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Posts from the ‘Enclosure’ Category

Sep 8

On Hacking the Academy #hackacad

I am very pleased to note that the edited book version of Hacking the Academy appeared online today. The online version lives on a site built by the volume’s publisher Digital Culture Books, an imprint of the University of Michigan Press. The volume has been edited by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, both of the Center for History and New Media. It is based on contributions submitted during one week–May 21-28, 2010.

I am very pleased to have been included in this volume and I want to thank the editors, the publisher, and all those who supported the project, including the many readers and cheerleaders who offered encouragement to the effort.

My chapter in the volume is based on an essay that originally appeared on this site (where the longer, older version can still be found). In the book, it is the first chapter of the “Hacking Scholarship” section. As with the earlier version, it is titled “Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps” and it offers an argument for withdrawing, where possible, from entanglements with commercial academic publishing in favor of lending energy, support, and resources to the strengthening of the existing public-sector scholarly communications system and to the building of a more democratic, ethical, sustainable, and open one for the future. It thus relates directly to my more recent post on the enclosure of scholarly journals in anthropology (and to other things that I do, including working on the Open Folklore project and editing Museum Anthropology Review.

I am so thankful to everyone who has engaged not only with the essay but with me in the larger work of understanding and reshaping the ways scholars share their work with the world. The biggest shout out of all, in this regards, goes to my colleagues at the Indiana University Libraries and the IUScholarWorks program. They have been my teachers and tremendous partners in the work. They are awesome!

The old-fashioned version of Hacking the Academy will be published next year. Find the online version here: http://www.digitalculture.org/hacking-the-academy/

Dan Cohen’s reflections on the project can be found online here: http://www.dancohen.org/2011/09/08/some-thoughts-on-the-hacking-the-academy-process-and-model/

Sep 5

9 Comments

How Enclosed by Large For-Profit Publishers is the Anthropology Journal Literature?

It is early fall and that means that it is the season for anthropologists to think out loud about the publishing ecology characterizing their field. As American anthropologists await final confirmation that their national association has renewed its publishing agreement with Wiley-Blackwell, the annual conversation has been renewed at Savage Minds [here] and [here] and elsewhere. Anthropologists have been reading and circulating George Monblot’s essay in The Guardian “Academic Publishers Make Murdock Look Like a Socialist” and the essay has, it seems, awoken some new interest in the anthropology publishing debates that have have been ongoing for many years now. Read more

Aug 31

On “Academic Publishers Make Murdoch Look like a Socialist”

A single article explaining much of what motivates me to work on reform in scholarly communications and academic publishing, including why I resist the corporate enclosure of society publishing programs in my fields, can be found in this very lively and accessible article in The Guardian by George Monbiot.

Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist: Academic publishers charge vast fees to access research paid for by us. Down with the knowledge monopoly racketeers

Aug 31

Enclosure: “Private companies will take over five public schools in Gary and Indianapolis”

The Associated Press and various news outlets reported yesterday how “Private companies will take over five public schools in Gary and Indianapolis.” This is a consequence of an assessment by the Indiana State Board of Education that the target schools are in “various stages of dire situations.” The students in these five schools surely deserve more educational opportunity that they have been getting, but it is also crucial to note what else is going on here. Two large and one small for-profit corporations are being handed five pieces of the former public realm and no one should expect to see these schools handed back to their communities. In keeping with the spirit of the age, corporations have allies in government willing to take public resources and responsibilities away from citizens and local communities and hand them over to private interest, for-profit corporations. The public realm shrinks and the private realm grows through processes of enclosure. The children of Indianapolis and Gary are now revenue-generating assets for Edison Learning, Inc., Charter Schools USA, and EdPower. Indianapolis parents who would rather not have their children turned into corporate beings have a choice–private parochial (Christian or Islamic) schools, which Indiana is also now subsidizing with tax funds via its new voucher program. Voucher-eligible, Christian options in Gary only go to grade 8, so parents at Gary Roosevelt High School will have to stick with Edison Learning, Inc. Those retrograde folks who still believe in community-driven, public interest activity will just have to get with the program and accept their new corporate overlords.

Aug 18

Fighting the Big Deal [Fighting Wiley-Blackwell and Elsevier]

Reminder. Commercial scholarly publishing is an adversarial rather than collaborative undertaking. As an author, editor, peer-reviewer, and/or scholarly society decision maker, you get to choose which party to the contest you will serve and support.

