This is wonderful

Leading Byzantine Studies journal now open-access

Dr. M.S. Viji

of the International 'We Serve' Foundation, the group which took our journals and shipped them to India, posted a lovely thank-you on their Facebook page, and told me I should feel free to share the information. By his count, we donated over 8,000 journals (that may be right, I was just estimating). The forty-foot container with our materials and a total of almost 26,000 books left Friday and should be in Poona, India (aka Pune) in roughly four weeks. Our journals will go to public libraries specializing in the health sciences. Dr. Viji's organisation takes books from kindergarten up through post-doctorate studies. Rotary Clubs throughout India partner with them to distribute the books. Also a special shout-out should be made to the International Book Project, based here in Lexington, which partnered with Dr. Viji's group to send the container to India.

Dr. Viji and I in front of the empty shelves on the first day of packing (of two--these were the shelves the bound journals had been on, whereas the next day we packed the loose journals):



(If I look red-faced and rumpled, it's from all that packing. But we had a good system--he would bring boxes, I would pack, he would take them by cart to his van and transport them to the International Book Project warehouse, a short distance away, and by the time he came back twenty minutes later, I would have packed all the boxes and sat for a moment or two in front of the desk fan to cool off, and then he would drop off more boxes and take the filled ones away. I'd say the first day there were about four trips and maybe forty boxes (about nine fit in the van at one time comfortably, unless there were some small ones to squeeze in), and on the second day I know there were forty-eight, because I counted them as we went). We also discovered that loose/unbound journals are much heavier than 2-5" wide bound journals, even with the cloth covers on the latter, etc. It's just so much harder to pack the loose ones so they're not heavy. Dr. Viji did most of the lifting from cart to van and from shelf or table to cart, thankfully). The two of us worked very well and packed and transported all those journals within two days, so I think that's pretty decent. I think he did about six or seven trips that second day. It was certainly an experience, and I am so thankful I didn't have to recycle or throw away anything, but rather could send them somewhere they will be used.

I'm still here

Listening to: Linkin Park, A Thousand Suns

The weekend was okay, but not nearly long enough, I guess. We got to play the game. I started the notes today, but ran into some trouble with Windows Media Player on my laptop, so I'm going to try to use Groove Music, which is recommended for Windows 10, instead. It just stopped playing, then said there was a trouble with the file, then wouldn't start Media Player at all. Fortunately I still had it on the voice recorder should the file have been corrupted, so I have another copy as a backup.

Yesterday I got a phone call asking what I was doing after work. Apparently YKWIA's coffee maker went out before the first cup of coffee of the day, which is a crisis in that household. So after work we went to Meijer, found a simple yet very efficient coffee maker, and I put everything together and brewed the first cup of coffee. Apparently it has a warming tank for water, and makes the coffee from that, so what your pour in only replenishes what is used. So after I got it all together correctly, I had to put water in it and let it warm up, then could brew the coffee. I had to explain not to turn off the tank switch or unplug the coffee pot (he was somewhat dubious of the safety of this. Keep in mind he's from a family whose family house was so old it didn't originally have that new-fangled electricity in the bedrooms, and it was added later, running lines outside the walls. He also once destroyed a computer by unplugging all the cables to the computer before a storm, even though it was on a surge protector/battery backup, and at the time didn't realise that the VGA monitor cables screw in, so he tore the video part of the motherboard apart. He's always turned off the coffee pot AND unplugged it as a matter of course, so it didn't get accidentally left on, which is quite reasonable, really. But this one is different. I made him a couple of cups of coffee, fully expecting a call in the morning, even though I'd explained briefly how it was different than his last one. Well, apparently today he learned not to put the water in first (closing the lid to the brewer makes the water run on through), got cold water a couple of times, and coffee=coloured water at one point, and I have no idea what he was doing wrong, but he eventually got it right before I got off work. I am not allowed to ask what the problem was. He insists he did read the instructions. But the important thing was as a result, he needed coffee from teh store, and creamer, so I went and got some of that, and he splurged for dinner from McDonald's, too, so we ate. Then I dame on home.

I found out that my endocrinologist appointment is apparently Friday at 7:30 am. I thought it was the 29th, though, so YKWIA had made a fairly urgent appointment with one of his doctor's at 9 am that day. I might be able to make it work, but it will mean getting him up at an ungodly hour and taking him first to my appointment, and then his. Thank goodness for that coffee maker, is all I can say. I'll call tomorrow to make sure the appointment time is correct. I actually spoke to one of the nurses today about whether they had a code to put into the OneTOuch Reveal program, and she was unfamiliar with it (as a professional office, they use a different program entirely) and she said she'd ask the rep when they come in a couple of weeks.

