Update :14th April 2017 - Unpaywall button now appears to be using Google Scholar and can "see fulltext from ResearchGate, Academia.edu, researcher homepages, and some IRs." You can turn off the option in the extension but it claims to lose 20% of content if you do that.
I've come to believe that learning how to search for and manipulate data will become the next "must-have" skill sets for academic librarians.
The recent rise in interest in fake news has given us librarians a reason to once again trumpet loudly the value of what we do in teaching information or media literacy.
How does one measure library eresources usage? This is a question I've bumped into numerous times recently in the course of my work whether it be trying to do correlation studies between student success and electronic usage , choosing the right metric for the library dashboard or even more mundanely just evaluating a database for subscription. My way of looking at it is two fold.
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany is probably one of the largest and most advanced aggregator of open access articles (hitting over 100 million records), others on roughly the same level are
Earlier this year, over at medium , I blogged about the Library Discovery and the Open Access challenge and asked librarians to consider how library discovery should react to the increasing pool of free material due to the inevitable rise of open access.
In recently months, I've become increasingly concerned about the competition faced by individual siloed institutional repository versus bigger more centralised repositories like subject repositories and commercial competitors like ResearchGate.
Since I've joined my new institution more than a year ago, I've focused a lot on this thing called "library analytics".
Recently, a researcher I was talking to remarked to me that University staff can be jumpy around copyright questions and some would immediately duck for cover the moment they heard the word "copyright".
Despite writing a bit more on open access and repositories in the last few years, I find the issues incredibly deep and nuanced and I am always thinking and learning about them.
Long time readers of my blog know that I'm a bit of a worrier when it comes to libraries,