Musings of an Academic Librarian

I became aware of author mills or vanity publishers during my first secondment as a liaison librarian at AUT.  Author mills spam academics asking for the rights to publish their research using print on demand technology and sell them for exorbitant prices.  They also sell poorly produced books that are in the public domain and can be accessed in multiple formats in the the Gutenberg Project. One example is LAP of which VDM Verlag is a subsidiary. I discovered that we had some shoddy looking books published by VDM on the shelves, even one of their Wikipedia books which are just a collection of Wikipedia articles on a particular topic.  I made sure that book was weeded!  I became fascinated with this shady world of academic publishing.  I read blog posts about VDM.  I looked on Amazon for them where there were thousands of their books on the most obscure subjects.  I even chastised one of our suppliers for listing them for sale on their website.  ...

It's still very easy to find dirty data in Google Scholar since they don't rely on data from publishers or library catalogue records for indexing, instead it's done automatically.  For example go to advanced search and do an author search for "author."  Lot of articles by A Author will come up like the example below. Do a search for "book title" and there are even more random results.

I get the impression that Google doesn't want to promote Google Scholar (GS).  For example, there's no link on Google Search to GS which I find very inconvenient.  There used to be a long time ago, why did they remove it?  GS is not in Google Apps on the Google Search homepage, yet everything else is there like Google Books, Earth and Blogger, even Plus is still there.  Also GS has no presence on Twitter so there's no news about updates and so on, yet there's a handle for Google Analytics and Google AI.  Also the GS homepage has not changed for a long time, unlike Google Search where, for example there is now an option for searching in Maori.  At least advanced search is easier to find in GS, it used to be hidden.

In the academic database Taylor and Francis Online there are both "free" and open access (OA) articles.  What is the difference I wondered?  Free articles are works that the publisher has made freely available - the PDF of the article is not behind a paywall.  However permission is required from T&F to photocopy or republish the article.  With OA articles, T&F says "you are free to share - copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format," as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author.  To put it simply, OA articles are like "free" articles but with less restrictions.

Back in May 2015 I made a YouTube video on APA 6th.  I have no idea why.  It me took quite some time to make it, particularly with learning how to add a voice-over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J745a8_1PNc&feature=emb_logo

From a lecturer: The topic of values came up so to illustrate I asked what NZTC ones were.  They (the students) mentioned Heart so I asked who at NZTC had shown them heart (being that values get lived, and are not just posters on the walls).  They immediately said the Librarian in how he found resources for them and showed them how to find others also.  Nice one Angus.  Thanks for supporting our students J