Category Archives: Uncategorized

Content-mining; Why do Universities agree to restrictive publisher contracts?

[I published a general blog about the impasse between digital scholars and the Toll-Access publishers /pmr/2015/11/22/content-mining-rights-versus-licences/ . This is followed by a series of detailed posts which look at the details and consequences /pmr/2015/11/22/content-mining-why-do-publishers-insist-on-apis-and-forbid-screen-scraping/ This is the second] If you … Continue reading

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Content-mining; Why do Publishers insist on APIs and forbid screen scraping?

[I published a general blog about the impasse between digital scholars and the Toll-Access publishers /pmr/2015/11/22/content-mining-rights-versus-licences/ . This is the first of a number of posts which look at the details and consequences] Chris Hartgerink described how Elsevier have stopped … Continue reading

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Content-mining; Rights versus Licences

[I intend to follow with several more detailed posts.] Last week was a critical point for those who regard the scholarly literature as a public good, rather than a business. Those who care must now speak out, for if they … Continue reading

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Extracting 100 million facts from the Scientific literature -1

In TheContentMine, funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation, we aim to extract 100 million facts from the scientific literature. That’s a large number so here’s our thinking…. What is a fact? Common Mist Frog (Litoria rheocola) of northern Australia. Credit: Damon … Continue reading

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Should Wikipedia work with Elsevier?

This story has erupted in the last 2 days – if it had been earlier I would have covered it at my talk to Wikipedia Science]. TL;DR. Elsevier has granted accounts to 45 top editors at Wikipedia so they can … Continue reading

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Wikipedia and Wikidata. Massive Open resources for Science.

I think Wikipedia is a wonderful creation of the XXIst Century, the Digital Enlightenment. It has arisen out of the massive cultural change enabled by digital freedom – the technical ability for over half the world (and hopefully soon almost … Continue reading

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Announce: Microbial Supertree through ContentMining

I haven’t blogged for some time as I have been writing Liberation Software (software to make knowledge and people free). Now we (Ross Mounce, Matt Wills and I) have got our first significant scientific result – a supertree: I am … Continue reading

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Postal voting UK style

Whenever there is a national, international or local vote I feel it’s my duty to vote. My grandmother was a suffragette and their actions won the right for today’s British women to vote. (She didn’t go to jail because she … Continue reading

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Is Figshare Open? "it is not just about open or closed, it is about control"

[Quote in title is from Mark Hahnel, see below] I have been meaning to write on this theme for some time, and more generally on the increasing influence of DigitalScience’s growing influence in parts of the academic infrastructure. This post … Continue reading

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The power of Digital Theses to change the world

I am speaking tomorrow at Lille to a group of Digita Humanists: Séminaire DRTD-SHS « Les données de la recherche dans les humanités numériques »  Journée du 21 avril 2015 : « Maîtriser les technologies pour valoriser les données » Lieu : MESHS (salle 2), 2 … Continue reading

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