Archives

April Fool’s Roundup — 2009

April Fool’s was a good one at the Scholarly Kitchen. Here’s a roundup of some notable pranks across the Interwebs.

The Google Books Settlement has authors up in arms. I’m an author now, and I don’t know what they’re so upset about.

According to a leaked document, publishing giants Springer, Elsevier, and Wiley-Blackwell will merge.

While university presses shrink and go digital, are they trying to preserve a structural memory in the face of a modern reality?

Academic video makes great leaps forward with the unveiling of AcademicEarth.org and YouTube EDU.

Squeeze the smartphone to find out where you can find relief in a pinch.

Is open access to science best described as an evolution or revolution?

Citations can be counted, but what do they mean? InCites wants to help us interpret them. But are citations data? Or social signals?

Science journalism is quickly vanishing. Will blogging fill the void? It depends on what you expect from your ‘news’

Twitter, Facebook, and Google may owe everything to AOL. But to what did AOL owe its success?

The MLA’s seventh edition style guide knocks print from its pedestal and dethrones the URL for citations. In other words, its editors get real.

Journal authors have more rights than they. Why is this disjoint dangerous and what can publishers do?

When information was scarce, it needed copyright protection. When it’s abundant and a service, is it relevant anymore? Really?

We’re in the early days of a major revolution in information dissemination and creation. Clay Shirky shows us why we need to think the unthinkable.

Los Alamos researchers create a usage map of science. Why does it look so different than a citation map?