more important as the project progressed and our focus on culture change developed. As I came to understand more deeply how much this process was one of showing by doing, for all parties, it became clear how crucial it was to make a best effort. This turns out to be pretty hard.

nnHere is a short publication notice: One year after publication in German, an anthology edited by Peter Weingart and Niels Taubert has now also been published in English – “The Future of Scholarly Publishing: Open Access and the Economics of Digitisation”.nn nnThe bibliographic data of the book which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence are:nn Weingart, P., & Taubert.

Open Access week is a fitting time to be finalising a project on Open Data. About two years ago I started working with the Canadian development funder, the International Development Research Center, to look at the implementation of Open Data policy. This week the final report for that project is being published. Everyone, it seems agrees that opening up research data is a good thing, at least in the abstract.

nnNot only the The Jussieu Call for Open Science and Bibliodiversity but also the European Union as a research funder seems to be paying attention to the problem of the commercialisation of Gold Open Access.nnAs OpenAire has posted the EU published a Call for proposals for Alternative Funding Mechanism for non-author fee based Open Access Publishing.

After having had some time to reflect on my writing process I’d like to share some of the things that I found useful during the writing of my PhD thesis. There’s probably already a million of these articles out there, but this also means that one more shouldn’t make much of a difference, so here we go. In principle this should all be applicable for other thesis writings as well.