Subscribe via RSS, Email, or Twitter
Posts tagged scholarly communication
It’s about time that faculty woke up and realized their interests aren’t different from those of the librarians.» via University of Pittsburgh Library System director Rush Miller, quoted in the U Pitt University Times on the Elsevier boycott. Right on! (via arlpolicynotes)
-
9 February 2012
at 12:13 pm -
Source: utimes.pitt.edu
-
via arlpolicynotes
-
5 notes
-
libraries
scholarly communication
faculty
publishing
librarians
- permanent link
I rarely look at the top journals these days. I canceled my subscriptions to all but the most relevant—Foreign Policy, for example, is one I will continue to read. Why? I read it because it comes out every month, and it’s timely and interesting. When I want to read what my esteemed colleagues have to say about theory or current events, I turn to the Foreign Policy website, which includes some of the best blogs by the top names in my field. They are talking to each other, and others are leaving important and interesting comments—in effect, “peer reviewing” is happening in real time, and in a transparent way. Intellectual discourse is moving forward at a rapid pace, not in the glacial quarterly publishing of journals.» via How Journals Put Us Behind the Times | Inside Higher Ed
-
6 February 2012
at 10:51 am -
Source: insidehighered.com
-
9 notes
-
scholarly communication
journals
publishing
education
higher education
- permanent link
A survey published today in Science shows that journal editors often ask prospective authors to add superfluous citations of the journal to articles, and authors feel they can’t refuse. (The Science paper is for subscribers only, but you can read a summary here.) The extra citations artificially inflate a journal’s impact and prestige.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
-
3 February 2012
at 9:42 pm -
11 notes
-
publishing
scholarly communication
education
higher education
ethics
- permanent link
In academe, the game of how to win friends and influence people is serious business. Administrators and grant makers want proof that a researcher’s work has life beyond the library or the lab.
But the current system of measuring scholarly influence doesn’t reflect the way many researchers work in an environment driven more and more by the social Web. Research that used to take months or years to reach readers can now find them almost instantly via blogs and Twitter.
That kind of activity escapes traditional metrics like the impact factor, which indicates how often a journal is cited, not how its articles are really being consumed by readers.
An approach called altmetrics—short for alternative metrics—aims to measure Web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked. “There’s a gold mine of data that hasn’t been harnessed yet about impact outside the traditional citation-based impact,” says Dario Taraborelli, a senior research analyst with the Strategy Team at the Wikimedia Foundation and a proponent of the idea.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
-
2 February 2012
at 10:28 am -
3 notes
-
scholarship
internet
impact
altmetrics
education
higher education
publishing
scholarly communication
- permanent link
Elsevier, the global publishing company, is responsible for The Lancet, Cell, and about 2,000 other important journals; the iconic reference work Gray’s Anatomy, along with 20,000 other books—and one fed-up, award-winning mathematician.
Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, who won the Fields Medal for his research, has organized a boycott of Elsevier because, he says, its pricing and policies restrict access to work that should be much more easily available. He asked for a boycott in a blog post on January 21, and as of Monday evening, on the boycott’s Web site The Cost of Knowledge, nearly 1,900 scientists have signed up, pledging not to publish, referee, or do editorial work for any Elsevier journal.
The company has sinned in three areas, according to the boycotters: It charges too much for its journals; it bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money to buy things they don’t want in order to get a few things they do want; and, most recently, it has supported a proposed federal law (called the Research Works Act) that would prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by its grant recipients freely available.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
-
31 January 2012
at 11:14 pm -
17 notes
-
libraries
publishing
scholarly communication
elsevier
future
business
faculty
education
higher education
- permanent link
» via Academic publishers have become the enemies of science | Dr Mike Taylor | Science | guardian.co.uk (via slantback)The result of all this free and far-below-minimum-wage professional work is journal articles in which the publisher, which has done almost nothing, owns the copyright and is able to sell copies back to libraries at monopolistic costs, and to individuals at $30 or more per view.
What is surprising is how complicit scientists are in perpetuating this feudal system. The RWA is noisily supported by the Association of American Publishers, which has as members more than 50 scholarly societies – including, ironically, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which by its implicit support of the RWA is making itself an association for the retardation of science.
