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Jun 30

AcademiX Presentations on Open Access Now Online

I am happy to report that the videos from the AcademiX 2010 conference on “Learning in an Open-Access World” are now online.  One can get to them via this page on the MacLearning.org site or one can just go into iTunes University in iTunes and search on AcademiX or a particular presenter’s name. While they are embedded in iTunes, they are free to all those who wish to consult them.  As discussed here earlier, my presentation is titled: “Innovation and Open Access in Scholarly Journal Publishing.” The other presenters and their titles are:

  • John Wilbanks (Creative Commons) Commons-Based Licensing and Scholarship – The Next Layer of the Network
  • Ben Hawkridge (Open University) New Channels for Learning – Podcasting Opportunities for a Distance University
  • Kurt Squire (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Education for a Mobile Generation
  • Nick Shockey (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) The Digital Natives are Getting Restless – The Student Voice of the Open Access Movement
  • Richard E. Miller (Rutgers University) and Paul Hammond (Rutgers University) This is How We Think – Learning in Public After the Paradigm Shift

I hope that our presentations are useful to the community in their this new form. Thank you to Apple for hosting the gathering and making these materials freely available online.

Jun 21

Deaccession and Accreditation in University Museums

As reported in Inside Higher Education, the AAM is moving to strengthen university and college accreditation standards to stress the importance of host institutions not treating museum collections as disposable assets. While this will be discussed mainly in connection with university and college art museums and galleries, it is equally important for museums of ethnography and other collections of cultural heritage.

Jun 15

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University of Prince Edward Island Unplugs Web of Science

Official news here that the University of Prince Edward Island is giving up on licensing Web of Science in the face of a 120% subscription increase. Better yet, they are taking the forward-looking step of building a consortium to develop a free and open alternative to it. Congratulations and thank you UPEI.

Web of Science is a product sold by Thompson Reuters. Part of its bundle of services is the proprietary system of citation indexes and impact factor rankings that has gummed up much of the legacy journal system.

Jun 11

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Dorothea Salo on NPG versus the University of California (or Make Tomorrow “Thank a Librarian Day”)

Compelling commentary on Nature Publishing Group versus the University of California by Dorothea Salo can be found here. The recent counter-reply by the UC leadership is awesome–careful and compelling.

While there are prominent pro-OA voices that are critical of boycotts and various other “wake-up people” approaches to changing scholarly communications, particularly as these efforts are deemed as ineffective and distracting relative to the full-steam-ahead implementation of green OA, I am personally gratified by the level of attention that faculty and researchers are paying to the NPG-UC dust-up. I think that this can only help on numerous fronts–serials crisis, budget crisis, enclosure, open access, IP, tax-payer awareness, administrator awareness, politician awareness, etc. If nothing else, it is revealing to new audiences how unbelievably hard and well academic librarians work on behalf of faculty, researchers, students, and staff. They deserve free, delicious, homemade cookies everyday simply for going regularly– on our behalf–into negotiation meetings with the representatives of NPG and the other mega-publishers. I know that that work is about as dispiriting as it gets.

Jun 9

Congratulations Smithsonian Anthropology

Today I received the email newsletter of the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Their lead story is a big deal. Congratulations to the department on the successful conclusion of a curatorial hiring effort that has brought four new colleagues to the department. Department Chair Dan Rogers writes:

With the arrival of Gwyneira Isaac (curator, North American indigenous cultures) in early June and the arrival of Gabriela Perez Baez (curator, linguistics) in December 2009, the department has successfully concluded its search for four new curators over the past three years. (Curators Joshua Bell (globalization) and Torben Rick (human-environmental interaction) were hired in 2008.) This represents the largest influx of curatorial staff in several decades and we are delighted to bring in another generation of scholars. These hires bring the number of anthropology curators to 23.

This is great news for Smithsonian anthropology specifically and for museum anthropology generally. Congratulations and good luck to the new members of the curatorial staff.

Jun 9

OA Tracking Project, Connotea, Nature Publishing Group, Threatened UC Boycott

I wish that the otherwise awesome Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) was not reliant upon Connotea, a product of the Nature Publishing Group (NPG). Peter Suber describes the project and why it uses Connotea here. The problems with NPG are discussed in the recent letter threatening a UC-system boycott of NPG. (See previous post.) Discussion in Insider Higher Education is here.

Jun 9

Cutting Ties with Nature Publishing Group

UCLA leadership explains why faculty need to cut ties with Nature Publishing Group. See the document available via this post on the UCLA Biomedical Library weblog. A 400% increase in subscription costs! Madness.

Jun 9

Smith on the Launch of (the) Journal of Anthropology

Archaeologist and advocate for open access strategies in archaeology (and anthropology) Michael Smith offers a skeptical review of the announcement that Hindawi plans to publish a general journal of anthropology to be called Journal of Anthropology. I was going to let this news just slip by with no comment, but I am pleased that Michael has weighed in and I recommend taking a look at his post.

Author-side fees is just one aspect of Michael’s commentary. I’ll elaborate on one aspect of this. I have nothing in particular against Hindawi and for those who work and publish in other science fields, its $425 article processing charge may seem reasonable. For folks in those fields who wonder about anthropology’s take on this, keep in mind that old fashioned page charges are extremely rare in our own ancestral publishing system. I have paid page charges twice in my career. Both times it was when publishing in Economic Botany–a journal on the edge of anthropology with biology norms and customs. Page charges and other author-side fees are outside the experience of most anthropologist and many would be faced with actual difficulties if asked to pay them. (Not all anthropology research is funded research and in many workplaces, there is no money available for such purposes.) Because author-side fees are so often brought up as a reason to reject (gold) open access in anthropology, it is important to note that there are numerous (gold) open access anthropology journals now in existence that do require submission charges, author fees, or page charges.

I recommend Michael’s post for a wider discussion of this particular development. I share some of his reservations.

Jun 8

Berlinger’s Chapter in the Collection-Jews at Home

Congratulations to Gabrielle A. Berlinger on the publication of her article “770 Eastern Parkway: The Rebbe’s Home as Icon” in Jews at Home: The Domestication of Identity, volume two in the Jewish Cultural Studies series edited by Simon J. Bronner and published by Littman. The book is beautifully made and carefully edited. Gabi’s article is a fine study of Jewish architecture in a complex context. Find the book on the publisher’s website here.

Jun 8

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Market Forces, Technical Changes Pushing STM Publishers Toward a Cliff?

On the recommendation of Dorothea Salo, I read today Richard Poynder’s interview with Claudio Aspesi, a financial analyst who’s job is to track the state of, and predict the future of, the commercial scholarly publishing industry In his interview of Poynder, the focus was on the financial health and prospect of Reed Elsevier but the discussion was briefly generalized to include Wiley-Blackwell and Springer. This is obviously not the kind of thing that I typically read, but it was very interesting to hear a deeply capitalist and, to me sophisticated, analysis of factors that point to the possible collapse of the scholarly communications system that we have known. Librarians  will find the serials crisis arguments interesting. Read it here.