… Elsevier delivered for me. Ah, the sweet smell of fraud in the evening.

Tuesday, I heard that they’d (oops) published a fake journal under a fake imprint. Now they’ve admitted it, but not before the LSW had sunk its teeth in and decided that the upcoming zine could be hilariously renamed The Australasian Journal of Library Science (complete with some of the most pesky problems any journal could ever have… seriously, go read the thread behind that link), and that Elsevier could perhaps benefit from some customized Cod of Ethics merch.

Now we’re up to six fake journals (sorry for the registration required by that link, but it’s free), and Dorothea has contributed some less hilarious, more to-the-point commentary.

If I were writing the “scenes from next week’s show” for this particular drama, it’d include revelations that their peer review system is run via seance, or that there’s an invisible clause in their author agreements that really does sign over the authors’ souls in addition to their copyrights. But since I’m not in charge, all I can say is Stay Tuned!

My good friend, Greg, has announced that Uncontrolled Vocabulary is going on a hiatus of undetermined length. While I’m selfishly sorry that I won’t be getting a new episode added to my podcast listening this week, I’ve got to admit that he has the best of all possible reasons for making this decision. So au revoir, UV. I’ll save “goodbye” until I’m told it’s needed.

It has historically been kind of a pain to get our South Of The Border hands on Canadian census data online. Students kept getting thwarted by the “yes you can have access if you just pay us” messages, and if we didn’t happen to have the right standing order to the right compendium, there was a good chance we’d have to stop there.

A couple of months ago, though, there appeared a small but significant change to the E-STAT interface (which is an online tool that grants access to the Census of Population and to other socioeconomic data collected by Statistics Canada). What is this change? Well, the main page now features a blessedly short click-license that basically says that if you’re a student or on the staff or faculty at an educational institution, you can access the site and it’s content for the purposes of research and study. Alleluia.