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Posts from the ‘Scholarly Communication’ Category

Aug 11

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A Note on Predatory Open Access Publishing

One of the worst developments in the emergence of open access as a set of practices and goals for the progressive reform of scholarly communication is the emergence of new commercial firms that are combining the worst traits of open access strategy, vanity publishing, automation of editorial and production tasks, and a predatory approach to meeting the publishing “needs” of foolish and/or desperate-to-be-published scholars and would-be scholars. Typical is the email that I received recently from a firm that included a section where I could click a link through which I could become not just an author with this publisher but could become a reviewer, an editorial board member, and even the Editor-in-Chief of a new journal. Such firms are, or hope to become, cash cows via author fees. One sign of such a firm is the announcement of a large number of not-yet-extant journal titles spanning a wide range of fields almost randomly. These vaporware journals are often announced before the identity of an associated journal editor is established. Another simple sign is the frequency of typos in communications and on websites. Lots of typos. Open access is too important for the scholarly community to become distracted by these marginal cases. Beware.

For discussions of predatory open access, see here and here.

Aug 10

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The Program for #AAA2011

Just got access to the preliminary program for the 2011 American Anthropological Association meetings this November in Montreal.

I will be participating in a AAA organized forum called The Future of AAA Publishing: A Forum for Discussion. In this event, I will address issues associated with green open access and the use of institutional (and other kinds of) repositories. This event begins at 1:45 on Friday afternoon.

I will also be part of a panel titled Digital Anthropology: Projects and Projections that has been organized by Kim Fortun. My presentation is Another World Is Possible: Open Folklore As Library-Scholarly Society Partnership. This panel happens first thing on Sunday morning.

I have only begun scouting out the program, but I see a lot of friends are scattered across it. I look forward to figuring out what is what and to attending.

Aug 5

AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus Now Part of @openfolklore

An exciting development in the Open Folklore project is the inclusion of the AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus within the Open Folklore portal. This great advance was announced on the AFS website and at the Open Folklore portal. The ET is a valuable resource for folklore studies, ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and other ethnographic disciplines. Thanks to everyone at AFS, LoC, and IU who worked to make this next phase of both projects possible.

Aug 3

Search: How Libraries Do it Wrong – Inside Higher Ed

Search: How Libraries Do it Wrong – Inside Higher Ed.

Aug 2

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@Kerim on AAA Abstracts Revisited, Being an Instance of Advocacy for Using the HathiTrust Digital Library and the Liberation of Already Digitized Content by Rights-holders

This post sat half written for a really long time. I just discovered it and decided to finish it off.  Some readers of this blog will recall a post by Kerim at Savage Minds on the subject of making the paper abstracts from the annual AAA meetings available online. What follows is an FYI post on this subject. It relates to my comments regarding the HathiTrust Digital Library, a resource that many in my circle are encouraged to learn about and to learn how to use.

You Now Have Access to the Abstracts from 37 Annual AAA Meetings

Remember Kerim’s earlier post about the publishing of AAA meeting abstracts? This note is a simple follow-up. If you would like to search an almost complete set of published abstracts since the 1970s, here is how to do it.

Get online and go to the HathiTrust Digital Library. If you go to this link (link: http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000525675 ) you can see the abstract holdings that are presently available in the digital library.

If, for some reason, you wish to search in the abstract for a particular year, you can click on it.  You can then use the “Search in this text” tool to find what you are looking for within that particular volume. For instance, if you click on the link for the 1976 volume, you can search on the word “Sahlins” and discover that it appears on page 155.

This volume is theoretically in copyright and thus the AAA would have to give the HathiTrust Digital LIbrary permission to make full text available. (This was the point of my comment on Kerim’s original point—doing this would cost the AAA nothing and would instantly create a scholarly resource of much enhanced value.) As things stand now, copyright is all that stands between you and full-text. Under present conditions, what HathiTrust is doing for you is (in this instance) telling you that something having to do with “Sahlins” appears on page 155. (Presumably an abstract by Marshall Sahlins.) Still, this can be very helpful. For instance, you now are better prepared to consult a particular page and volume in the library or make an informed ILL request. If one did a search on a topical phrase like “debt” or “gift” or “New Guinea”, this could be especially useful in tracking down fugitive research. [The “Find in a Library” link will help you track down physical copies to consult.]

If, for some other reason, you wished to search the whole group of abstracts, you can do that too. Just use the main search tool at the HathiTrust Digital Library homepage and search “Sahlins” adding “American Anthropological Association” and “Abstract” to reduce the amount of material returned. Of course, searching the whole full text library is a very powerful tool in general.  Thankfully a large and growing portion of the library IS available in full text.

Hopefully more rights holders will (as with material liberated through the Open Folklore project) work with HathiTrust to make their content freely available.  The materials are already digitized and in the system.  Permission is the only thing still needed to make the most of this valuable resource.

