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Posts from the ‘Scholarly Communication’ Category

Mar 2

Campus Salon on Academic Publishing in the Sciences

On Monday I will be helping host the second in a series of campus solons focused on the changing scholarly publishing landscape. While keyed to the campus science faculty, all campus researchers are invited to come and participate. The invitation appears below. Information on the series is available here.

* * *

The Advisory Committee to the IU Office of Scholarly Publishing
and the Office of the Provost
invite you to attend a

Salon on Academic Publishing in the Sciencesipadpub
Monday, March 4, 2013
1:30 p.m.-3 p.m.
Walnut Room
IMU
Salon hosted by Professor Jason Jackson

Dec 22

New Beginnings: Journal of Folklore Research

During 2013, I will have the honor of editing the Journal of Folklore Research. I will be serving for a year as Interim Editor, bridging Moria Marsh’s editorship and the anticipated service  of an outstanding departmental colleague who will be away from campus next year. The opportunity is a valuable one and the time is most auspicious, as 2013 will see the publication of the journal’s 50th volume.

With roots that go back to 1942 and a number of earlier publications, the journal that we now know as JFR was founded in 1964 as the Journal of the Folklore Institute. The journal’s name was changed to its current form in 1983. Long published by Indiana University’s Folklore Institute (which would later become the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology), the journal has been published in its current period in a partnership between the Department and the Indiana University Press. Today the journal is prominently included and heavily used in key services such as JSTOR and Project Muse. It has long maintained a distinctive and international voice in folklore studies and ethnology and has benefitted from a global community of supporters, led by its team of corresponding editors. In keeping with the mandate of its departmental home, the journal has welcomed work by ethnomusicologists throughout its history.

I have learned much shadowing the journal’s able staff throughout the fall and, while Moria begins enjoying life after editing, I will enjoy continuing, in the year ahead, alongside Managing Editor Danille Christensen and Editorial Assistant Miriam Woods. In my preliminary work, I have already learned a tremendous amount about the fields in which JFR publishes. I look forward to the work, and the year, ahead.

Thanks to everyone who has made JFR a success over the past five decades.

Dec 5

1 Comment

Two Reasons to Love the University of Nebraska Press @UnivNebPress

Visitors to this site will know that I am involved in a range of projects relating to reform in the scholarly communication system. University presses are a key part of that system. They bring to the current moment a lot of durable skills, values, and useful practices and they have the potential to play a key role in innovating the future.

In this note, I want to put on my author hat and celebrate two modest practices–one a tradition and the other an innovation–in the work of the University of Nebraska Press, the press that I have historically worked most closely with.

Part One: Some Things Never Go Out of Style

As an editor of a small scholarly journal with a reviews program, I spend a lot of time with what used to be called (and sometimes still are called) tear sheets. The term’s origins are in commercial advertising, but it extends logically to journal-based publishing of things like book reviews. When a publisher sends a new book to a journal in the hopes that it will be reviewed, it asks (among other things) that a journal that actually does publish a review send a copy of the final published review to the press’ attention. In the older days (and, in some cases, still today) the obligation was to send two (sometimes more) paper copies of the review to the press’ attention. These days, this task is most often accomplished electronically by sending a PDF of the published review to the attention of the relevant press’ marketing staff. The old name tear sheet refers to actual sheets of paper (with advertisements to send to buyers or reviews to send to publishers) torn from the relevant print edition so that they could then be mailed. (BTW: Shame on those journals who do not live up to their end of this bargain.)

When the reviews get to the press, there are a number of things that can be done with them. It is common for them to be harvested for favorable quotes that get added to a book’s page on the press’ website. In more elaborate operations, such quotes get pushed out to sites like Amazon. A acquisitions editor can use the incoming reviews to guide the development of their “list.” In aggregate, reviews tell editors what kinds of works (and which authors) are being well received. Such intellectual indicators complement quantitative measures as sales numbers.

