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Posts from the ‘Publications’ Category

Aug 3

Folktales and Fairy Tales: OA Book Published in ScholarSpace at University of Hawaii at Manoa

A folklore essay collection has just been published in an open access institutional repository. The collection is Folktales and Fairy Tales: Translation, Colonialism, and Cinema edited by ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui, Noenoe Silva, Vilsoni Hereniko, and Cristina Bacchilega. It is available in ScholarSpace at University of Hawaii at Manoa at the following stable URL: http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/15609

In their Preface, the editors write:

We chose ScholarSpace as a publishing venue because it allows for wide accessibility to scholars across disciplines and because its reduced production timeline enables us to make the collection available in a more timely manner. We thank UHM librarian Beth Tillighast for her support.

Congratulations to the folklore minded editors, authors, and librarians involved in this significant project.

Jul 25

Worldwide List of OA Journals in Anthropology

Thanks to antropologi.info for compiling a worldwide list of (gold) open access journals in anthropology and neighboring fields. (Many folklore and ethnology titles are included.) In addition to listing known journals with links, a search utility has been set up on the site. Find the OA anthropology journal list here: http://www.antropologi.info/links/Main/Journals . This is a great resource for a number of reasons, including the presence here of titles such that have not been included in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The listing should be of special value to higher education librarians and the students and faculty that they support.

Antropologi.info had already established itself as the best blogroll in anthropology (see here), so this was a logical and wonderful next step.

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 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.

May 28

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Our Circulatory System (or Folklore Studies Publishing in the Era of Open Access, Corporate Enclosure and the Transformation of Scholarly Societies)

The following essay is adapted from a talk given on March 6, 2009 as part of the symposium “The Form of Value in Globalized Traditions” organized by the Center for Folklore Studies at the Ohio State University, Columbus Ohio. At the time, I discussed my participation in this event here. This essay builds upon three reviews of open access issues in folkloristics that I authored for the weblog Open Access Anthropology in winter 2008 (Jackson 2008a, 2008b, 2008c). Inspired this week by the Hacking the Academy project and by Ted Striphas’ recent examination of scholarly communications issues within the field of cultural studies (Striphas 2010a, 2010b), I decided not to leave the essay sitting on the back-burner. In lieu of doing something more formal with it later, I am publishing it here in the hope that it will prove useful to a colleagues in folklore studies and neighboring fields.

Our Circulatory System (or Folklore Studies Publishing in the Era of Open Access, Corporate Enclosure and the Transformation of Scholarly Societies)

Jason Baird Jackson
Indiana University, Bloomington

The system of scholarly communication in which folkloristics is a small but important part is quickly changing in some dramatic ways. The phenomena falling under this rubric become more diverse and interconnected everyday and the good and bad news seems to come at an every quicker rate. To begin with a tangible example, a key publisher in our field and the home to three of its four main English-language introductory textbooks is Utah State University Press. When I prepared this essay in the spring of 2009, our field feared that the press would cease operations in the context of its university’s response to the current global economic crisis (Howard 2009; Jaschik 2009; Spooner 2009). On the brink of disappearance, Utah State University Press was instead made a unit of its university library (Utah State University 2009). It is not unique in undergoing such a dramatic transition. The present economic climate will almost certainly accelerate further various processes of change that were well already underway. Many of these shifts are positive, but whether for the good or for the bad, they are prompting some fundamental reconsiderations of: (1) of the genres of scholarly production, (2) of the paths down which we circulate our work, (3) of the publics whom we seek to address, (4) of the hierarchies of value that we used to judge and reward good work, (5) of the partners with whom we collaborate, (6) of the technologies that we harness, and (7) of the means by which we pay the bills.
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May 17

AcademiX 2010: Learning in an Open-Access World

The second conference of the week was AcademiX 2010, an event sponsored by Apple and MacLearning.org (an Apple affiliate organization comprised of people interested in educational uses of Apple technology). The event’s complex structure made it a real learning experience for me. I had not previously participated in an event of this type. I was at Northwestern University, one of two primary sites for the conference. The other main site was at MIT. These two sites were connected with each other, with the Apple HQ in California, and with secondary sites at Duke University, San Diego State University, the University of Kansas, the University of Minnesota, and the University of New Mexico. Beyond these physical conference sites, there were a great many conference participants experiencing the conference online from their desktops. Video and audio linked all of these places and people together.

