What happens when scholars bypass the library? In new and probably illegal ways?

Why would you want to pay 30 USD for a 20 year scientific article?

It’s nothing new. Scholars have always exchanged information. In olden days, before the deluge of videos shaming cats for silly behaviour, scientist regularly needed access to papers that were not available through their university library. When that happened, they asked their secretary to write the author of the paper, and request a copy.

It was institutionalized. When you submitted a paper to a journal, you were expected to buy a number of preprints of the paper from the journal. That  covered some of the cost of printing the journal, and you were welcome to distribute the preprints among your colleagues. You were annoyed that you had to buy them, but you actually needed them, to promote your own work, so that was OK.

Then the internet happened. Scholarly journals became digital, information suddenly had the potential to become very free. Scholars had instant access to huge numbers of scientific papers. Information could travel around the globe almost instantly. What also happened, was that the cost of subscribing to the journals went through the roof. No university library today can afford to subscribe to all the journals that researchers want access to. The publishers still want to be paid for the access, so they erect paywalls around their content. If your university library does not subscribe to the journal you want to read, you can pay to get access.

Okay. The scene is set. We have scholars, who believes that information should be free. We have information with a very high potential for being set free. And most of that information is hidden behind paywalls, where some scholars have access, and others dont.

Solution? Write to a colleague that has access, and ask him to email you a pdf.

Again, nothing new. We’ve seen it before. If we could gain access to the emails, we could describe the networks exchanging pdfs.

It might even be possible to describe this situation with nice formulas. It is probably analogous to the potential energy harnessed by cells, then there is a difference in the concentration of sodium ions across a cell membrane.

But now something interesting has happend (it actually happened a couple of years ago).

Researchers have begun using Twitter to request copies of papers they otherwise wouldnt have access to. They tweet the hash-tag “#ICanHazPDF, along with a reference and an email-adress. And kind people around the world, with access to the paper, send a pdf-copy of it. Quick. Easy. Free.

That was a very long introduction, inspired by this post. Whats next? In the next couple of posts, I’ll try to analyze what the consequences of this new-ish phenomenon might be. Maybe we’ll even get some numbers.

 

It’s been a little quiet around here. A lot of things have happened, maybe to many given the activity here.

We are getting ready to open the DataLab. The InnovationLab have had its first workshops (and I have to build a gadget to fix a problem with one of the printers – it is going to be ugly. But it will work!)

But right now I’m waiting for someone to send me an image. Before I get that, I cant send out our annual user satisfaction survey. So – an unexpected break!

Therefore a post that would normally show up at another blog, dedicated to geeking out. But relevant here.

One of the latest trends in library marketing is the promotional video. At our library, we appear to be fond of LEGO stop-motion animations. But “my” library is a small one, and we are frequently left out of the videos. For good reasons, but still, something must be done!

It is time consuming to produce a stop-motion video. And its been done. Instead we should do something that has’nt been done before. But it should be cool. Enter the music video for AHAs hit Take On Me. It used a technique called rotoscoping, to mix ordinary imagery with sequences that appear to have been drawn in hand.

How to do that?

1. Download ImageMagick
2. Make an ordinary video
3. Download IrfanView
4. Split the video into individual frames, using IrfanView
5. Process the frames with ImageMagick – edgedetect and negate are the filters we’re going to use her
6. Splice all the frames together again to a video

Simple. Allthough it does require a lot of time. But first of all – sell the idea, and make a storyboard.

Der var nu forbindelse mellem Arduino og Raspberry pi. Og nu skulle telefonen så gøres klar til at blive samlet igen. Min plan var at signalet fra telefonen til Arduinoen skulle gå gennem den gamle telefonledning. Det syntes jeg var mest nørdet. Men… I sådan en ledning mellem en telefon og et telefonstik, er der tre ledere. Og ledningen fungerer altså bedst hvis alle tre ledere fungerer. Den røde var død…

Så er rådne dyr gode. Ned i Brinck. De havde ikke den slags ledninger. Hm. Hvis det ikke kunne blive med et gammeldags telefonstik, så skulle ledningen i det mindste ligne originalen. Det der kom tættest på, var et netværkskabel. Sådan et standard twisted pair kabel med 8 ledere. De er ret tynde, så jeg samlede dem parvis. Og havde nu fire ledere. Men jeg skulle ikke bruge mere end tre. Den fjerde… Jeg ville jo godt have røret med. Jeg kunne bare ikke finde en løsning hvor det ikke gav for meget støj på det egentlige signal fra drejeskiven. Men det kan en fjerde leder klare. De skrueterminaler imellem hvilke der er forbindelse når røret er af, blev forbundet med en pull-down modstand og den fjerde ledning. Og vupti, nu har jeg to signaler fra telefonen. Et hvor jeg kan tælle pulser fra drejeskiven. Og et hvor jeg kan se om røret er af eller på.