At the University of Nebraska Press a tradition that many other presses have abandoned is also maintained. It is one that promotes tremendous goodwill with authors and, by extension, furthers the press’ reputation among potential authors. Judging by my experience (I have never discussed the practice with UNP staff.), the UNP marketing staff forwards incoming reviews to authors for their interest and use. Even in an era of such things as Google Alerts, this is a tremendous help to authors. In the wake of the publication of Yuchi Ceremonial Life, copies of these reviews–neatly annotated by press staff with date and place of publication–were mailed to me as they came in. Today, via email, I got from the press a PDF copy of the Chronicle of Higher Education book note appearing in the wake of Yuchi Indian Histories Before the Removal Era. This is such a wonderful courtesy. If the new (edited) book is reviewed, I will really appreciate learning of this from the press. Even today, not all journals are richly woven into the digital infrastructure and thus the press will sometimes know of a review before I will. When I mention that UNP does this for authors, all my colleagues are jealous, as few of them have experienced such attention from the presses with which they work. This service is especially valuable to pre-tenure scholars for whom reviews are a crucial resource in route to their tenure cases.

In a time in which academic author have new choices, old courtesies like this can go a long way in maintaining strong relationships with authors.

Part Two: New Things Done the Right Way

Increasingly, university presses aim to promote awareness of their titles by making sample chapters available for free via their websites. This is an inevitable outgrowth of broader practices, such as the views inside books available on sites like Amazon. Typically university presses simply (and it is not exactly simple, of course) make this material available as a PDF download from inside the press’ website on the book’s page. This is a logical thing to do, but it is also a very temporary thing to do, as press websites (like most websites) are very unstable and ephemeral things. They are breeding grounds for link rot and they just do not measure up as preservation environments.

If a press is going to let a sample chapter loose into the digital world, it should do this in a way that advances all of the goals of scholarly communication. This means that if content is going to be freely available, it should be made freely available according to professional best practices. This means curated carefully in a digital environment with attention directed to preservation, metadata, stable URLs, etc.

Kudos and thanks, in this context, to the University of Nebraska Press for working with DigitalCommons @ University of Nebraska-Lincoln (the university’s institutional repository) to make such samples permanently and properly available (with a great cover sheet and good metadata) for the long haul.. I was happy to learn about this effort when I found the introduction to Yuchi Indian History Before the Removal Era deposited there. As such samples clearly generate sales, these practices are self-interested as well as in the interest of the public good.

In a word, thanks to everyone at the University of Nebraska Press for your work to preserve what is good about university presses while we discover new paths forward.

Aug 15

On “New Forms of Scholarly Communication”

Presented below are remarks prepared for a meeting of Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) Department Chairs and Academic Associate Deans hosted by the IUB Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs. The focus of the larger gathering was a campus-wide discussion of tenure and promotion issues, with a special emphasis on current draft revisions to campus-level tenure and promotion guidelines. The task assigned to me was to reflect on the place of new forms of scholarly communication in the tenure and promotion mix. Other speakers were recruited to address diversity, interdisciplinarity, and public scholarly engagement. Speakers were grouped into two person panels and allotted five (and only five) minutes for a statement. Ten minutes of discussion was scheduled on each theme following the two presentations.

Because it was a campus-wide event and because it was anticipated by the vice provost that my co-presenter Ruth Stone would speak about issues in the digital humanities, I endeavored to draw my examples from further afield. The brevity of the assignment precluded discussion of many of my favorite examples and many relevant issues (ex: the role of scholarly societies or issues of open access) were not raised at all. To help my listeners find their way to the conversations that I evoked, I offer my text here with the links that oral presentation could not facilitate.

There are countless resources available for the purpose of gaining an introduction to the subject of change in scholarly communication. One very reasonable and appropriate overview–inclusive of a call for wider discussion among researchers–is available in Karla L. Hahn’s (2008) “Talk About Talking About New Models of Scholarly Communication.”

My thanks go to Vice Provost Tom Gieryn for the opportunity to make this presentation.

. . .

While I will use a few examples, my task is to reinforce four general themes that you are probably already are carrying into discussions with your departmental and disciplinary colleagues—change, genres, processes, and metrics.

Change. As reflected in the draft guidelines, junior faculty are pursuing careers that bear less and less resemblance to those of their mentors. As with most forms of cultural change, there will be losses and gains attendant to these shifts. Regardless of our own hopes and fears, we have an obligation to engage with the shifts happening to us. A fringe benefit of moments of discontinuity is that they help us focus more intensively on our persistent core values. How we do peer-assessment and how impactfulness is achieved and assessed are very much in flux, but their centrality as values is not. Read more

Jun 8

MLA and AAA Author Agreements Revisited (Plus Improvements to the AAA Agreement)

This note is an update to yesterday’s post regarding comments made comparing the author agreement used by the American Anthropological Association to the newly changed agreement announced by the Modern Language Association.

In a comment on the original AAA blog post, MLA Executive Director Rosemary Feal confirmed that under the new MLA agreement authors retain their original copyright and are not asked to transfer it to the association in order to be published in its journals.

