By Barbara Fister. Since it’s Open Access Week, I finally got around to reading a paper I’d bookmarked a few weeks back, “The Future of OA: A Large-Scale Analysis Projecting Open Access Publication and Readership.” Written by Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem, and Richard Orr, the wizards behind Our Research, a non-profit devoted to developing infrastructure for open research, it makes a measured assessment of how much open access research is being read, what form it takes, and whether being published in an open access form makes a difference in readership and (by extension) in impact. More...

By Barbara Fister. Reading Edward Snowden's Permanent Record and thinking about how we use data - and how data collectors use us. More...

By Barbara Fister. Libraries are a boon to journalism. No, I’m not referring to taking out subscriptions or encouraging literacy or filling a gap when local reporting no longer exists -- I mean the ad revenue generated whenever an article is published arguing libraries are doing it wrong. They get a lot of clicks. More...

By Barbara Fister. Eight years ago, when Occupy Wall Street protests and the Arab Spring used social media to organize and publicize protests against economic inequality and state oppression, it seemed the internet was on the side of youthful progressivism and liberal change. More...