January 2019

Yet I have come to suspect these punk derivatives signal something more than the usual merry-go-round of pop culture. These punks indicate that something is broken in our science fiction. Indeed, even when they reject it, these new subgenres often repeat the same gestures as cyberpunk, discover the same facts about the world, and tell the same story. Our hacker hero (or his magic-wielding counterpart) faces a huge system of power, overcomes long odds, and finally makes the world marginally better—but not so much better that the author can’t write a sequel. The 1980s have, in a sense, never ended; they seem as if they might never end.

From Hopepunk can’t fix our broken science fiction.

From 1976 until his death in 2013, Georg P Salzmann collected about 12,000 books that had been banned – and burnt – by the Nazis for being ‘un-German’. His father – a Nazi – had shot himself in 1945, when Georg was a teenager.

What became known as the Library of Burnt Books was sold to the University of Augsburg in 2009 – and is now open to the public. Stumpf describes the first book that Salzmann bought, as well as how one author witnessed his own books being burnt.

From BBC – Culture – The library of forbidden books

The entire editorial board of the Elsevier-owned Journal of Informetrics resigned Thursday in protest over high open-access fees, restricted access to citation data and commercial control of scholarly work.

Today, the same team is launching a new fully open-access journal called Quantitative Science Studies. The journal will be for and by the academic community and will be owned by the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI). It will be published jointly with MIT Press.

From Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

It’s a tale as old as time, or, at least, the internet: None of us are reading any more, the physical book is dead, Amazon has killed the independent bookstore, and it’s all only going to get worse. But this year, the story looks like just that—a fiction. We are buying books—especially the kind with physical pages—and we’re doing so, increasingly, in well-loved indie bookstores.

From Book sales — Quartz

King was happy to oblige, smirkingly calling the Herald’s request “blackmail.” And, thanks to his following of more than five million, the Herald raked in roughly 200 new subscriptions in less than 48 hours. “It’s a Stephen King story with a happy ending,” Lisa DeSisto, chief executive of MaineToday Media, which publishes the Herald, told the New York Times.

From Stephen King prevented a Maine newspaper from axing its freelance book reviewers

A centuries-old doodle of a cyclops has been discovered in a study-shy teenager’s book of ancient Greek plays by conservation staff restoring his family’s library in a Hampshire mansion.

William John Chute, who lived at The Vyne between 1757 and 1824, was the owner of the book and is believed to have drawn the sketch when he was 15. The National Trust has identified it as the cyclops Polephemus, from Homer’s Odyssey.

From Eighteenth-century schoolboy’s doodles uncovered as library is restored | Books | The Guardian

Libraries aren’t just for books. They’re often spaces that transform into what you need them to be: a classroom, a cyber café, a place to find answers, a quiet spot to be alone. It’s actually kind of magical. This week, we have stories of people who roam the stacks and find unexpected things that just happen to be exactly what they required. 

From The Room of Requirement – This American Life

Thanks Michael Sauers!

Robert-Jan Smits, the European Commission’s OA envoy in Brussels, who is one of the architects of Plan S, says publishers have stalled by emphasizing the need for broad participation. “The big publishers told me: ‘Listen, we can only flip our journals [to OA] if this is signed by everyone. So first go on a trip around the world and come back in 20 years. Then we can talk again,’” Smits recalls. “Some people try to do anything to keep the status quo.”

From Will the world embrace Plan S, the radical proposal to mandate open access to science papers? | Science | AAAS

ABSTRACT. This paper is a survey of the research topics in the field of Semantic Web, Linked Data
and Web of Data. This study looks at the contributions of this research community over its first
twenty years of existence. Compiling several bibliographical sources and bibliometric indicators, we identify the main research trends and we reference some of their major publications to
provide an overview of that initial period. We conclude with some perspectives for the future
research challenges.

From A Survey of the First 20 Years of Research
on Semantic Web and Linked Data

“Librarians are incredibly risk averse,” he said. “I think they do care very much about patrons and about the impact that their work does, and so we’re very unlikely to take a chance when we’re dealing with public money and when we’re dealing with patrons; we have a personal relationship with them.”

From Interview: NYPL’s chief digital officer says public is better off when libraries are ‘risk averse’ about tech – GeekWire