I suspect they're going to have me go down a bit on my insulin. I'm on quite a bit, after all, having gone up on the Lantus slowly until my blood sugars got more normal, but now I'm going low in the morning sometimes, unless I eat a mid-morning snack. I went down to 58 this morning right before lunch, so I ate a piece of bread with peanut butter on it. By the time I normally leave for lunch, it was up to 68, which was still low, so I didn't use any rapid-acting insulin for lunch. I'm also tracking my insulin this week to see if the program will notice patterns. I've taken down the morning long-acting insulin by 5 units; I think it needs to go down at least 5 more, but keep the nightly dose the same, as that affects the morning blood sugar levels, which with me are usually higher (today, uncharacteristically, was only 103 this morning). I am also happy that now that things are more normal than they were (I'm averaging about 129 over the last two weeks, with good control), that the eye doctor's office called, and where I was on the waiting list, they've moved my appointment up to Thursday at 4:45 pm. That's a better time for my blood sugar than the morning appointment I had, and now I won't have to wait until September. So I went ahead and told my bosses of the new appointments and they were fine with it. Thursday and Friday are slower, anyway, and I can come in early tomorrow and Thursday to offset any loss of time.

Today at work I was asked if I had any trouble with the revenue cycle people taking over the referrals, which is really who should be doing them, and with an eye towards transition to the new medical centre, they want to take it off my hands, which is fine with me--it's the least favourite task of my job, to be honest, particularly calling insurance companies to see what a referral entails for their company. I still have the charges to put in and the reconciliation of charges to do. Probably at some point they'll take over the monthly audit; I think that's really supposed to in that area, it's just I was the one who started doing them when they were instituted, so I have been. But since neither my librarian job nor the data entry position are going to the new building, they're having to examine what to do to carry on some of my tasks. The facility charges won't be an issue--that's something only a hospital can charge, and they'll be an ambulatory care centre. I don't know about the cast and procedure charges I put in--they may have to be done by somebody else. And the reconciliation of charges will probably be taken over by surgery, as it is their charges.

I also spoke to the administrator today about items in the library and have a better idea of where we need to go with breaking up the library. I'll take the ideas to the library committee meeting next month. I also have a better idea of the algorithm for disposing of hospital property and the level of services available in the new building (the latter, may be a real issue for them, as they won't be able to get free interlibrary loans unless they come up with some sort of agreement with the folks at the university). I also have an editor interested in a short column on closing a library, so I'm going to write up something on it before January and maybe get it published, too. The last two books of my order came in today, so I'll catalogue them tomorrow, and that will be it. We may be able to break the newer books into appropriate offices (i.e., Green's Hand Surgery to the doctor who specialises in that, the gait analysis books to the motion laboratory, the family resource centre books to care management, etc.) The journals are actually the big issue. I really don't want to have to recycle a lot at the end of everything. I have orthopaedic journals, some of which have very good runs (I have the Journal of Bone and Joint SUrgery back to the early 20th century, as in during World War I, for example. There's also (randomly) an 1832 book on fractures. Really. And I found out that they did find a place for some historical proceedings that had been donated by a former board director, so that's great.

I'm trying to do what I can to lessen the blow of losing the library as much as I can. Considering that when it closes, it will have been in existence for 30 years and was relied upon for information needs, articles, and a host of other things, it will be sad to see it go. And of course, I go with it. :( But I'm trying to keep a stiff upper lip on that front, and in the meantime I keep looking for a position. I check my sources every day or so.

Okay, I guess I should wrap this up. Sorry I didn't blog for a couple of days. as life was rather busy. Hope you have a good week.

Did you see this?

Who's Afraid of Peer Review?

A spoof paper concocted by Science reveals little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals.

On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.

In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.

I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does not exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine. Over the past 10 months, I have submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper to open-access journals. More than half of the journals accepted the paper, failing to notice its fatal flaws. Beyond that headline result, the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.

Not that open access itself is necessarily the problem; you can still have academic rigour with this model:

The rejections tell a story of their own. Some open-access journals that have been criticized for poor quality control provided the most rigorous peer review of all. For example, the flagship journal of the Public Library of Science, PLOS ONE, was the only journal that called attention to the paper's potential ethical problems, such as its lack of documentation about the treatment of animals used to generate cells for the experiment. The journal meticulously checked with the fictional authors that this and other prerequisites of a proper scientific study were met before sending it out for review. PLOS ONE rejected the paper 2 weeks later on the basis of its scientific quality.

But this does expose the flaws in a system where the OA has been milked as a lucrative pay-to-publish model that essentially acts as a vanity press charging often exorbitant author's fees in exchange for one's name in print, preying especially on academics under pressure to publish to attain tenure, etc.

Now that's a science project

8-Year-Olds Publish Scientific Bee Study

A group of British schoolchildren may be the youngest scientists ever to have their work published in a peer-reviewed journal. In a new paper in Biology Letters, 25 8- to 10-year-old children from Blackawton Primary School report that buff-tailed bumblebees can learn to recognize nourishing flowers based on colors and patterns.

“We discovered that bumblebees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from,” the students wrote in the paper’s abstract. “We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.”

Like medical history?

Check out the journal devoted to it. The new issue is out.