Check it out.  Information on HathiTrust in general is available here: http://www.hathitrust.org/about .

Cool Update!!  As indicated in the comment’s section here, one awesome reader has built a dedicated collection in HathiTrust providing easy searching just against the abstracts: Try it out here: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?c=129534190;a=listis

 

Jun 30

On HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

I have been meaning for several weeks to highlight the announced/upcoming launch of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory on ambitious OJS-based open access journal project. One can read all about it here: http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/index. I look forward to the first issue and to hopefully working with the organizers on common projects in the service of open access scholarship in anthropology and neighboring fields.  Hau’s editorial board and announced initial papers are quite impressive.  Check them out.

Jun 6

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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.

May 6

Ruth Finnegan’s New Book on Quotations Available in Gratis OA Form

Ruth Finnegan’s book Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation has just been published by Open Book Publishers, a not-for-profit, academic run publisher that combines no-cost online access to published works with the sale at modest cost paper and PDF versions. The no-cost online version is (interestingly) accessible via the Google Books platform. I highlight this book both because it is a contribution to the fields in which I work by a very senior and well respected scholar and because it is the first instance of an Open Book Publishers title that I have learned about and have had an chance to study. The business model, goals, and production framework of the publisher are all noteworthy and worth further study. It is important to note that the World Oral Literature Project, a “Friend of Open Folklore” organization is announced as a partner on the Open Book Publishers website where a new Oral Literature Series is announced.  These are major developments for the Open Folklore and open anthropology communities. Congratulations to everyone involved in these efforts.

(Thanks to D.N. for the tip.)

Mar 20

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Anthropologies

Thanks to everyone who is working to create new ways of communicating and discussing the pressing issues of our time. As has been discussed by Kerim at Savage Minds and Daniel at Neuroanthropogy, a new project in anthropology has just debuted:  Anthropologies edited by Ryan Anderson. It is blog based magazine focused on exploring:

contemporary anthropology through essays, short articles, and opinion pieces written from diverse perspectives.  There is no single way to define the field, hence “anthropologies.”  By presenting various viewpoints and positions, this site seeks to highlight not only what anthropology means to those who practice it, but also how those meanings are relevant to wider audiences.

I have just begun my reading of the first issues with Keith Hart’s “Kant, Anthropology and the New Human Universal.” It is a an accessible, compelling, valuable, and brief essay that builds upon the key arguments about the promise/necessity of anthropology that he has been developing in recent work, including The Human Economy, which I am now reading. It certainly has motivated me to remedy my failure to have read Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.

Thanks Keith and the other authors. Thanks to the editor and everyone else who is fostering this project.

I would like to offer one suggestion, by way of a coda. Having been down a similar path before, I know how handy blog software like blogger is for getting such a project off the ground quickly and cheaply. All to the good. The only costs are that there is no built in preservation framework and the site does not allow for Open Archives Initiative Protocols for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Without an OAI compliant framework, broadly used tools like Google Scholar will not be able to harvest metadata and, along the way, put works published in Anthropologies on scholarly radar. More specifically, OAI-PMH allows more topically focused projects, such as the Open Folklore project on which I work, to harvest and thereby promote the discovery of, content published in places like Anthropologies. There are many ways to address this matter inexpensively. A place to begin would be UKnowledge, the University of Kentucky Institutional Repository, which appears to be gearing up to support journal like projects, among other things. Such repositories make materials available in harvestable ways while also insuring longterm preservation. It would be possible to deposit PDF copies of Anthropologies content after the fact without giving up the basic blogger-based format.

 


Mar 16

Share Anthropology!

Share Anthropology is the brand new place to go when you want to share anthropology. The site is for “sharing and disseminating open access anthropology.” What does that mean?

The simple site has a “submit” button at the upper right. If you click it you can get some clear and helpful guidance.

Please help share and disseminate open access anthropology articles, books and dissertations by linking to blog posts, reviews, and discussions about that work. DO add a short “description.” DON”T link to the primary Open Access works themselves. Rather, link to blog posts, reviews, and discussions of that work. (Linked discussion should contain at least one link to an Open Access anthropology article, book, or dissertation.)

So, what this new tool is built to do is to aggregate and circulate open access discussions of scholarly works in anthropology that are themselves made available in open access form. It is not an aggregator of the scholarship itself (as the Open Folklore search tool is in the neighboring field of folklore studies) but is instead an aggregtor of value-added discussions of that underlying open access scholarship. Thus is it a place to discover, but also to call attention to, articles, blog posts, etc. that build on or comment upon open access works. (As open access scholarship continues to expand, this distinction might break down, but for Share Anthropology’s startup phase, it seems clear.)

The other main part of the site is an RSS feed so that you can learn about what others are sharing via a feed reader.

Congratulations to Kerim Friedman for getting this going! Kerim has introduced the project in a Savage Minds post. Check it out and check out Share Anthropology.

Very promising!

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