In a later comment to that AAA blog post and in a follow up posting, Joslyn Osten of the AAA staff confirmed that the AAA author agreement does transfer copyright in accepted works from the author to the association

These confirmations indicate that my observation that the two agreements were distinctive (in a way that I judge to to significant) is accurate.

Along the way, I was pleased to discover something new (to me) about the AAA author agreement. As a former AAA editor, I spent a good bit of time with the author agreements in use during that period (2005-2009). The agreement in use during most of this period is the agreement that has been celebrated as SHERPA/RoMEO green. A key concern that I have had about that agreement was that it did not clarify for potential authors what form (post-print, publisher version, etc.) was allowed to circulate outside the official publications channels. In the new AAA blog post, a link is given to the current AAA author agreement and this document is different from earlier versions in this regard (the relevant language is quoted in the post itself, as well). Clarifying language has been added to item three under the heading “Author’s Rights.” The older version of the author agreement is presently available from the SHERPA/RoMEO website (look up American Anthropological Association to find it). Comparing the recent to the current agreement shows that what was previously called an “article” (in the contexts of retained author rights) is now described as either a “post-print” (a term of art now clearly defined in the agreement) or (quite generously) “uncorrected page proofs”. Allowing authors to circulate “uncorrected page proofs” along the green OA path represents a significant step above and beyond the minimum threshold required to qualify as a green OA publisher. (Post-print is the threshold for green OA. For further information, consult the SHERPA/RoMEO database, particularly its section on “RoMEO Colours.”

I commend the AAA on these improvements to its author agreement. As an observer of such things, I would have been satisfied with the clarification embodied in the move from “article” to “post-print”. That the association has agreed to allow uncorrected page proofs to circulate represents a noteworthy additional step. (I am sure that this shift to include “uncorrected page proofs” is not totally new, its just new to my awareness. It seems likely that it has happened in the past six months given that the change was not discussed at the time of the 2011 AAA meetings at which I spoke on the subject of green OA in the AAA. Allowing the circulation of uncorrected page proofs has its pros and (significant) cons, of course, but, be they what they may, this is what many AAA authors are doing anyway and this shift thus effectively “decriminalizes” a widespread practice among association members.

Jun 7

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The AAA Author Agreement is Not the Same as the New MLA Author Agreement

If I am wrong about this, I hope that someone in a position of authority will explain clearly why my understanding is in error.

As I have discussed previously, the American Anthropological Association has an author agreement that allows for the circulation of author post-prints down the “green” OA (open access) path. It has had this author agreement for a number of years and it is a worthy thing that the association can be proud of.

The Modern Languages Association has recently announced changes to its author agreement. These changes are also designed to facilitate green open access practices. (For the announcement see here. For reporting in Inside Higher Education see here. For commentary from Kevin Smith at Duke, see here.)

The MLA has been receiving a lot of positive attention in the wake of its announcement.

Commenting on the story presented in Inside Higher Education Hugh Gusterson credited the MLA with making a positive step, but chided IHE for suggesting that this move was novel among scholarly societies, pointing to the green status of the AAA policy. The suggestion of Gusterson’s comment is that the two policies are equivalent because they both allow authors to post articles on websites and in repositories. Gusterson is someone whose research I respect and who is working hard on AAA publishing issues as a member of the association’s Anthropological Communications Committee.

More recently, on the AAA blog and in a tweet from the AAA twitter account, this argument is made in more elaborate terms. The AAA is basically saying that its author agreement is equivalent to the new MLA one and that anthropologists should be proud (rather than alarmed) that the AAA got there first. The blog post notes: “AAA members should rest assured that such an agreement is not new to publishing; in fact AAA journal authors have enjoyed this practice for quite a while.” There is no need for me to quote extensively from the blog post. It is there for interested readers to consult. To see the relevant tweets, the twitter account to look for is @AmericanAnthro.

I stand ready to be corrected and I have not seen the actual MLA author agreement, but the MLA’s language is clear on the following point: “The revised agreements leave copyright with the authors…”. This is clear language on a major point. If it means what it says (and I have every reason to believe it does given that Kathleen Fitzpatrick is the Director of Scholarly Communication for the MLA), then it means that the MLA agreement and the AAA agreement should not be treated as equivalent. Unless things have changed since the last time I saw a AAA author agreement, it does not leave copyright in the hands of an author but instead serves as an instrument by which copyright was transferred to the association. While the agreements may be alike in having the effect of allowing authors to circulate their work outside the society’s publication channel, retaining copyright and granting a license to your scholarly society to do something with your work is very different from signing away your copyright and retaining (i.e. being granted back) certain rights to use the work in which you formerly held copyright.

