We’ve all monkeyed around trying to sort out the ownership of published content. In the scientific community, copyright and its (mis)application in…

Open-source image forensics tool.

The Ohio State University Libraries created an organizational policy for digital preservation, shared here to address the policy development process a

Investing in Opportunity: Policy Practice and Planning for a Sustainable Digital Future  sponsored by the 4C project  and the Digital Preser...

Half of all clinical trials are never published, and Big Pharma wants to keep it that way.

Writing my post about AI and summoning the demon led me to re-read a number of articles on Cathy O'Neil's excellent mathbabe blog. I highlighted a point Cathy...

© The Author(s), 2014. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in BMC Research Notes 7 (2014): 79, doi:10.1186/1756-0500-7-79.

This week I had the privilege and pleasure to attend the Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute event at the University of North Carolina. It was a great event. I spoke about the Open Library of Humanities, had discussions about XML typesetting, positive representations of Sikhism and social challenges of changing scholarly communications. In short, the diversity and breadth of expertise and participants here made it a brilliant environment. I was sorry I had to leave early.  One point that I made during the event and that we discussed was the connotations of the term “the crowd” and I wanted to write up a few words on why I think the ideologies of this phrase should be subjected to some close reading. The dominant way in which the university and its digital projects tend to think of “the crowd” is primarily as a means of bi-directional engagement. In other words, we need to do public engagement, outreach, become more than an ivory tower that preaches to distant constituents from an elitist site and instead invite contributions in. Many of these elements are key to my thinking on open access, so I certainly don't disagree with that motivation. However, there are two problems and I want to argue them from a devil's advocate perspective. The first lies in the term itself. “The crowd” implies a noisy, uncontrolled “mass”, distinct from the orderly, hierarchical structure of the university that solicits crowd involvement. Sure, we've heard of the “wisdom of the crowd”, but this is perceived as a very different type of wisdom, occurring accidentally and in opposition to the lone, individualist genius, who instead imposes control and discipline to achieve insight. Likewise, we might consider how close synonyms – “swarm”, “the masses”, “quantity” – might have denigrating connotations when applied to others. In other words, while

A majority of Americans feel that their privacy is being challenged along such core dimensions as the security of their personal information and their ability to retain confidentiality.

Very good section on how data gets swapped around between corps, government, and researchers.

entrepreneur · investor · executive · data geek · privacy thinker · former rocket engineer · on twitter @jim_adler · musings are mine and not those of my employer, but read my disclosure statement anyway.

A version of this talk was presented as the keynote for the annual meeting of the Association of College and Research Libraries – Delaware Valley Chapter, in Philadelphia PA on November 6, 20…

The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey of Internet Archive and co-chair of the NDSA Innovation Working Group. In this edition of the Insights Interview series we talk with Meghan Banach Bergin, Bibliographic Access and Metadata Coordinator, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. Meghan is the author of a Report on Digital Preservation Practices […]

Control over data profiles is about power, not privacy

UConn and the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, one of the world’s leading archives of social science data, have announced they will part ways at the end of 2015.