Posted on March 27th, 2012 at 15:04 by Steve Sloan in General | Permalink | Comments Off
One of my favourite Web sites is Kickstarter.
On that site, people can join together to fund artistic or creative projects. For their contributions, supporters usually receive some sort of reward. Well, now there is site for funding science projects. PetriDish is still in beta, but will allow anyone with an interest in science to contribute to research across the globe (and beyond). I just sent $20 to help find the first exomoon.
Posted on March 12th, 2012 at 10:50 by Steve Sloan in General | Permalink | Comments Off
Following up on this article on text mining in Nature, I’d like to point out that the systematic downloading of articles from our library databases requires permission from the vendors involved. Please contact your friendly neighborhood librarian if a large dataset of articles is needed for research purposes.
Posted on March 8th, 2012 at 11:28 by Steve Sloan in General | Permalink | Comments Off
Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, has done us all a great service by compiling a list of journal publishers who try and take advantage of the Open Access process. They charge a fee to authors for publication and deliver little in return. The quality of their editorial boards is often, to say the least, suspect. One publisher, OMICS, has a so-called peer reviewed journal entitled Journal of Homeopathy & Ayurvedic Medicine. Fortunately, it appears no issues or articles have been published. Perhaps no submissions could get past even the sketchiest of reviews.
Posted on February 20th, 2012 at 10:30 by Steve Sloan in General | Permalink | Comments Off
This Slate article pretty much says it all.
Posted on January 27th, 2012 at 11:37 by Steve Sloan in General | Permalink | Comments Off
