Bridging the gap between academia and Wikipedia

Jisc and Wikimedia UK are collaborating on a project to bring the academic world and Wikipedia closer together. This will create opportunities for researchers, educators, and the general public to contribute to the world's freely available knowledge.

Librarians' Views of Academic Library Support for Scholarly Publishing: An Every-day Perspective

 Some of the topics discussed in the article: (from J of academic librarianship)

• How do academic librarians perceive their role in relation to the research community in their everyday work? 
• How is it possible to make academic librarians active in the processes surrounding academic research
• more integrated view of the different parts of the university in that researchers and non-academic staff are tied closer to each other
• academic libraries ... today are expected to take a larger responsibility for the publication output of the university, primarily through the establishment and support of open institutional archives and Open Access journals. In keeping these archives, insight and participation in the scholarly processes are required in order to keep researchers aware of the opportunities offered by the university library to make research results public through internal, open channels.
• a gap between attitudes and action, where positive attitudes about Open Access are confronted by the rigidity of the university system and its library practice.
• basic tension between the traditional “reactive” academic librarian and the “proactive” librarian expected to meet contemporary demands
• the importance of the pedagogical discourse that has dominated academic libraries for the last decade is now decreasing. Instead a combination of traditional bibliographic work and development of engagement in researchers' publication strategies is emerging. Even though there are several ways of looking at the practical solutions for the library's engagement in digital repository development and Open Access publishing, there is a clear sense that this will be of increasing significance for academic libraries in years to come.
• increasing importance of bibliometric research evaluation indicators both locally and nationally is felt to be a factor which will influence both the position of academic libraries in organizational settings and the practical work for librarians, not least in relation to the digital institutional repositories, where bibliographic records must be developed and maintained.
• With new prerequisites for scholarly publication through peer-reviewed Open Access journals and institutionally based digital repositories, academic librarians now feel that there are opportunities emerging both in relation to the individual researchers, research groups and to the universities as a whole. Turning focus from information seeking tutorials towards publication support and strategy formulation makes the academic libraries, also at relatively small universities as those in this study, active parts of the development in scholarly knowledge production.

Guardian Tech Weekly Podcast: Victor Henning on the future of Mendeley

Tech Weekly Podcast: Victor Henning on the future of Mendeley

This week Charles Arthur meets Victor Henning co-founder and CEO of Mendeley the academic and research focused online network. Mendeley was recently purchased by the publisher of the Lancet, Reed Elsevier and Victor discusses the advantages offered by the historic science publisher for Mendeley the online upstart.

Handbook of Academic Writing for Librarians

ACRL announces the publication of Handbook of Academic Writing for Librarians, written by Christopher V. Hollister of the University at Buffalo.

 

 

The Handbook of Academic Writing for Librarians is the most complete reference source available for librarians who need or desire to publish in the professional literature. The handbook addresses issues and requirements of scholarly writing and publishing in a start-to-finish manner. Standard formats of scholarly writing are addressed: research papers, articles, and books. 

More news about Google Glass

Google Glass apps for enterprises coming by early 2014

A company that specializes in Google apps is developing a series of enterprise applications for Google Glass that should be available late this year or early 2014.