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[URGENT] Protect Vancouver from cowardly budget cuts Decades of progress toward making Vancouver a greener and more livable city are on the line

Sign up to speak and/or write a letter to the mayor and councillors, urging them to rethink what would be a disastrous decision.

You can find a letter tool here: act.stand.earth/page/90450/a...

Home | Draw The Line - For life, for people, for the planet. Join us this September to draw the line against injustice, pollution, and violence; for a future of peace, clean energy, and fairness.

I just joined the global call to #DrawTheLine — for peace, climate justice, and a world beyond fossil fuels. I'll be taking action in Vancouver on Sept. 20, 2025. Will you join me? drawtheline.world?event_id=262...

UBC Library supports Canadian research data discovery in European open scholarship platform UBC Library has added a new research platform, OpenAIRE, to its suite of data discovery systems, making Canadian research data more accessible to scholars in the European Union. OpenAIRE is a European platform and not-for-profit organisation that supports open scholarship by providing the infrastructure to accumulate, store and link open research from all disciplines. “OpenAIRE is the EU’s Google Scholar for research objects. It allows researchers in the European Union to see a variety of scholarly outputs, including grants, datasets, articles, books and more,” says Eugene Barsky, Research Data Management Librarian at Koerner Library, who completed this project as part of his sabbatical. Collaborating with the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance), UBC Library has enhanced the Lunaris platform, Canada’s national discovery service for multidisciplinary data, for research data discovery in OpenAIRE under the FAIR principles. Through Lunaris, information about UBC research data—in the form of metadata records—is brought together in a centralized repository, known as a metadata store. These collected metadata records are then made available in different formats, which are used by various discovery services, such as ProQuest, Google Data, DataOne, the US National Library of Medicine, and now EU’s OpenAIRE. By making research data available in this way, through a single repository and in multiple metadata formats, UBC research reaches a wider audience globally. “If you have any partner organizations, or know of any disciplinary databases or researchers who want to access more Canadian research data, now we have a way to give them this type of access,” says Barsky. “And scholarly partners, like OpenAIRE, can acquire that metadata in the formats they need for interoperability.” In simpler terms, interoperability means that different research platforms and systems can easily share, read, and use the same data—no extra work or reformatting required. There are also plans in the works to add additional enhancements, says Barsky, like map search capabilities: “Our next step is to make Canadian research data accessible to the world in a geospatial format, in addition to other metadata standards.”

UBC Library supports Canadian research data discovery in European open scholarship platform - About UBC Library https://about.library.ubc.ca/2025/05/12/ubc-library-supports-canadian-research-data-discovery-in-european-open-scholarship-platform/

Bunk used to justify distrust.

Researchers find rampant misinformation at government meetings during the height of the pandemic publichealth.uci.edu/2025/05/22/r...

"Misinformation about vaccines & disease prevention continue to be pervasive in our society & can be harmful to people & communities”

‘Vaguely Threatening’: Federal Prosecutor Queries Leading Medical Journal The New England Journal of Medicine received a letter suggesting that it was biased and compromised by external pressure. Other journals have also received the letter.

Breaking News: A federal prosecutor interrogated the The New England Journal of Medicine — which is considered the world’s most prestigious medical journal — in what its editor described as a “vaguely threatening” letter.

75% of US scientists who answered Nature poll consider leaving More than 1,600 readers answered our poll; many said they were looking for jobs in Europe and Canada.

Wow.

The darkness descends.

75% of US scientists who answered Nature poll consider leaving www.nature.com/articles/d41... via @nature.com

Where to? "Anywhere that supports science..."

The Importance of Critical Thinking Skills From medical myths to media bias, misinformation is everywhere. Strengthen your ability to think critically and make informed decisions in a chaotic world.

www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-...

No, but I received the alert on my phone and it seems like only a few of us did in our library. Some of my colleagues felt it but no alert.

Yes! Let's not forget Eunice Foote!

Ok, this is so timely as I put together a history of climate science display for Climate Emergency Week. #climatesciencehistory
bsky.app/profile/beea...

close up of a grey and ginger torti with white whiskers

The sweetest torti I know. I'm always so grateful to see this little face every day. #midweekchill #linathecat #catsofbluesky #whiskerwednesdays

TikTok took it down, so let’s share the shit out of this reading list. #HolocaustRemembranceDay #NeverAgainIsNow #BookSky
#StateMediaCensorship

Influencers are using the Los Angeles fires to hawk wellness products Essential oils, detox regimens, and the booming disaster economy.

Damn, the wellness space is filled with darkness.

Influencers are using the Los Angeles fires to hawk wellness products www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

@this_is_mallory: “heartbreaking and really irresponsible.”

or....Christmas Day by She & Him

Silver Bells by She and Him. It's short and sweet.

Geneviève Bergeron,
Hélène Colgan,
Nathalie Croteau,
Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward,
Maud Haviernick,
Maryse Laganière,
Maryse Leclair,
Anne-Marie Lemay,
Sonia Pelletier,
Michèle Richard,
Annie St-Arneault,
Annie Turcotte,
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz. 💜 #14notforgotten #16days

Study: Browsing negative content online makes mental health struggles worse People struggling with their mental health are more likely to browse negative content online, and in turn, that negative content makes their symptoms worse, according to a series of studies by researc...

Study: Browsing negative content online makes mental health struggles worse news.mit.edu/2024/study-b...

"...a causal, bidirectional relationship between health and what you do online."

“After browsing this content, their symptoms become worse. It is a feedback loop.”

Developing a Canadian artificial intelligence medical curriculum using a Delphi study - npj Digital Medicine npj Digital Medicine - Developing a Canadian artificial intelligence medical curriculum using a Delphi study

Excellent new @ubcmedicine.bsky.social led paper re: expert consensus of key elements of AI integration into the medical curriculum. I'd like to see librarians as experts as key learning elements (ie. copyright, equity, bias) overlap with our work in medical libraries! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

But in other ways, Google Scholar is opaque. Among the key concerns is a lack of insight into what content, including what journals, it searches and the algorithm it uses to recommend articles. It also restricts bulk downloads of its search results, which could be used for bibliometric analyses among other things. “We don’t have a lot of insight into one of the most valuable tools that we have in science,” says West. Acharya says Google Scholar is chiefly a search tool and its main goal is to help scholars find the most useful research. Updated engines In the past few years, competitors have emerged that offer this kind of bibliometrics data, although none can beat Google Scholar’s size and access to full-text articles behind paywalls. One noteable example is the index OpenAlex, which launched in 2022. The previous year, Microsoft Academic Graph, which crawled the web for scholarly information, had been discontinued and its entire data set released. OpenAlex builds on this and other open sources of scholarly data. Users can search the content it catalogues by authors, institutions and citations and also download its entire records for free. “They are doing what we wanted Google Scholar to do,” says Martín-Martín.

News piece marking 20 years of Google Scholar instead reads to me as a recognition it will soon be overtaken. #OpenAlex in particular is well-suited.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

h/t @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy for the find, @aarontay.bsky.social & @jevinwest.bsky.social for quotes.

I've made the switch and deactivated my X account. I hadn't used that account since it became X. Despite the photo, it's a cloudy and rainy day, but I'm feeling the blue sky around the corner. #silverlinings #newtobluesky #byebyex