(22 Mar 2021) University rankings are imbued with great significance by university staff and leadership teams and the outcomes of their ranking systems can have significant material consequences. Drawing on a curious example from their own institution, Jelena Brankovic argues that taking rankings as proxies for quality or performance in a linear-causal fashion is a…
Site offers access millions of scientific research papers which detectives say were illegally obtained through phishing attacks (20 Mar 2021) Police are warning students and universities not to use a popular pirate website offering free access to millions of scientific research papers. Sci-Hub, which was set up by Alexandra Elbakyan, a graduate student…
(17 Mar 2021) Wikipedia is launching a paid-for service in an effort to charge big tech companies for access to its trove of information. While the encyclopedia is run by a non-profit that operates on donations, keeping the essential online resource free for general users, it is readying a commercial product for later this year, reports Wired.…
(17 Mar 2021) The Tang Tho Chamber, a national library under the Nguyen Dynasty, the last Vietnamese kings, has begun welcoming visitors in central Hue town after being closed for 75 years. The chamber displays more than 70,000 documents in diverse genres, including books in the ancient Vietnamese script of Han Nom, ancient bibliographies,…
(18 Mar 2021) Digital library usage spiked amid the pandemic last year but closures during the circuit breaker meant overall loans fell from 40.5 million in 2019 to 29.2 million. The number of Singapore residents using the National Library Board’s (NLB) digital channels went up by 46.5 per cent from 2019, its year-in-review report noted…
(28 Feb 2021) Historical records bearing the imprint of Singapore’s early Hokkien pioneers such as Tan Tock Seng and Tan Lark Sye will soon be made accessible to the public following the donation of more than 4,300 original documents from the Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan (SHHK) made to the National Library Board (NLB) on Sunday (Feb 28).…
(17 Mar 2021) China is growing in dominance in Asia-Pacific collaborations, according to the Nature Index 2021 Asia Pacific supplement, published today. The supplement draws on Nature Index data to track trends in research output and collaboration in the Asia-Pacific region. The strongest partnership in the region is between Australia and China, however among leading APAC countries…
(9 Mar 2021) OASPA is pleased to announce the publication of an in-depth report and associated recommendations arising from a study of open access journals across the world that are free for readers and authors, usually referred to as “OA diamond journals”. Funded by Science Europe and commissioned by cOAlition S in order to gain a better understanding…
(18 Mar 2021) More than two years after negotiations began, the University of California and the academic publisher Elsevier announced on March 16 that they had finally secured an open-access deal. The new, four-year agreement goes into effect on April 1, making open access the default option for UC academics wishing to publish their work in Elsevier’s journals.…
(7 Mar 2021) For academic and research libraries the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated a significant shift of resources towards supporting digital online access to resources. As a result, the prohibitive cost of some of these resources, notably e-textbooks, has become a flashpoint, even breaking into mainstream media and public debate. Here, Johanna Anderson, Paul Ayris and…