Consider this yet another commitment to trying to write here a little more regularly. Lots of thinking has been going on but not much writing! At least not writing as I’m going…

Three things colliding over the past few weeks have led me to want to try and get some ideas down. The first was a conversation – one of a set really – with Titus Brown and Dan Katz relating to the application of political economy and collective action theory to communities building research.

The second was the posting of …

This post was prompted by Donna Lanclos tweeting a link to a talk by Eamon Tewell:

OK so I'm not mad at all but this talk from @EamonTewell anticipates lots of what I want to dig into in a future talk of mine. So, I'm gonna cite this https://t.co/lZVYTFKp0u
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) May 5, 2018

His talk, on the problems of deficit models chimed with me on issues of tacit knowledge. I’m still noodling around an underpinning theory of knowledge for my work (blog post currently has spent nearly 12 months …

Three things come together to make this post. The first is the paper The 2.5% Commitment by David Lewis, which argues essentially for top slicing a percentage off library budgets to pay for shared infrastructures. There is much that I agree with in the paper, the need for resourcing infrastructure, the need for mechanisms to share that burden, and fundamentally the need to think about scholarly communications expenditures as investments. But I found myself disagreeing with the mechanism. What motivates me to getting around to writing this is the recent …

It’s not my joke but it still works. And given my pretty much complete failure to achieve even written resolutions it’s probably better to joke up front. But…here are a set of things I really need to write this year. Maybe more for my benefit than anyone else but it’s good to have a record.
Blog Posts: I have a few things that either need finishing or need writing, these are relatively immediate

Against the 2.5% Commitment – argument that fixed top-slicing of scholarly communications budgets is not the right way to …

This is a piece I wrote for Jisc, as part of a project looking at underpinning theories of citation. There are a few more to come, and you can read the main report for the project at the Jisc repository. This post cross-posted from the Open Metrics blog.
Citations, we are told, are the gold standard in assessing the outputs of research. When any new measure or proxy is proposed the first question asked (although it is rarely answered with any rigour) is how this new measure correlates with the “gold …

In this final post about the IDRC data sharing pilot project I want to close the story that started with an epic rant a few months ago. To recap, I had data from the project that I wanted to deposit in Zenodo. Ideally I would have found an example of doing this well, organised my data files in a similar way, zipped up a set of directories with a structured manifest or catalogue in a recognised format and job done. It turned out to not be so easy.
In particular there …