Class notes 11/2/10

Here are the websites we looked at in class today:

Google to Redirect China Users to Uncensored Site
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/technology/23google.html
Article from the New York Times earlier this year on the decision by Google to shutter its Chinese site and redirect users to the Hong Kong version for Chinese-language searching. What are your thoughts on this, especially given what we read in the Grimmelmann article about Google’s history of censorship of its Chinese site?

Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories
Here’s an example of a news story that has captured the popular consciousness despite being untrue, an example of the power of media hype (which Fister discusses).

Editor quits after journal accepts bogus science article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jun/18/science-editor-resigns-hoax-article
Sometimes the peer review process fails — this article from The Guardian (a British newspaper) describes a computer-generated article that was accepted for publication in a scholarly journal.

When big pharma pays a publisher to publish a fake journal…
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/05/when_big_pharma_pays_a_publisher_to_publ.php
Blog post about the revelation that scholarly publishing company Elsevier had created a fake publication that appeared to be a peer-reviewed journal but was in reality a collection of articles favorably reviewing drugs from the pharmacy company Merck.

Class notes 9/2/10

• Planned Obsolescence, the scholarly book we discussed in class, is an innovative example of new methods of peer review that are possible with digital texts.

• Library Success is a group wiki created and used by librarians around the world. It’s a great example of a collaborative project published only on the internet.