Monday, April 23, 2012

Does LIS need yet another OA journal?

I'll start off with the answer to the question in the title of the post with "Yes, why not."  Now, I'll say why.
  • The journal needs to be Open Access so that authors and scholars have a way to reach all possible readers.  There can always be more OA journals with more publishing options.
  • The journal should use the CC By license so that we "allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in [the] journal, so long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers."
  • If you clicked on the link above, you can tell that I am thinking of something along the lines of a PLoS ONE format.  The editorial and peer-review process would be similar to PLoS ONE, but it would be modified to suite our discipline.
  • This journal is not intended to compete with PLoS ONE since I imagine that we might publish around 4 to 40 articles in a year.  This isn't even a dent or a door ding in the side of PLoS ONE.
  • I don't think we should worry about prestige of the journal as a whole.  Let the articles stand by themselves.  We will use article level metrics (maybe similar to what PLoS does) to let the authors know how often their articles have been downloaded and cited. 
  • Encourage submissions of all different kinds of research.  If an author has a very small survey sample, then our journal could be the one to publish the minor results. Negative results would also be fine.  If someone wants to provide examples of how not to do something, that could really help others.  Scholarly essays and opinion pieces would be dandy. Turn that poster paper into a real article.  Turn that long blog post into an article. Write up an overview of a conference. ("Every article its reader." Let readers filter articles for relevance.  The journal editors and peer-reviewers can determine if something meets a minimal "technically sound" criteria before publication. )
  • It could be funded by donations to pay for the cost of domain registration (and maybe other things) if needed.
  • I see myself as more of a journal facilitator than as the journal "editor."  I don't plan on editing other people's articles all that much.
  • Publish the articles when they are ready instead of making readers wait for an issue to be completed.
Questions.
  • What should we call it?  [Whatever the title, I don't think we should co-opt the use of the word "ONE."  Maybe something like the Discussions in Library & Information Science or Findings in Library & Information Science or Journal of Library & Information Science Topics or something that indicates that it accepts manuscripts from a broad range of LIS topics.]
  • How much editing should we do on articles that are written by non-native English writers? [Cross this bridge when we get there.]
  • Let people use any kind of citation format?  [That would be ok with me, as long as people can find the cited references.  We do not need to be citation police.]
  • Where should we host it?  [While it could go into a section of thelsw.org website, it might be better if we purchased a different domain and had it hosted someplace else.]
  • When would we launch?  [I am thinking either fall of 2012, or January of 2013.  Depends on how quickly this all gets put together, and if anybody is interested.]
  • What should the format of the articles look like?  [While most articles could be published in an HTML format within a blog setting, some articles might be better suited to PDF documents.  This could be the case where there are many images in the article, and it is easier for the layout editors to simply tie up the images with the text into a PDF file.]
  • How should the articles be loaded onto the site? [I am thinking we could just load up the articles into a single blog-post like format, and leave comments on the articles for a limited amount of time, maybe a week or a month or a year. TBD.]
  • Should we try to get the journal indexed in some of the LIS indexing databases, or just let Google and/or Google scholar handle the indexing?
  • Should we get an ISSN registered for the journal?
  • Who would like to be on the editorial board? [I'd like to try to get a bunch of people involved from academic to public to special to archives to independents or whatever.]
  • Where should we backup and archive the articles? [Cross this bridge when we get there.]
  • Aren't there enough LIS journals out there?  [While there are plenty of OA LIS journals, but I don't know of any that have a PLoS ONE like system.  If you know of one, let us know in the comments.  Even if there are others, why not another publishing option?]

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Korbel School TechWeek Event - HealthMap.org

Today, I was able to go to a TechWeek Event which was in the CyberCafe of Ben Cherrington Hall.

The topic was "Tracking global public health threats through apps and the web."

Health mobile applications--Digital Disease Detection
by Dr. David Scales
Harvard Medical School
Children's Hospital Boston
david.scales@childrens.harvard.edu

He will cover the what, how and why of Healthmap.org -- Global Health Local Knowledge

They have a news section Sometimes breaking news is published in another language, and they translate the news into English. How? They get newspapers RSS feeds, 93 feeds and about 2000 alerts per day. They also take reports from individuals. they get information on the locations, species, and disease patterns, and this is put into 5 categories: Breaking news, warnings, old news, context, not disease related. They rate by risk by color: yellow, orange and red. They have seven languages on the website and 1 million hits per year.
Who uses this? CDC, WHO, national state local public health organizations, and many others.

Politics sometimes gets in the way of information transmission.  He tells the story of the 1972 Iran smallpox problem.At that time, the International health regulations required that the WHO act on official information only. Statements were made in 1951 and 1969.

Newsweek article on SARS. WHO "shining moment" in 2003.  WHO had been using unofficial data since 1998.  The WHO issues travel advisory to Hong Kong, Toronto and later, China. WHO was allowed to use unofficial sources in 2005/2006.

Disease reporting flowchart
Outbreak start, detection and reporting getting lots better time wise.
Promed disease social network
They want to build up use of social media into their results
Google news MMWR data, Geosentinal and CDC.