-
16 January 2012
at 3:44 pm -
Source: Guardian
-
via slantback
-
21 notes
-
scholarship
publishing
higher education
scholarly communication
- permanent link
The scholarly publishing industry used to offer a service. It used to be about making sure that knowledge was shared as broadly as possible to those who would find it valuable using the available means of distribution: packaged paper objects shipped through mail to libraries and individuals. It made a profit off of serving an audience. These days, the scholarly publishing industry operates as a gatekeeper, driven more by profits than by the desire to share information as widely as possible. It stopped innovating and started resting on its laurels. And the worst part about it? Scholars have bent over and let that industry continuously violate them and the university libraries that support them.» via Save Scholarly Ideas, Not the Publishing Industry (a rant) « Social Media Collective
-
12 December 2011
at 9:51 pm -
Source: socialmediacollective.org
-
6 notes
-
scholarly communication
publishing
education
higher education
- permanent link
[C]ollectively the top two or maybe three publishers take out of the academic world enough profits to pay for every research article in every discipline to be made freely available online for everyone to access using PLoS’s publishing fee approach.» via Amazing true fact from Glyn Moody at Techdirt. (via arlpolicynotes)
-
3 November 2011
at 11:34 am -
Source: techdirt.com
-
via arlpolicynotes
-
11 notes
-
publishing
scholarly communication
education
higher education
business
profit
- permanent link
Well-known coder and activist Aaron Swartz was arrested Tuesday, charged with violating federal hacking laws for downloading millions of academic articles from a subscription database service that MIT had given him access to. If convicted, Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
Swartz, the 24-year-old executive director of Demand Progress, has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls. Swartz, who was aware of the investigation, turned himself in Tuesday.
» via Wired
-
19 July 2011
at 11:10 pm -
5 notes
-
tech
technology
scholarly communication
jstor
libraries
hacking
data
information
- permanent link
University presses have injected a lot of energy lately into collaboration: with each other, with their parent institutions, and with academic libraries. But this month, at the presses’ annual meeting, the appeal of collaborating ran up against worries that their strongest asset, intellectual property, is under threat.
Collaborate and share—but protect your copyrights: That was the sometimes conflicting message heard at the Association of American University Presses gathering here. “Copyright is under constant attack today,” Jon A. Baumgarten, a veteran intellectual-property lawyer, told the crowd at a plenary session on “Back to the Future of Copyright.” He advised the press association to be vigilant.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
-
13 June 2011
at 9:49 am -
6 notes
-
education
higher education
publishing
scholarly communication
copyright
law
- permanent link
Not long ago, Ms. Hawkins heard from a junior scholar who wanted her to consider his revised dissertation for a series she edits for Pickering & Chatto, an academic press. She liked the idea—until she discovered his work was fully accessible on the Internet. Few would buy the specialized book, she worried, if much of its contents was already freely available.
“The problem I have is when anyone can either find the dissertation immediately on Google or by going to the university page and just clicking it and downloading it, whether they are in the United States or Taiwan,” Ms. Hawkins says. Unless he could limit access, she told the hopeful author, she wouldn’t consider it for the series.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
-
7 April 2011
at 8:13 am -
scholarly communication
publishing
internet
faculty
- permanent link
Academic librarians are welcoming the merger earlier this month of two major university press ebook initiatives that could have a significant impact on the market for scholarly publishing and research.
Project MUSE Editions (PME) and the University Press ebook Consortium (UPeC) have formed a new partnership called the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC), which will launch January 1, 2012.
» via Library Journal
-
17 March 2011
at 4:35 pm -
3 notes
-
libraries
ebooks
books
publishing
scholarly communication
- permanent link
Operating in this digitally powered era of “information hyperabundance,” university presses still get most of their sales revenue from print sales. But they’re also putting more and more energy into trying electronic, open-access, and nontraditional publishing—and are likely to be experimenting for a very long time. So says a new report made public today by the Association of American University Presses.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
-
7 March 2011
at 2:16 pm -
publishing
university presses
scholarly communication
education
future
- permanent link
As e-reading devices gain popularity, professors and students are struggling to adapt them to an academic fundamental: proper citations, which other scholars can use.
The trouble is that in electronic formats, there are no fixed pages. The Kindle, developed by Amazon, does away with page numbers entirely. Along with other e-book readers, the Kindle allows users to change font style and size, so the number of words on a screen can vary. Instead of pages, it uses “location numbers” that relate to a specific part of a book.
Other devices, like the Sony Reader, which reflows text based on font size and model of device, have different methods, so the same passage might have a different identifier. Things get more confusing when readers come in various screen sizes.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
-
9 February 2011
at 10:19 am -
6 notes
-
ebooks
citations
scholarly communication
ereaders
- permanent link
‘Facebook of Science’ Seeks to Reshape Peer Review
Vitek Tracz is a risk-taker. He put his money into open-access publishing when free Internet journals seemed like a long shot.
“Everybody promised me that open access would not succeed,” recalls the scientific publisher. “They said I would go bankrupt. I thought there was a very high chance of that, myself. But it now turns out to be significantly profitable.” Two years ago he sold his BioMed Central publications—there are now about 200 of them—to Berlin-based Springer for an undisclosed sum, thought to be in the region of $50-million.
Now, the man described by his colleagues as one of the most innovative and mercurial forces in publishing wants to reinvent the basics of scholarly communication. Mr. Tracz plans to turn his latest Internet experiment, a large network of leading scientists called the Faculty of 1000, into what some call “the Facebook of science” and a force that will change the nature of peer review. His vision is to transform papers from one-shot events owned by publishers into evolving discussions among those researchers, authors, and readers.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
-
3 February 2011
at 2:07 pm -
Source: chronicle.com
-
8 notes
-
open access
peer review
publishing
social media
education
scholarly communication
- full resolution image
- permanent link
- Older »
- Page 1 of 3