Group items tagged

"Scholarly communication outreach and education activities are proliferating in academic libraries. Simultaneously, digital humanists-a group that includes librarians and non-librarians based in libraries, as well as scholars and practitioners without library affiliation-have developed forms of scholarship that demand and introduce complementary innovations focused on infrastructure, modes of dissemination and evaluation, openness, and other areas with implications for scholarly communication. Digital humanities experiments in post-publication filtering, open peer review, middle-state publishing, decentering authority, and multimodal and nonlinear publication platforms are discussed in the context of broader library scholarly communication efforts."

Open Access repositories promote the widespread dissemination of scientific and scholarly production. Researchers and teachers publish free on line digital assets for claiming their activity and for sharing research results with other researchers. In particular universities, research centres, libraries and, for limited subsets of their collections, museums, administrative archives and other cultural institutions are promoting open access. In the future, a considerable section of scholarly, academic and cultural institutions memory will be formed by born-digital assets, stored in open access archives. Their digital collections will have an ever growing relevance in making up the scientific and information heritage of the next generations. In order to ensure that these objects will survive and continue to be cited, scholarly and academic communities should be committed to the long term preservation of their repositories.

Michael Eisen is a researcher at UC Berkley and a co-founder of Public Library of Science. He discusses the news that the American Association for the Advancement of Science named Kent Anderson as its new Publisher, who is a critic of the open access movement. The most interesting thing for me was the mention in his blog post as well as in the comments section by another, that it is perhaps a trend for scholarly publications to produce open access journals. A peculiar motive, to perhaps "own" the open movement? It would be interesting to learn more about this trend, motivations behind it, and the implications on how that affects the OA movement.

And then a quick Google search found an announcement that Nature will be fully open access as of 20 October 2014... but still costs $5,200 USD to cover the article processing charges - perhaps Universities should (will) start to pay these costs instead of the high costs of subscriptions to scholarly journals as they continue to open up their access. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/open_access/index.html

Wow--these article publishing charges are ridiculous. I don't know if the scholars whose work gets published in these esteemed journals have budgets that would allow them to cover such fees, but I am sure that I wouldn't be able to get multiple articles covered by grants for my own work in the social sciences. And I'm 99% sure that the public universities I've worked for would not be ponying up that kind of money to cover my publication fees. This seems like yet another way to penalize scholars working in fields that don't get big grants or living in countries that don't have this kind of money to throw around. I prefer the UK's policy of requiring all nationally funded research to be published open access without any publication fees. That's the only way to even the playing field.

In this article Abby Clobridge discusses the Scholarly Publication landscape today as it relates to open access journals, and how we need to re-think some of our standards for publishing (both my authors and by publishers).

Part 2 of this article addresses OA and journal impact factors, and part 5 give examples on how libraries/librarians can contribute in spreading OA acceptance.

Criteria that can be used to distinguish between popular magazine articles, articles from trade publications, and scholarly journal articles

"Funded by tertiary institutions rather than individual researchers, this new model seeks to provide open access not just to traditional academic publications but to all forms of scholarly output."

"This raises the interesting and important question of whether publication in an OA journal represents the end of a process or the beginning of a different one. The difference is marketing, a term that is often misunderstood in scholarly circles. Marketing means creating demand for something. Traditional publishers do this with their brands and (for books) their authors. For OA publishers the challenge is to continue to keep pushing a particular paper after it has appeared online. There are many ways to do this, of which simply making the content openly available is one (allowing an article to get indexed by search engines and pointed to by bloggers and others). But to continue to keep the article in the eyes of its prospective readers, new means of attracting attention have to be developed. "

Online discussions and post-publication analyses are catching mistakes that sneak past editorial review. This article describes the pitfalls with editorial review and pre-publication peer review, and advocates for post-publication crowd-sourced reviewing through social media platforms.

I think having a comments section is a great way to provide feedback on the information provided. Often when I read articles the comments section allows me to understand different perspectives and interpretations of the information.

This article, while not necessarily explicitly, managed to hint at what I find to be a source of problematic practices/outcomes in the academy, publishing, etc. That is, it is not necessarily that traditional peer review processes are ineffective at finding errors or misconduct, but rather it is when our processes and practices become so systematized that we can mindlessly or effortlessly engage in and reproduce them without our full, critical attention that they can produce problems. While I think there are good reasons to critique the notion of peer and "expert" culture within traditional peer review processes, an additional and separate critique is the problems that arise with systematization. The article implicitly addressed this when the author commented that current post-publication environments "provide a public space that is not under the control of journal editors and conference organizers." Yet, as White indicates, there exists skepticism of the value of post-publication reviews along with a simultaneous effort to build post-publication systems that have standards that put those questioning it at ease. The National Institutes of Health establishing requirements that potential post-publication reviewers must meet demonstrated this. That is, they are trying to figure out how to systematize post-publication. For me, what this article indicates is that we ought to figure out how to keep our academic and publishing processes "fresh," so to speak. This way we don't become so comfortable with our methods and practices that they allow us to simply go through the motions without fostering innovative and critical inquiry.

"By leveraging technology, we can open new doors to scholarly inquiry for ourselves and our students. Through new collaborations, we can create exciting shared spaces, both virtual and physical, where that inquiry can take place. The library is a natural home for these technology-rich spaces.