Next generation public health information coming from twitter and other social media sources.
Outbreaks near me iPod app. 100k downloads.
Will have a droid version soon
Signal to noise concern
Pretty close trend lines
Validate undiagnosed events by mobile phone Call 919 map1bug or on website or...
Chikungunya in India 7/22/11
he mentioned a Contagion movie tie-in  to help advertise healthmap.org.

Flunearyou.org Weekly survey.  Invite your friends. Win money.

Covered http://www.google.org/flutrends/  

Beyond digital disease detection.

This technology can be used for other types of tracking, such as the illegal animal trade, human rights abuses, etc
Dengue.  There are 4 types. See this PLoS article about it.  (PLoS was changed to plod on my iPod Touch.  It looks like he publishes and blogs quite a bit in PLoS journals.)

Cholera in Haiti surveillance
Twitter use Volume of tweets correlation? Yes

Bio.diaspora airline traffic and disease Problems near the Hajj - Healthmap.org/hajj
Biomosaic (PDF about the project) Demographics, migration and health and foreign born population issues

Wildlife trade clandestine industry unmonitored and underground WWF wildlife trade map

Spread of polio virus 2004/05 Nigeria Vaccine News.

Hama massacre syria tracking human rights 1982 Syria tracker human rights abuses torture deaths etc.

This is a "Novel Internet-based collaborative system." It can play an important complementary role in gathering health info.

Media reports have been declining because there are less journalists covering health issues.  30-45% less articles and major newspapers. Science and medical journalists are getting laid off.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Advice for newish librarians to be

On Saturday, I wanted to help LIS students with advice on how to interview and get a job, but the interviewing workshop got cancelled.  Bummer.  Anyway, I thought it would be good to put down some of my thoughts about how to get a job in this mixed-up crazy library world that we live in.

1) Take the advice of Jenica when building an online identity or presence. She had this presentation way back in 2009. "Yes, You Are Speaking In Public: Some Implications of Building a Personal and Professional Online Presence." (PDF).  Go out there and create a blog or two, and write about what you are interested in.  Write up some book reviews and stick them on the web. If a blog is not your thing, create a nice looking portfolio page for yourself.

2) Post some of your better class papers online.  Put them into E-LIS or something similar.  Submit some of them for journal articles.  Really, many library journals are hungry for content--even from grad students.

3) Learn about why you should license your work with a creative commons license.

4) Follow other librarians or library organizations on Twitter to see what they are discussing.

5) Take a look at the advice from others such as this and this and this and this.

6) Once you interview for jobs, think of the process as you interviewing them.  You want to see how well their culture will fit with your personality.

7) Remember that once you get a job, the learning ain't done.  You will need to continue learning stuff, so keep reading and going to conferences and meeting people with new perspectives.

Added 4/18:

8) Here are some other semi-random articles/blog posts on nailing the interview for a library job, what not to do at an interview, and networking.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Overview of the NCAR/UCAR Data Citation Workshop up in Boulder

It has now been a week since the first day of the NCAR/UCAR Data Citation Workshop.  They recently put up all of the slides, so it is good to go back and see them again.  Here are my main take aways.

Purpose of Data Citation (Page 7)
• Aid scientific reproducibility through direct, unambiguous connection to the precise data used
• Credit for data authors and stewards
• Accountability for creators and stewards
• Track impact of data set
• Help identify data use (e.g., trackbacks)
• Data authors can verify how their data are being used.
• Users can better understand the application of the data.

“Tracking Dataset Citations Using Common Citation Tracking Tools Doesn’t Work”—Heather Piwowar, DataONE (Page 13)
• Traditional fields such as author and date too imprecise
• Web of Science, Scopus, and other tools don’t handle identifiers

Surprise, many scientists do not know how to cite data. We need to better advertise this guide from the Digital Curation Center.

Something basic like this could be used.
Author(s). ReleaseDate. Title, [version]. [editor(s)]. Archive and/or Distributor. Locator. [date/time accessed]. [subset used].
In addition to DOIs, there are other identifier systems, such as ARKs, and EZIDs. EZID is used by many organizations.

Data citations in NCAR/UCAR Whitepaper.

Barbara Losoff at CU-Boulder did a good job of explaining the libraries role in data curation? (Start at page 5.)

Love this quote - "Data preservation is communicating with the future."

Dr. Tim Killeen from the NSF provided a good overview of their vision (start at page 20) concerning data citation and curation. This book, Cyber Infrastructure Framework for the 21st Century, is worth a read.

I am still not quite sure what the NSF Earth Cube Project is all about.

NOAA gets a good amount of social media views and uses.(See page 10 of 11. For example, YouTube: ~ 715 subscribers, ~ 88,000 video views.)  This may be where the action is headed.

This observatory tracks how people cite their data in articles through WoS and Google Scholar.  We could do something like that here.

The big finale from Matthew Mayernik

We need to make things "Simple, Weak, Open, and Together"

Simple – Don’t overload citations
Weak – Make it easy for users, data users and data submitters
Open – easier to address problems and new cases
Together – Lots of interest in multiple communities
The idea came from From John Wilbanks – Designing for Emergence.