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Daily Archives: October 26, 2014

Elsevier Adds Five New Subject Areas to Legacy eBook Collection

News release: “Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced it added five new subject areas to its Legacy eBook Collection on ScienceDirect. The Legacy Collection consists of digitized, classic scholarly book content, now including nearly 13,000 books. The new subject areas are arts and humanities; computer science; economics, econometrics and finance; immunology and microbiology; and mathematics. In addition, there are newly digitized books in the engineering and the biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology collections. The Legacy Collection includes books with contributions from notable authors like leading business management thinker Peter Drucker, and Nobel Laureates such as Lev Davidovich Landau, George Olah, Peter Diamond  and Sir Frank McFarlane Burnet. For the first time, the books in the Elsevier’s Legacy Collection are also being made available to more than 70 third-party ebook distributors. Customers can purchase these revived titles through online retailers or through library ebook service providers.”

  • Via Boing Boing: “Elsevier is one of the world’s largest scholarly publishers and one of the most bitter enemies that open access publishing has; SSRN is one of the biggest open access scholarly publishing repositories in the world: what could possibly go wrong? As renowned security academic Matt Blaze pointed out in a series of tweets, there is a common misconception about the role scholarly publishers play in research: the publishers don’t pay a cent towards the research, nor do they compensate the researchers for publishing their work; but they do represent a huge cost-center for scholarly institutions in the form of subscription charges, which continue to increase far ahead of inflation. Scholarly publishers are in the business of charging money to show the public the results of research that the public paid to undertake. Elsevier says that nothing will change at SSRN, but there’s good cause to be skeptical: it’s like if Monsanto bought out your favorite organic farm co-op…”

Signaling Status: The Impact of Relative Income on Household Consumption and Financial Decisions

Finance and Economics Discussion Series- Divisions of Research & Statistics and Monetary Affairs. Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C. Signaling Status: The Impact of Relative Income on Household Consumption and Financial Decisions. Jesse Bricker, Rodney Ramcharan, and Jacob Krimmel. 2014-76. “This paper investigates the importance of status in household consumption and financial decisions using household data from the Survey of Consumer Finances… Continue Reading

National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

Helping individuals and organizations utilize secure, efficient, easy-to-use and interoperable identity credentials to access online services in a manner that promotes confidence, privacy, choice and innovation. The NSTIC calls for a vibrant Identity Ecosystem where identity solutions adhere to four Guiding Principles: Identity solutions will be privacy-enhancing and voluntary Identity solutions will be secure and resilient… Continue Reading

Open Access Issues and Potential Solutions Workshop

Open Access Issues and Potential Solutions Workshop – McCutcheon, V., Kerridge, S., Meyering, M. A., Walker, K., Tripp, L., Khokhar, M., Nixon, W., Cheesman, P., Pike, D., and Caplehorne, J.(2014) Open Access Issues and Potential Solutions Workshop. Project Report. University of Glasgow, Glasgow. (Unpublished) “This report provides a summary of the discussion and findings of the… Continue Reading

Big Data, Dumpster Diving and the New Ethics of Waste Management

New York Times: “Rubicon, based in Atlanta, isn’t in the business of hauling waste. It doesn’t own a single truck or landfill. Rather, companies hire it as a kind of waste consultant. It begins by holding an online bidding process for its clients’ waste contracts, fostering competition among waste management businesses and bringing down their… Continue Reading