Carlos Cámara @ccamara@scholar.social

Scholar.social is going to be putting on a free conference covering a variety of topics! We will have signup sheets for moderators, presenters, *and* participants coming soon.

#summerschool

PSA: I know image descriptions aren't possible for everyone and I respect that access-needs clash (all disabled people are familiar with this phenomenon). But I also know a lot more people can describe their images than are currently doing so.

If you can, you should describe
* jokes and memes; it's no good telling me I'm not missing anything
* gifs and videos
* your art! I see so much art I can't boost
* cute animal pics; I'm always sad when I can't boost the cute dogs
* audio clips too!

That is, when your work is freely available, more people read it and cite it. And for scholars, more citations means more career opportunities: jobs, grants, conference invites...Everything that matters to the progress of scholarship.

It's obvious, but it has some fascinating implications - like, "If you're a scientist who wants to progress, you should let Nature publish your work and get the prestige, then defeat Nature's paywall so that Scihub can distribute it and get the impact."

eof/

Not only does Scihub make it possible for scholars to see the literature they need to review to continue their work, irrespective of institutional affiliation (this is especially important in the Global South, where many universities can't afford subscriptions).

But - as a quartet of scholars from Brazil, Colombia, Czech, and Australia show in a new paper...well, the title says it all, really: "THE SCI-HUB EFFECT: SCI-HUB DOWNLOADS LEAD TO MORE ARTICLE CITATIONS."

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.14979.pdf

7/

Alchemy looks a lot like science: an alchemist observes a phenomenon, hypothesises a causal relationship, and designs and performs an experiment to test the hypothesis.

The difference is in what happens next.

The scientist publishes their findings so that others can critique it. The alchemist does not. Scientists aren't smarter than alchemists, so scientists are every bit as capable of making themselves believe that drinking mercury is good for their health.

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This I like. #together

Free accessibility tips from my wife, a professional UX designer who does a lot of accessibility work:

1. Keep your image descriptions short, simple, and descriptive. Try to limit it to a single tweet-length.

2. Don’t do both alt-text AND a visible image description. This will result in screenreaders reading your caption twice.

3. Use camel case in your hashtags.