The focus of the event was “Learning in an Open-access World.” My mandate was to speak about academic open access in the scholarly communications sense relating to peer-reviewed scholarly literature, but the program was broader than this area. John Wilbanks (Creative Commons) spoke of “Commons-Based Licensing and Scholarship: The Next Layer of the Network.” Ben Hawkridge (Open University) presented “New Channels for Learning: Podcasting Opportunities for a Distance University.” Kurt Squire (University of Wisconsin-Madison) discussed the findings of his research on “Education for a Mobile Generation.” Nick Shockey (SPARC) presented “The Digital Natives Are Getting Restless: the Student Voice of the Open Access Movement.” In the final slot, Paul Hammond (Rutgers University and Richard Miller (Rutgers University) co-presented “This is How We Think: Learning in Public After the Paradigm Shift.”

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May 15

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Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Values Revisited

This is a note (1 of 2) to report on my two speaking events this week. I had wanted to write more of them, but business and a weak internet connection at my hotel have kept me from it until now. Here are some notes on the first of these two events.

Earlier in the week I was a guest of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. I had been invited to be the keynote speaker for a ” A Forum for Authors and Creators of Academic Works.” The event was titled: Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Values: Choosing our Future and it was organized by a great group of UMN folks committed to work on scholarly communications issues. It was an honor to be asked to participate in this event and I learned a great deal from my time talking with everyone there. On Monday night I was treated to a wonderful meal and a small group discussion of the UMN campus context and big picture of scholarly communications at the university. On Tuesday at lunch, I met with the UMN Scholarly Communications Collaborative and we had a pleasant meal filled with a great and (for me) very informative conversation about changes and developments in scholarly communication. After lunch was the event itself. I spoke of my experiences working as a scholarly editor trying to make sense of the changing publishing landscape, with special attention to open access efforts and the factors that are shaping them. I offered a number of provocations/predictions and tried to address the questions that were posed for the event as a whole (listed here). The event was recorded and streamed to folks who could not fit into the room at the library. It is now available online at: https://umconnect.umn.edu/p48935637/ An important part of the forum was hearing from three faculty discussants and participating in a wide-ranging discussion with the in-person and online audiences.

One of the discussants was Gabriel P. Weisberg, a senior art historian at UNM who has been very involved in the founding and continuing good work of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture.  This is an impressive gold open access journal now publishing its 9th volume. Professor Weisberg described the history of the journal, its successes and niche, and reflected upon questions of long-term sustainability in OA journals published outside the framework of commercial or society publishing.

Another discussant was Neil E. Olszewski, a UMN professor of plant biology. He provided a scholarly society perspective, reflecting on his work as a member of the publications committee of the American Society of Plant Biologists, a society that is confronting the same issues that are posing challenges for those North American scholarly societies who have come to depend on publishing revenue to support non-publishing activities. Professor Olszewski is also the incoming chair of the UMN library committee, a parallel role to that which I have served in at IUB over the past year.

The final discussant was geneticist Stephen C. Ekker. In addition to publishing extensively in the gold OA journal PLoS One, he is the Editor-in-Chief for Zebrafish, a journal published by one of the remaining small science publishers Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.

With this rich and diverse background, the panelists made a range of important observations on the changing landscape of scholarly communications and were able to very effectively engage with the excellent questions posed by the audience. I learned a great deal from their observations and appreciate their generous response to my own reflections.

My thanks go to Dean of the Libraries Wendy Pradt Lougee, to her exceptionally talented staff and colleagues, to the UMN Provost and other event sponsors, and to the engaged audience that came out for this event. The organizers did a wonderful job and it was an honor to visit such a dynamic scholarly community.

May 3

Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Values: Choosing our Future

I am very pleased to have been invited to the University of Minnesota to speak to the faculty and librarians there about scholarly communications. I will surely share reflections after the event but I wanted to pass on the details now. I really look forward to talking to, and learning from, everyone there. I am very appreciative of this opportunity. Find the details here.

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