Expediente Divulga-CI – Revista de Divulgação Científica em Ciência da Informação Volume 2, Número 8 – Agosto de 2024. Editada em julho de 2024. Última edição em agosto de 2024. Publicada em 15 de julho de 2024.

Ob Wissenschaft oder Popkultur – Zitate sind überall! Wie regelt das Urheberrecht Zitate und worauf muss man beim Zitieren achten? Alles Wichtige zum Zitatrecht in diesem Text. Im privaten und professionellen Alltag sind wir permanent mit den Äußerungen anderer Personen konfrontiert. Dies umso mehr seit Voranschreiten der Digitalisierung, etwa in den Sozialen Medien, auf YouTube, in journalistischen oder wissenschaftlichen Texten.

Research England has dropped the mandate for OA books in its guidance for the next REF, saying that it will, now, apply instead by 2029. It is hard to see, given the extensive trailing of this mandate, what will be different by 2029. We seem stuck in a doom loop whereby RE announces its policy decisions years in advance, but far from enough people systematically try to implement them until the last minute, by which time they say it was too late.

Kasabi was an innovative RDF publishing platform from around 2011. Shortlived, and maybe just too early. I published two open datasets there. One was ChEMBL-RDF (see these posts). The second was a small data sets called ChemPedia, a open science effort to crowdsource chemical names. This is still very much needed, and possibly Wikidata could fill that gap, but it would first need to be able to handle all labels as statements itself.

I jumped ship from Twitter following the Musk takeover in 2022. Seeking an alternative, I joined Mastodon and didn’t look back. Since then, I’ve enjoyed many wonderful interactions and conversations; and I feel a bit sad at what Twitter turned into.

Our community and tools rely on high-quality DOI metadata for building connections and obtaining efficiencies. However, the current model - where improvements to this metadata are limited to its creators or done within service-level silos - perpetuates a system of large-scale gaps, inefficiency, and disconnection. It doesn’t have to be this way.

This post is inspired by the Pharaoh exhibition at the NGV in Melbourne, Australia. This is a beautifully displayed exhibition of objects from the British Museum, London. It has all the trappings of a modern exhibition, beautiful lighting, a custom sound track, and lots of social media coverage. But I found it immensely frustrating to visit.

The world is full of wonderful animals, both extant and extinct, and they all have names. As a result, it’s fairly common for newly named animals to be given names already in use — as for example with the giant Miocene sperm whale “ Leviathan “ (now Livyatan ). BUt there are ways to avoid walking into this problem, and in a helpful post on the Dinosaur Mailing Group, Ben Creisler recently posted a summary.

I want to take another step back in perspective from the last post to say a few words about what the radial acceleration relation (RAR) means and what it doesn’t mean. Here it is again: This information was not available when the dark matter paradigm was developed. We observed excess motion, like flat rotation curves, and inferred the existence of extra mass. That was perfectly reasonable given the information available at the time.

Last time we talked about the evident hijacking of the PalArch Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. No-one seemed to know what had happened or how. I managed to track down Andre J. Veldmeijer, who was involved with the PalArch journals a while back. Based on my Facebook Messenger discussions with him, here’s what we now know: Andre is not involved any more with these journals.