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Posts from the ‘Editorial and Opinion’ Category

Aug 24

Library Babel Fish on Open Folklore and Neighboring Discussions

Barbara Fister in her regular column on library and scholarly communications issues for Inside Higher Education (Library Babel Fish) has focused today on Open Folklore and a cluster of neighboring discussions, projects, articles, and memos relating to scholarly communications in folklore studies, anthropology, media studies, and in general. In addition to commenting on Open Folklore, she connects to (among other things) my IUB colleague (1) Ted Striphas’ article on scholarly communications in media studies [discussed here and oa here], (2) discussion of these issues at Savage Minds, (3) Kim Fortun’s memo on these matters within the American Anthropological Association, and (4) my essay on scholarly communications in folklore studies. That she could make these connections without having discussed the linkages with me (we have not communicated previously except for my comment on her post last week) is a testimony to the power of scholarly communications in a open and networked environment.

Her essay is titled Open to Change: How Open Access Can Work. It can be found here: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library_babel_fish/open_to_change_how_open_access_can_work

Thanks to Barbara for highlighting these projects and discussions so prominently.

Aug 12

On “Five Suggestions for the Open Folklore Project”

The author of the blog Archivology has offered “5 Suggestions for the Open Folklore Project.” This is a detailed and thoughtful contribution, one very worthy of the attention of those interested in scholarly communications issues in general and in folklore specifically. Together with Alex Golub’s discussion of the project on Savage Minds, these are valuable inputs for the early phase of the effort. Those involved in the early phase of the project are very appreciative of these commentators and also of those who have spread news of the project on twitter and in the media (see Nathan Miller’s story in the Indiana Daily Student here).

Aug 4

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Savage Minds on Scholarly Communication

Significant posts appeared today on Savage Minds related to scholarly communications in my two fields of study. Chris Kelty writes about the latest developments within the American Anthropological Association, focusing on (and releasing) an important memo by former Cultural Anthropology co-editor Kim Fortun. Alex Golub writes about the Open Folklore project of the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries and the American Folklore Society (with which I am involved and about which I have been writing here).

Read all about it.

Jul 4

AFS Executive Board Issues Arizona Statement

[As noted in today’s AFS email newsletter] After a period of discussion and review, the American Folklore Society‘s Executive Board [on which I serve] has issued a public statement on recent Arizona immigration legislation. The Society will distribute this statement to relevant public officials and bodies in Arizona, and to other learned societies.

The statement reads:

The American Folklore Society, the US-based professional association for the field of folklore studies, with a membership of 2,000 people and institutions, and an annual meeting that draws more than 700 participants from around the world, has historically supported policies that prohibit discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, national origin, race, religion, or sexual orientation, and our field has long been concerned with the well-being of immigrant populations.

The Executive Board of the American Folklore Society takes notice of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, requiring all local law enforcement officials to investigate a person’s immigration status when there is a reasonable suspicion that the person is in the United States unlawfully, regardless of whether that person is suspected of a crime. We also take notice of Arizona House Bill 2281, that prohibits public schools in the state from offering, at any grade level, courses that advocate ethnic solidarity or cater to specific ethnic groups.

More than a century of research in the field of folklore studies (and in other fields in the humanities and social sciences) has detailed the cultural, political, and social impact of discrimination based on ethnicity, national origin, and race.  Based on that research, the Executive Board of the American Folklore Society considers these laws just identified, and the ways they may be implemented, to be discriminatory.

The Executive Board of the American Folklore Society resolves that the Society will not hold a scholarly conference in the State of Arizona until such time that Arizona Senate Bill 1070 and Arizona House Bill 2281 are either repealed or struck down as constitutionally invalid and thus unenforceable by a court.

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 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

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.

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