This article is fantastic, and speaks to just about everything I'm passionate about as an aspiring academic librarian. I'm somewhat worried about how smaller universities-my chosen workplace-will adapt to these newer models of scholarly communication and publication, and generally with how the academic conversation is changing. These exciting developments in what the university means have the potential to widen the already extensive divide between smaller and larger schools. I know the challenges section at the end talks a little bit about convincing decision makers to fund these projects, but has anyone read anything about how these changes can be made specifically by smaller or poorly funded universities?

Peer review citation ring exposed in major scholarly publisher SAGE.

As a scholarly publisher, we enable scholarly journals to take full advantage of the opportunities unlocked by electronic publishing and open access. Through our comprehensive and modern publication practices and technological expertise we realise each journal's full potential, and improve their scientific impact whilst upholding international publishing standards and ethical practices.

How the Internet has evolved to effect our society in terms of collaboration, government, participation, intellectual property, content, and information as a whole

Open Access book - Opening Science: the evolving guide on how the internet is changing research, collaboration and scholarly publishing / edited by Sonke Bartling and Sascha Friesike. 2014

Scientific journals are surely important. They provide the most effective means for disseminating and archiving scientific results, and so are a key part of an enterprise on which our health, security, and prosperity ultimately depend. Publications are used by universities, funding agencies, and others as a primary measure of research productivity and impact. They play a decisive role in hiring, promotion, and salary decisions, and in the ranking of departments, institutions, even nations. With big rewards tied to publication, it is not surprising that some people engage in unethical behavior, abuse, and downright fraud.

I have found some interesting research publications on this site, in particular to MOOCs. Leading Social Science Research Delivered Daily Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences. Each of SSRN's networks encourages the early distribution of research results by distributing Submitted abstracts and by soliciting abstracts of top quality research papers around the world. We now have hundreds of journals, publishers, and institutions in Partners in Publishing that provide working papers for distribution through SSRN's eLibrary and abstracts for publication in SSRN's electronic journals. The SSRN eLibrary consists of two parts: an Abstract Database containing abstracts on over 563,000 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an Electronic Paper Collection currently containing over 465,300 downloadable full text documents in Adobe Acrobat pdf format. The eLibrary also includes the research papers of a number of Fee Based Partner Publications. The Networks encourage readers to communicate directly with authors and other subscribers concerning their own and others' research. To facilitate this we publish detailed author contact information including email addresses for authors of each paper.

ScienceOpen, is a next generation Open Access platform that builds on the premise that scholarly publishing is not an end in itself, but the beginning of a dialogue to move research forward. It combines over 1 million articles from all areas of modern science, the humanities and social sciences with collaborative pre-publication workspaces, immediate publication and post-publication peer-review.

A plan to convert traditional subscription publication formats, including society-published journals and books or monographs, to OA, based on an annual or multi-year payment made by every institution of higher education, no matter what its size or classification, and by any institution that benefits from the research that is generated by those within the academy.

Compares the cost of articles from society and non-profit publishers to those of the major commercial publishers.

Its crazy. The numbers (of profit and control) for the publishing companies is astronomical!

Universities have received a poor deal from the system of private, subscription-based access to knowledge production since the port WW2 commercialization of the scientific publishing industry. It is absurd that the university or research funder supplies the content (the research), pays for the authoring (the time of the researcher writing the article), and provides and pays for the time of peer reviewers and academic editors. In addition, it often pays page charges or formatting charges to publishers. It then cedes copyright and finally buys back its own research at prices that have escalated at four times the rate of inflation in the past decade and a half! Considering most of this research is conducted using public funds, it becomes a moral argument when public resources are used once again to purchase access to the outputs of this research. The commercial model of disseminating research does not obey the rules of supply and demand. A relatively small number of 'core' journals occupy monopoly positions, in that university libraries have to subscribe to access their content, whatever the cost, because these journals have been established as 'must-have' resources. While the practice of 'bundling' offers the advantage of bulk pricing, it reduces room for choice, as bundles consume large chunks of library budgets, making it difficult to subscribe to smaller, individual titles. In addition, the inflexibility of indexing systems makes it difficult for new journals to establish themselves; thus compromising the potential for smaller niche subjects and newer interdisciplinary areas. Thankfully the global inequalities engendered by the commercialization of scholarly publishing are being challenged by open access.

This is an interesting article in the Guardian reporting on Harvard's move against rising prices of journal publications. It calls for Faculty to make their research freely available.

Well worth reading. It also mentioned a model of how publication of the article could be paid for: "Open access comes in various guises, but one model requires authors to pay to have their articles published and made freely available to anyone." In the academic world, research /grant monies would allow authors to build the cost of publishing into their research/grant applications.

Very interesting article. Especially because it relates to Harvard who (alongside with Stanford) is an opinion leader among universities. Other universities watch Harvard (and Stanford) and it is highly likely that these two universities are able to influence the trend.

While not exactly on topic, and newspapers are not generally considered Scholarly publishers, they do engage with the public, and frequently act as a liaison between journals/researchers and the public. In the past ten years or so, people have gotten used to accessing, for free, newspapers and television reports as a way to inform themselves. While this is good for the individual, it is not so good for the publisher. Many traditional news outlets have been struggling to find a way to generate revenue in a way that neither smacks of consumerism, nor excludes the average citizen from participating. IN the UK, the liberal-leaning newspaper The Guardian has begun selling 'memberships', and hosting events ranging from lectures to classes on things as diverse as photography and creative writing.