Category Archives: Uncategorized

We’re getting involved in Wikidata! It will change the world of scientific (and other) information. So here is an emerging conversation, hopefully over several blog posts. Wicki: Hang on! What’s Wikidata? And Wikimedia? I’ve heard of Wikipedia, but… Dater: Wikipedia … Continue reading →

I am honoured by this award; I ‘ll describe the current struggle for ownership of digital scholarly knowledge, emphasize young people and machine-understandable theses and suggest practices.   Early Career Researchers see the digital literature – including theses – as … Continue reading →

ContentMine is going to mine the whole scholarly literature (10,000 articles every day). We’d hoped to do this some months ago and one of the reasons is the massive pushback from major publishers. Technically, legally , politically. UK government note: … Continue reading →

TL;DR. I continue to try to get public data out of Elsevier. I think I should be able to – every other publisher has no problem. After some not-very-useful replies Elsevier simply give up answering me. Over the last 7-8 … Continue reading →

When I go the airport by taxi [1] I try to get the same taxi driver, Ken [2]. Ken is a shining example of why every citizen of the world needs access to the whole scholarly literature – open and … Continue reading →

I have just blogged on the legal aspects of ContentMining: /pmr/2016/05/06/sci-hub-and-legal-aspects-of-contentmining/ (which also contains links to previous blogs. These are general considerations but also relevant to the current issue of Sci Hub. I am now going to set out my … Continue reading →

Previous posts: /pmr/2016/04/30/a-commentary-on-sci-hub-1-scholarly-publishing-is-broken/ /pmr/2016/04/30/a-commentary-on-sci-hub-2n-why-it-matters-to-me-and-contentmine/ /pmr/2016/05/02/a-commentary-on-sci-hub-3n-legal-aspects/ I have written today to my collaborators in ContentMine – staff, volunteers, advisory board and Shuttleworth funders and mentors. It’s on the legal aspects of mining. It’s long, but laws are complex. It’s meant to … Continue reading →

Previous: /pmr/2016/04/30/a-commentary-on-sci-hub-1-scholarly-publishing-is-broken/ /pmr/2016/04/30/a-commentary-on-sci-hub-2n-why-it-matters-to-me-and-contentmine/ It’s impossible to discuss Sci-Hub without discussing legal aspects. Unfortunately these are complex and highly varied, so it is impossible to give simple clear answers. On one hand many claim that this is a criminal (or near … Continue reading →

In my previous post , catalyzed by Sci-Hub, /pmr/2016/04/30/a-commentary-on-sci-hub-1-scholarly-publishing-is-broken/ I argued that scholarly publishing is completely broken. It’s now lost a huge amount of respect, it’s unwieldly, unfair and mired in bickering. It pays no attention to readers. It’s becoming … Continue reading →

Many of you will already have read of Science Magazine’s account of Sci-Hub, the “pirate” site for scholarly publications. “Science” is often seen as one to the “top three” outlets, along with Nature and Cell. Here’s the original: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone And … Continue reading →