British Libraries Push Back [Against Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell] from Inside Higher Education

Whose healthy corporate balance sheet / straining public budget have you impacted this week?

Jun 6

3 Comments

Hacking the Academy, Revisited [ #hackacad ]

I am honored to have learned that my post “Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps” will be included in the edited book version of Hacking the Academy. The essay focuses on resistance to commercial enclosure in scholarly publishing. Thanks to everyone involved in the ongoing effort.

Jan 18

The View from Commerical Scholarly Publishing

Barbara Fister is a consistently wonderful voice on scholarly communications and libraries issues. I strongly recommend her discussion of the recently published interview with Derek Haank, former chairman of Elsevier Science and current head of Springer.  I read the interview via Richard Poynder’s blog Open and Shut (the full interview is linked to from that site) and learned of it from someone’s recent tweet. Without getting frustrated and spending a lot of extra words on it, I will just say that I think that the disbelief among librarians is justified and that this articulate voice from commercial scholarly publishing makes clear why I oppose commercial scholarly publishing as we have known it and we now still experience it.

Nov 3

Kristin R. Eschenfelder Expores Attributor, A DRM Service for Scholarly (and Other) Publishers

Read all about it http://kreschen.wordpress.com/2010/11/02/thanks-but-no-thanks-emerald/

Oct 20

New Book: Die Konstituierung von Cultural Property: Forschungsperspektiven

The Göttingen Interdisciplinary Research Group on Cultural Property is happy to announce the publication of an edited volume on the constitution of cultural property:

Regina Bendix, Kilian Bizer, Stefan Groth (Hg.)
Die Konstituierung von Cultural Property: Forschungsperspektiven.
Göttinger Studien zu Cultural Property, Band 1. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2010, 320 Seiten, Softcover, 30,00 EUR
ISBN 978-3-941875-61-6

Kann Eigentum an Kultur sinnvoll sein? Das Interesse, Cultural Property dem Markt zuzuführen oder dies zu verhindern und hierdurch kollektiven oder individuellen, ideologischen oder ökonomischen Gewinn zu schaffen, gestaltet sich unter den stark divergierenden Bedingungen, die Akteure in einer postkolonialen, spätmodernen Welt vorfinden.

Die interdisziplinäre DFG-Forschergruppe zur Konstituierung von Cultural Property beleuchtet diese seit einigen Jahren in der Öffentlichkeit mit wachsender Brisanz verhandelte Frage. Die Forschergruppe fragt nach der Konstituierung von Cultural Property im Spannungsfeld von kulturellen, wirtschaftlichen, juristischen und hiermit auch gesellschaftspolitischen Diskursen. Dies bedingt auch die in dieser fokussierten Form neue Zusammenarbeit von Fachwissenschaftler/innen aus Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften sowie Rechts- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften. Die Unterschiedlichkeit des disziplinären Zugriffs auf einen Forschungsbereich zeigt sich in den in diesem Band vermittelten ersten Ergebnissen aus der laufenden Forschung genauso deutlich wie die Notwendigkeit, disziplinäre Standpunkte in gemeinsamer Arbeit zusammenzuführen, um den Konstituierungsprozess von Cultural Property zu verstehen.

Der erste Teil versammelt Beiträge, die den Zusammenhang zwischen Heritage Praxen und der Formierung von Interessen an Cultural Property anhand von Fallstudien aus Indonesien, Kambodscha und Deutschland  beleuchten. Im zweiten Teil werden existierende Parameter des Schutzes von Cultural Property aus der Sicht von Völkerrecht, Verfüungsrecht und visueller Anthropologie untersucht. Der dritte Teil widmet sich Erkenntnissen aus internationalen Verhandlungsprozessen und ein vierter Abschnitt zeigt unterschiedliche Forschungsperspektiven auf Cultural Property.

Der Band kann auf den Seiten des Göttinger Universitätsverlages bestellt werden und ist zudem unter einer Creative-Commons-Lizenz als PDF verfügbar:
http://bit.ly/gscp01
Read more

Sep 14

The Pioneer Age of Internet Video (2005-2009)

The transformation described by Adam Fish in this Savage Minds post can almost certainly be generalized even further to other mediated realms of communication. The Pioneer Age of Internet Video (2005-2009)

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