§1

It looks like Andromeda Yelton is sharing weeknotes (“This week in AI“). I can’t wait to see what she shares with us all in 2021.

§2

Earlier this fall, Clarivate Analytics announced that it was moving toward a future that calculated the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) based on the date of electronic publication and not the date of print publication…

This discrepancy between how Clarivate treated traditional print versus online-only journals aroused skepticism among scientists, some of whom… cynically suggested that editors may be purposefully extending their lag in an attempt to artificially raise their scores.

Changes to Journal Impact Factor Announced for 2021, Scholarly Kitchen, Phil Davis, Dec 7, 2020

I don’t think there is anything cynical about the observation that journal publishers picked up a trick from those booksellers who actively engage in promoting pre-publication book sales because those weeks of sales are accumulated and counted in the first week of publication which results in a better chance of landing on the New York Times Bestseller list.

§3

In 2020, a team at Georgia State University compiled a report on virtual learning best practices. While evidence in the field is “sparse” and “inconsistent,” the report noted that logistical issues like accessing materials—and not content-specific problems like failures of comprehension—were often among the most significant obstacles to online learning. It wasn’t that students didn’t understand photosynthesis in a virtual setting, in other words—it was that they didn’t find (or simply didn’t access) the lesson on photosynthesis at all.

That basic insight echoed a 2019 study that highlighted the crucial need to organize virtual classrooms even more intentionally than physical ones. Remote teachers should use a single, dedicated hub for important documents like assignments…

The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2020, Edutopia, By Youki Terada, Stephen Merrill, December 4, 2020

§4

I’m pleased to say that with some much appreciated asssistance, our OJS instances are now able to allow to connect authors with their ORCiD profiles. This means that all authors who have articles accepted by these journals will receive an email asking if they would like to connect to ORCiD.

I was curious how many authors from one of our existing journals had existing ORCiD profiles and so I did a quick check. This is how I did it.

First, I used OJS’s export function to download all the metadata available at an article level.

Next, I used the the information from that .csv file to create a new spreadsheet of full names. I then opened this file using OpenRefine.

Then, through the generosity from Jeff Chiu, I was able check these last names with the ORCiD api using the OpenRefine Reconciliation Service and Chiu’s SmartName server: http://refine.codefork.com/reconcile/orcid/smartnames.

Using the smart name integration, I can limit the list to those names very likely to match. With this set of likely suspects in hand, I can locate the authors in the OJS backend and then send invitations from the OJS server from their author profile (via the published article’s metadata page):

§5

I can’t wait to properly tuck into this issue of The Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship with its Special Focus on Academic Libraries and the Irrational

§6

Happy Solstice, everyone.