Writing in the Toronto Star, Michael Geist argues that when Canada gives public money to scientific researchers, that it should require that the research be made available to the public through open-content publishing, rather than locked up in expensive journals that require Canadians to buy the research they’ve already paid for.
Boing Boing: Canadian-funded research should [...]

It’s one of my favorite soapboxes that we need to publicize ourselves more. With the sheer amount of options members of our society face today, just offering excellent service isn’t enough to make them think of us. Plus, there is the common preconceptions of what librarians do. While the way we are characterized is fairly [...]

September’s JoDI: Journal of Digital Information is all about digital libraries with several interesting articles.

Cory Doctorow’s talk on DRM has been formatted as a print-centric PDF. Perfect for educating people without getting too mixed up in the tech terms.
as a print-centric PDF

I’ve actually responded in detail to the article.

Under its program, for a fee, BMC will �build, launch, maintain, and populate� repositories for institutions that could not otherwise afford to, or may lack the infrastructure or technical capacity in-house. Institutions can choose to pay a �one-off set-up fee,� to BMC, which will then build a repository to an institution�s requirements. They can hire [...]

Paul Chiao and Christian Schmidt, Open Access gains attention in scholarly communication, Molecular Cancer, September 6, 2004. An editorial describing the OA policy of this OA journal, published by BioMed Central, and enumerating seven benefits of OA. Excerpt: “[1] All articles become freely and universally accessible online; so an author’s work can be read by [...]

LibraryTechtonics: Creative Librarian reads my mind……or my blog.
Actually both .
First there was the Library Juice article, which made a great point.
Next was the Wired News article where the idea of the stereotype not really fitting seems to finally be moving into the press. (While mainstream media have blandly stood by as the free [...]

OJOSE (Online JOurnals Search Engine) is a new academic search engine. It covers a large number of free and priced journals and databases, and even some books. When a search brings up priced content, you will usually see a citation and abstract; clicking for full-text can bring up a pay-per-view offer, the full-text (if you [...]

…realize about the librarian stereotype. Every human trait has a valuable and a less-functional face to it. We tend to talk about the librarian stereotype strictly in terms of its undesirable aspects. But it is related to our strengths as librarians also – to our thoughtfulness, our focus, our desire to help.
Library Juice 7:18

Very thought-provoking.

…the National Institutes of Health has established a policy mandating open access to the full text of research results from projects it funds. Conservative estimates have placed at least a quarter of the quality medical research done in the world as funded by NIH grants and contracts.
All the material will end up deposited at PubMed [...]

There’s more to the open-access movement than financial reasons.
Re-analysis of clinical trials recently made open access has confirmed the link between suicidal tendency and paroxetine, a member of the class of antidepressants known as SSRIs. The link had previously been suspected but was difficult to establish because the studies were not readily available.
Open Access [...]

The knowedgable answers from a professional actually implementing an open-source ILS via OSS-4-Lib.

Information professionals usually don’t think of marketing themselves as a big issue. We know are the key to accessing information; we are service- and customer-oriented; we know our business – so, customers will just come to us, right?
Unfortunately, we do need to market ourselves – not just to be known, but also to let our [...]

The NIH has released its open-access plan, Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information (September 3, 2004) for public comment. Excerpts:
This notice is to announce and to seek public comments regarding NIH�s plans to facilitate enhanced public access to NIH health related research information. NIH intends to request that its grantees and supported Principal Investigators [...]

First, read Users Trump Library Vendors Again! >The Shifted Librarian
It’s true libraries have limited resources, but they already have a vendor for their catalog, and that vendor should be the one leading the way.� Libraries must begin demanding these types of services from the vendors. It’s crazy to see users writing code to compensate for [...]

OCLC Research Publications Repository contains works produced, sponsored, or submitted by OCLC Research. In general, the works are research-oriented and are in the subject area of library and information science. Many items describe OCLC Research projects, activities, and programs and were originally published by OCLC, while others are from peer-reviewed scholarly journals
Peter Scott’s Library Blog

Stephen Downes writes about blogs as educational tools in Educause. I highly recommend you read it for yourself because it’s very well-balanced and insightful. I couldn’t resist including some of my favorite bits below.
…the events of September 11 brought home to me the immediacy of blogging. We ran ongoing coverage, submitted via SMS to my [...]