Leo Betschart @betschart@qoto.org

@kravietz
As you point out it can be difficult on administrative grounds for organizations or businesses to make a donation outright. One approach that worked for me as a (now retired) manager, and I mention it for readers who may be in a position to act, is to identify needed features or fixes that are relevant for your organization and finance that work. Then you have a business case and measurable deliverables for the bean counters.

Few things piss me off more than a huge, multi-billion IT corporation that suddenly sends me an email regarding an open-source project I’ve been running since 1990’s that I’ve recently shut down due to absolute lack of interest from its users… which happened to be telcos and large IT companies. Here’s what I replied:

Thank you for your email. As it’s often the case with open-source projects, their value to organisations is only noticed and appreciated when they go offline. I have maintained pam_tacplus for the last years and it had the call for sponsorship prominently displayed for most of the time specifically because it’s a legacy project that is difficult to maintain. None of the commercial companies that clearly do rely on it ever demonstrated any interest in even nominal donations, so it was archived. While it’s notable someone finally noticed it, I’m not the person to discuss any future development any more.

I did work in large companies and I do understand the sick logic that drives them, when it’s easier to get approval for annual spending of $50k for some office decorations than $100 for a mission-critical project which happens to be open-source and can be used for free for some time.

But it’s possible. If you’re working in such roles, please make every effort to get this $100 because otherwise it will become your responsibility to develop and maintain code that you always got for free.

who would you rather have at your author Q & A, a "this is more of a comment" person, or a bear

Mein Vortrag (auf der Jahrestagung der 'Vereinigung der juristischen Bibliotheken der Schweiz ') fand heute in diesem Verhandlungssaal des Bundesverwaltungsgerichts in St. Gallen statt. Und ich weiss jetzt auch nicht....

Wie hat mein Leben mich hierher geführt?

It is surprising how often, when I say "Hey, I'm reading this really interesting book..." people immediately respond with "Oh, you have TIME to read?! I don't even..."

Like... what is that?
What makes people jump right to that?

It bugs me for a bunch of reasons.

1. Yes, I am busy too. I make time because it relaxes me.

2. No, I don't care how much you read and I'm not judging you. You don't need to defend yourself.

3. I wanted to share something I found fun, geez.

#reading

Whenever a scientific paper mentions Indigenous people or issues, my first check is for an Indigenous co-author. It shows me how closely the researchers worked with native people, and more importantly, it's a metric of trust put in the research by an Indigenous partner.

This may be the first time I've ever seen an entire Indigenous nation cited as a co-author of a paper. Not an individual, not even an office. The entire St'uxwtéws First Nation.

#SciComm #fire #ecology

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ecs2.4795

"The male midlife crisis is well-documented and parodied, but we have no concept of what a deep reckoning with the female self looks like."

I wrote a deeply personal essay for a new website for Gen X and elder Millennial women

This one is a little scary to put out there! Hope you enjoy it.
https://jennymag.com/2024/03/27/what-is-a-female-midlife-crisis/

Mastodon is my primary social media, and there’s a lot I dig about it. But if there’s one thing I’d like to change, it’s the way people say THIS IS A CRISIS RIGHT NOW AND IT’S THE MAIN CRISIS AND IF YOU DON’T DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT RIGHT NOW YOU’RE BAD AND WRONG!!!

Know what? It’s *your* crisis. Do what you think is right. Stop judging others for having different priorities, political or otherwise. Quit putting everything in black and white, absolute terms. It’s exhausting, and nobody can live like that.

I just took an #Elsevier survey on "how the research community views and uses different #SocialMedia platforms for professional and personal purposes."
https://confm.it/r/bYedqfc

One question asked which social-media platforms I use. It offered a list of platforms with checkboxes. The list included #GooglePlus, and excluded #Mastodon and #Bluesky.

IT IS HAPPENING! Today, Signal launches phone number privacy & usernames! These features let you use Signal w/o sharing your phone number with the people you talk to

Proud to add more privacy to Signal, & proud of the smart, careful work the team did to make this happen ♥️

You can read more here: https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/

#QOTO is back after a long migration in the first stage of our upgrade. Now that we are on a new home we will give it 24 horus to see if the move was bug free (As it seems to be) and then we will start upgrading versions one at a time day by day.. The upgrades are prepared and ready and should be **much** quicker.

The move took a while as we keep a backlog of every message to the start of the fediverse so our media and DB stores are quite large and it took a long time. But we are back!!!

I'm looking for common spelling errors in scientific papers. Here's my list so far: confident interval, fischer's exact, guassian, kaplan-meir, odd ratio, odds ration, pubic health, public heath, randomised controlled trail, risk ration, statically significant.

@betschart Obviously you can randomly open and close libraries with the flick of a switch.

Today, we have a big announcement: The new Leiden Ranking Open Edition has been launched! 🎉

The new ranking is completely based on OpenAlex data and provides an open and transparent alternative to traditional rankings.

https://open.leidenranking.com