Open access myths – on both sides of the fence

Michael Geist points to a Globe and Mail article about the open access movement. I would have liked more from the interview with University of Toronto’s head librarian – the two words about subscription costs (“It’s alarming”) probably distill a 20 minute conversation -  but it is good to see this in the popular press. [...]

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Reluctant academic bloggers

For her first post to the new University of Alberta law blog, Barbara Billingsley expresses skepticism about academic blogging. I’d like to change her mind.
Here’s her worry:
I have concerns about the notion that blogging will soon become the choice method of academic communication, or, worse yet, the notion that blogging ought to replace traditional forms [...]

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CBC.ca redesign redux: Now (almost) with CBC Aboriginal!

Responding to my post, How to hack the new CBC website, Netvibes sent me an email indicating they’ve created a page full of CBC feed content. Subscribers can personalize it as they wish.

www.netvibes.com/cbc

You can do much the same thing with iGoogle.
Reaction to the redesign in the blogosphere has been tepid but illuminating. So far, [...]

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Finding stuff in open access repositories

In an earlier post, I said that centralized, national repositories like PubMed Central perform the important service of making scholarship easier to find. I neglected to mention and recommend two resources that allow researchers to search sets of open access repositories. Both of these use the Google Custom Search Engine, which limits the scope of [...]

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What’s wrong with PubMed Central?

There is some modest political debate behind the scenes about whether or not Canada should have the equivalent of PubMed Central, an open access repository for peer-reviewed biomedical science publications. The UK has already done so with UK PubMed Central.
Enter Steven Harnard, whose post to American Scientist Open Access Forum was picked up by the [...]

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