Figshare for sharing academic papers with their datasets

Figshare seems to be gaining important in scholarly communication - here is a blogpost from a social scientist on how she uses it.


figshare is a repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner.

figshare allows users to upload any file format to be made visualisable in the browser so that figures, datasets, media, papers, posters, presentations and filesets can be disseminated in a way that the current scholarly publishing model does not allow.

Creative Destruction and Library Services

I came across this editorial in Issues in Science and TechnologyLibrarianship
Excerpt:
“ …..Reduced library visitorship due to the more desirable digital delivery of services and collections means that science librarians (among others) have to change their way of operating. For example, the recent emphasis on the creation of inviting spaces to attract users is probably not an effective long-term survival strategy. Think about it: What if the Department of Motor Vehicles' stated objective was to get as many people into their brick-and-mortar office as possible? What if bank executives instructed their branch managers to induce as many people to come into the bank as they could? Would these strategies actually improve service or outcomes?
The digital delivery of information means that librarians have to develop more direct-to-reader services. And because publishing infrastructure and standards are so well developed in science, it will be the science librarians who are first in this area. If we can't deliver content and services to our users in their offices and labs, then it is likely that someone else (e.g. Google and Amazon) will…”  

Research impact: Altmetrics make their mark

Alternative measures can yield useful data on achievement — but must be used cautiously.

Steve Pettifer and his colleagues did not heavily promote their 2008 paper on digital library tools. So it came as a surprise when, in August 2012, Pettifer got an e-mail from the Public Library of Science (PLOS), based in San Francisco, California. A PLOS representative told him that people had viewed or downloaded the article (D. Hull et al. PLoS Comput. Biol. 4, e1000204; 2008) more than 53,000 times. It was the most-accessed review ever to be published in any of the seven PLOS journals. The paper had come out just as biologists' interest in digital publishing was building and the number of tools was exploding, says Pettifer, a computer scientist at the University of Manchester, UK. “It hit the right note at the right time,” he says

A New Polemic: Libraries, MOOCs, and the Pedagogical Landscape

In Brief: The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) has emerged in the past few years as the poster child of the online higher education revolution.  Lauded and derided, MOOCs (depending on who you ask) represent the democratization of education on a global scale, an overblown trend, or the beginning of the end of the traditional academic institution. MOOCs have gained so much critical traction because they have succeeded in unmooring educational exchanges and setting them adrift in the sea of the internet.  Although the MOOC is a new and evolving platform, it has already upended facets of education in which librarians are heavily invested including intellectual property, digital preservation, and information delivery and curricular support models. Consequently, to examine the MOOC as a microcosm is also to explore how the scope of academic librarianship is changing and will continue to change. Librarians and information professionals—who serve as bibliographers, purchasing managers, access advocates, copyright and preservation experts, and digital pioneers on many campuses—are uniquely situated to mediate this disruption and to use this opportunity to develop strategies for navigating an environment in flux......
....Librarianship, which has undergone its fair share of ‘disruption’ in the past few decades, is a field that is (perhaps uniquely) primed for change. In the context of online instruction, librarians have new opportunities to expand the realm of their work. In practice, this may mean taking on more active roles as co-instructors and content creators, educating faculty about open access scholarship, authoring best practice guidelines for intellectual property management, facilitating intra and inter institutional networks, or developing a new controlled vocabularies and preservation protocols for archiving and repurposing MOOCs.   .....