socialscience@web2.0

The last post has prompted some more, unformed but interesting thoughts about the ways in which the pressures of open-access publishing are re-shaping academic publications. UCL have recently introduced an ‘e-prints’ scheme, which aims to provide free, pre-publication copies of papers by UCL academics. Similarly, a number of researchers have taken to circumventing the firewalls of closed academic journal publishing by making pre-publication copies available online. Given that many of these papers turn up on Google Scholar, increasingly the main way of searching for papers, it is not inconceivable that they will achieve a much greater circulation than the actual published paper. While I’m in favour of open-access publishing, the ‘halfway house’ provided by publishing research articles in less than finished form seems to raise as many questions as it solves. If these papers are suitable for dissemination by the university, what then is the purpose of the journal review process? Who is to have the final say in what is worth publishing? University administrators or journal editors?

It has been a long time since I’ve added anything here, caused by moving house and the usual panic about not having written enough thesis. The thesis is still underwritten (although not in an insurable sense), however I came across this website, which I couldn’t resist posting about.

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From Harvard, H20 is an initiative to bring together teaching, course syllabi and students from around the world.

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I’m a big fan of podcasts, not least for trying to learn something new while I’m on my bike or the bus. There are an increasing number of great resources available in and around science studies.

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Somehow, this post got lost somewhere between typing and publishing, which would seem to imply I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing.

There is a nice guide (and accompanying lecture) from Princeton which describes how to avoid having to trawl through Google results and instead get searches to work, including how to search only academic or government websites. Perhaps equally impressively (for the easily impressed), it describes how to use Google’s calculator, conversion tools and weather forecasts. I’m not sure how many universities provide this kind of information, but it must be among the most useful to give to todays students and researchers.

And more help and guidance can be found here (pdf)

The application I use the most, and which is some distance ahead of software like Endnote in terms of ease of use, is Citeulike, an online bibliography manager. Not only does it add articles with one click, but you can also browse other people’s libraries, in the way that you’d often find a great book next to the one you were looking for. You can set up watch lists for journals and group or individual libraries. It used to have a ‘touchgraph’ feature, which would generate maps of interrelated citations, but this appears to have disappeared for now.

For me, it is much easier to use than Connotea, Nature’s online reference manager, and is much better integrated with online databases, as well as Amazon. You can import bibtex files generated in Endnote or Reference Manager (and export too, although both of these are sometimes less straightforward than they might be) and use the rss feeds for dynamically updating course websites or blogs (like this).

Its just been reviewed at ‘Inside Higher Ed’ below, and as more people use it, can only improve.

Keeping Citations Straight, and Finding New Ones :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education

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Programs, articles, videos, websites - all can be useful, all will feature.

Patience is a virtue

However, the best possible introduction to why this website is necessary is provided by cultural anthropologist Mike Wesch’s video about Web 2.0