Koden skal nu skrives om – det er vist ikke så svært igen, men kræver lidt mere ro i hovedet end der normalt er efter en 10 timers arbejdsdag. Så det bliver ikke lige med det samme. Men nu begynder målet at være i sigte!

For some interesting reasons, I’m learning Python and R. I’m done with the Codecademy introduction course in Python – and still lacking about 9000 hours of experience.

At the moment I’m doing the R introduction course from Datacamp. Not as good a course as the Codecademy, but good enough.

When I was much younger, and studying at the Technical University of Denmark, this would have been af three-week course, with an estimated workload of 140 hours (yep, we studied for almost 47 hours every week). Now, I have a lot more experience, and should be able to do it faster. On the other hand, I do not have 47 uninterrupted hours to set aside each week. More like 4. And they will be interrupted. At least twice every hour.

A post on DJØF-bladets homepage (in danish) tells of swedish research, revealing that when you are in flow, that is, when you are working at optimum efficiency, it will take 25 minutes to recover from an interruption.

A qualified guess is, that at the current level of interruptions, this three-week course, is converted to an 84 week course.

All the print journals, and all print books in closed stacks, have been moved from my little library. We started monday, and was finished friday. More or less, the materials have not yet been placed on their new shelfes at our main library. Now we’re just waiting to get rid of all the empty shelfes, and getting the new furniture for our students. More than 220 square meters for them! The students are looking forward to it, the faculty are worried that it’ll get to cozy at the library, and that the students will be late for classes. Yay!

Is everything just nice and great? No. It is strange, even for the former ebook-coordinator at the royal library, to see all the empty shelfes. Print books and journals have a permanence, that communicatets solidity and symbolises the scientific progress and knowledge in a way that digital ressources simply cannot. At least to people who grew up in the last millenium.

Moving print materials from open to closed stacks also symbolizes the changing world of libraries. We have always been the keepers of knowledge, and paper was the tangible symbols of that knowledge. We know that our mission is to provide access to information, and we know that we are able to do that much more efficiently with digital than with print materials. But it feels profoundly strange to relegate a couple of hundred years accumulated knowledge to closed stacks.

I sincerely believe that this is the future. I believe that the students will get better service even if we move the print material. But it still feels strange.

One of the more interesting talks at MakerfaireUK was “Fixing the Internet of Things” by Alasdair Allan. The way IoT is made today is with a lot of different standards of communication. That leads to the troublesome conclusion, that none of them actually are standards. And the worrying possibility, that soon we will have to choose not only the wattage of a lightbulb, and the size of it. But also which protocol our “smart” lightbulb uses to communicate with the internet.

Another problem is the lack of privacy. Everything have been hacked. Even the White House mailservers… Allan believes that it is only a matter of time, before we see the first murder committed with the help of smart, internetconnected things.

A promising trend, counteracting these problems, is the way that Moores law helps us. Smart devices are not nessecarily becoming more smart. But they do come with increasing computing power. An interesting article on version2, a danish IT-site, touches on this. Read it here, and notice the competitive advantages companies trying to get in on the german market gets, when they can say that data is not stored on american servers…

 

Last friday Students of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Pharmaceutical Library held our third academic seminar, this time with Jesper T. Andreasen. As is our custom with the seminar in the spring, the speaker is the recipient of the prestigeous award for teacher of the year. At the School of Pharmacy, that is. Jesper spoke about his work with mice and rats as models for the study of anxiety and depression. A very enlightening talk, I did not know that (some) treatments for alzheimers address the same receptors as nerve agents!

 

 

Or – Copenhagen University Library – Nerd. A danish pun on the name of the location of our makerspace/fablab/playground.

One of the truly great things about working at this library, is the playfull attitude to innovation of our library director. About two years ago he wrote me and asked – “this 3D-printing thing, is that very difficult?”. As an engineer there is only one answer “not at all, and the printer can stay in my office”. Actually I had suggested introducing 3D-printing in the library about a year before. We bought a Makerbot, we played around with it, and made it available to the students.

And yesterday we had the grand opening of our innovation-lab (thats the official title, KUB-Nørd is so much better). Three printers, a 3D-scanner, arduinos, Raspberry Pis, Lego Mindstorm and lots of other fun stuff to play with. And the students loved it!

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