Group items tagged

"11 academic publishers, including major players like Taylor & Francis and Oxford University Press, would be raising the cost of short-term e-book loans effective June 1. In some cases the increase would be as much as 300 percent."

This research study was an eye-opener for me. Until this point, I was completely unaware of these journal practices, although I had received several emails from journals I had never heard of wanting to publish papers based on conference presentations.

Although it is important to put those predatory journals under the spotlight so researchers don't fall in their trap, I always wince when I read one of those articles because too few take the time to talk about the good sides of open access journals and many readers will leave the article thinking that open access publishing is bad and not trustworthy. Of course, as mentioned in the Nature Mag article linked in the Guardian article, PLOS are excellent and have very high levels of evaluation, but they are not alone. And I have yet to find a paper that would make the same exercise with both open access journals and subscription-based journals so we could see how bad it is in the publishing world in general. That said, we must do everything within our power to stop those malpractices by predatory journals. (by the way, I have also received spam to publish in journals that were not even in my field of practice by BioMed Central. They are good, they are trustworthy. I wrote to them to say that it looks like baits to send spam calling me a Dr and inviting me to publish in fields that I know nothing about. They removed me from their mailing list but I don't know if they changed this practice)

A blog, Scholarly Open Access. Critical analysis of scholarly open-access publishing, http://scholarlyoa.com/, systematically lists fake academic journals and predatory publishers, who are taking advantage of a some open access naiveté.

"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."

For a broader class of publications, which include scientific journals, see Academic journal. "Science journal" redirects here. It is not to be confused with Science (journal), the scientific journal named "Science". In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research.

Their stories open my head every time I have the opportunity to read. Being a layman in this matter made ​​me see it more closely now! Thank you!

Their links open my head so easily. Although I did not know it, I noticed a subtle difference about it!

Welcome to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up-to-date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they are made public. Consequently, our dynamic reference work maintains academic standards while evolving and adapting in response to new research. You can cite fixed editions that are created on a quarterly basis and stored in our Archives (every entry contains a link to its complete archival history, identifying the fixed edition the reader should cite). The Table of Contents lists entries that are published or assigned. The Projected Table of Contents also lists entries which are currently unassigned but nevertheless projected.

I like this encyclopedia, I already have used it to do my homework, it has very structured information, and is like consult a great book of phylosophy and very specialized!

"Progress has been made toward making academic research, knowledge, and resources accessible to the broader public. This is a great cause. It is certainly a matter of justice and equality. Ironically, a number of scholars - particularly those from marginalized communities themselves (women, people of color, LGBT people) - cannot or are hesitant to participate in the move toward open access. However, many scholars, particularly marginalized scholars, participate in a different form of open scholarship: intellectual activism. "

Open Access Library (www.oalib.com) is an academic search engine and publisher. You can download research papers for free and submit your paper to it. It is a shared academic database.

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.

The Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, adopted by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) in 2000, have become an essential document related to the emergence of information literacy as a recognized learning outcome at many institutions of higher education

As one of the academic libraries in the Philippines, we are also using the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education as bases for our Information Literacy program though its more than a decade. We recognize its competencies for outcomes based education.

Background Back on 19th June 2014 I gave an invited plenary talk on "Open Practices for Researchers" at the Research and Innovation Conference 2014 at the University of Bolton. I was pleased to have an opportunity to share my experiences with researchers at the University of Bolton, an institution which has a clear focus on...

"Think of your meanest high school mean girl at her most gleefully, underminingly vicious. Now give her a doctorate in your discipline, and a modicum of power over your future. That's peer review."

Great article. Funny, descriptive and useful. Anyone non-academic who works with academics should understand the pressure of peer review and this article introduces it wonderfully. I want to dig deeper into this idea of open peer review.

See my bookmark to: 'Open peer review is a welcome step towards transparency ...'

This is a weekly series highlighting Open Access Button users from around the world, discussing their work, and sharing their stories. If you would like to participate, please email oabutton@gmail.com Professor Ernesto Priego, part of the team at City University London's Library and Information Science Course, was thankfully able to chat with us after a...

This title is SO meaningful. People always ask what librarians do in this digital-Google-era. Librarians enable access, that is what they do! And in many ways. In educating people on open access, how to search databases, by searching databases for patrons, by searching the full-text, by contacting other libraries to get interlibrary loans, etc. etc. etc. The role of the librarian today is still very important and relevant. Technologies did not diminish the role of the librarians, technologies pushed it to very advanced, specialized and precise roles.

"Instead of calling for more money to prop up a traditional model that was never particularly viable in the first place, we need to embrace a variety of alternatives. Academic librarians are well positioned to lead the way here, both because of their long history of managing change and because they often hold the purse strings."

"What solutions might we find within our community to solve the problem of rising textbook prices? In our latest issue brief, Nancy Maron, Ithaka S+R's Program Director for Sustainability and Scholarly Communications, looks at recent trends in textbook publishing and suggests that collaborations between university presses and academic libraries might yield a new breed of textbook more aligned to the needs of faculty and students."

"Impact Factors have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years for their lack of transparency and for misleading attempts at research assessment. Last year the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) took a groundbreaking stance by explicitly disavowing the use of impact factors in assessment. This document has since drawn support worldwide and across the academic community. But what exactly are Journal Impact Factors and why are they cause for so much concern? Here is a reading list that highlights some helpful pieces we've been able to feature on the Impact blog over the last few years."

"Although the official press release highlights that "Open Access publishing has no negative effect on book sales, and increases online usage and discovery considerably" (which is, in my opinion, only a snapshot which will sooner or later lose validity in the course of the ongoing digitalization of the academic book market), the most interesting and valuable outcomes of the pilot arise from the attempt to quantify and itemize the costs of an OA monograph."

"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."

"Responding to rapid and steep increases in the cost of scientific journals, a growing number of scholars and librarians have advocated "open access" (OA) to the scientific literature. OA publishing models are having a significant impact on the dissemination of scientific information. Despite the success of these initiatives, their impact on researchers in the developing world is uncertain. This article analyses major OA approaches adopted in the industrialized world (so-called Green OA, Gold OA, and OA mandates, as well as non-OA information philanthropy) as they relate to the consumption and production of research in the developing world. The article concludes that while the consumption of scientific literature by developing world researchers is likely to be significantly enhanced through such programs, promoting the production of research in the developing world requires additional measures. These could include the introduction of better South-focused journal indexing systems that identify high-quality journals published in the developing world, coupled with the adjustment of academic norms to reward publication in such journals. Financial models must also be developed to decrease the reliance by institutions in the developing world on information philanthropy and to level the playing field between OA journals in industrialized and developing countries."

Proposes an alternative future where author self-publish their work for peer review outside of traditional journals.

Si, porque también se menciona, como dice en su proposición, Harvie et al. (2014) hacen un magnífico trabajo que describe los hechos exasperantes de la actual académico panorama editorial. Todos sabemos cómo funciona el sistema y cómo se juega el juego. Lo que se quiere dar a conocer una realidad alternativa facilitada por la plataforma de revisión por pares abierto gratuito, libre y sugerir acciones concretas que ayuden al movimiento científico comunidad hacia un sistema de evaluación de conocimientos y el intercambio más abierto y eficiente que se divorcia de revisión por pares desde la publicación de revistas.

The proposed alternative future is achievable, but not without resistance of traditional publishing, I think.