I hope that raising this distinction (something smarter people than me can explain more effectively) is not seen as snarky. As a board member that helped implement it, I am proud of the green author agreement that the American Folklore Society has and am quick to celebrate its strengths (i.e. it allows authors to circulate the publication version rather than just the post-print version of an accepted manuscript). I can also acknowledge that the AFS did not take the further step of defaulting to author-retained copyright. I am cognizant of the arguments for and against societies gathering in copyrights (and for the opposite position in which authors are allowed to retain them). My point here is just that, unless I am wrong, it is not accurate and thus not helpful to describe the AAA and MLA frameworks as being the same.

If I am reading the MLA language incorrectly and the association is actually obtaining copyright is the customary way, then it would be good if I were corrected on this point and for the accurate word to get out.

If I am wrong about the AAA author agreement and it does not now serve as a means by which copyright is transferred to the association, that too would be good to know. It would be an amazing and unlikely development.

If I am right and there is a difference between the two frameworks, then it would be beneficial for all interested parties to think about their implications and to discuss them with as much clarity as possible.

Despite the ways that my attempts to clarify its specifics have gone nowhere, I am glad that so many AAA anthropologists worked hard and early to establish a green author agreement for their association. It is a worthwhile accomplishment, for certain. Progress on open access can, of course, be incremental.

At the same time, I think that the MLA should be commended for its systematic reform efforts across the scholarly communications spectrum. If I am right and the copyright transfer aspects of their new agreement are distinctive, then they deserve particular credit for the kind of innovation that the recent AAA postings have aimed to diminish.

Apr 30

Open Research and Learning: Collaboration, Connections, and Communities

I am very happy to be again visiting the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. Over the weekend, I participated in a wonderful conference on the “Anthropology of Performance” organized by the industrious undergraduate students in the Department of Anthropology here. The conference included work in all four of anthropology’s four sub-fields, plus folklore studies and social psychology. The student presentations were outstanding. The number of soon to finish students reporting on nearly complete senior theses was amazing and the quality of their research and presentations was very impressive. Congratulations to the students and to the faculty and advisers who are supporting them.

Today I get to reconnect with my friends at the library here. I will be participating in a very promising event on “Open Research and Learning: Collaboration, Connections, and Communities.” The event includes an amazing group of people. David Ernst, Director of Academic Technology in the UM College of Education and Human Development will discuss open textbooks. Astronomer Lucy Fortson will discuss open data, and University of Minnesota Press Director Doug Armato will discuss open publishing projects at the press. Copyright librarian Nancy Sims–whom you should certainly be following on Twitter (@CopyrightLibn)–will be the moderator. I will be talking about the ways that open access projects foster richer forms of scholarly collaboration. I am really looking forward to it and I am thankful that the kind invitation from the anthropology students has allowed me to reconnect with the scholarly communications community at Minnesota. Thank you to all of the faculty and researchers who have signed up for today’s event. Information on the event is online here.

Mar 6

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Occupy and Open Access in Anthropologies (and Elsewhere)

I wish to express thanks to Ryan Anderson  [@ethnografix] for his editorial work on the online magazine Anthropologies [@AnthroProject]. Specifically I would like to highlight the publication’s new issue (#12), which is thematically focused on “Occupy and Open Access.” I really appreciate Ryan’s invitation to contribute to the issue. My essay is titled “We are the One Percent: Open Access in the Era of Occupy Wall Street.” In it I try to explore the mutual resonances of the Occupy and Open Access movements.

Daniel Lende, Barbara Fister, Kim and Mike Fortun, Laurence Cuelenaere, Doug Rocks-Macqueen, Kyle Schmidlin, and Ryan are the other contributors.

The essay by Kim and Mike Fortun is based on the presentation that Kim gave at the 2011 American Anthropological Association meetings in Montreal. Focusing on how the journal Cultural Anthropology, which she and Mike previously edited, might be transitioned into gold open access status, their essay complements my presentation on green open access strategies, which was delivered on the same occasion. The original event was a session on the present status and future prospects of the publishing program of the American Anthropological Association. (For other presentations from the event, see the links here.)

In related news, consider also checking out Chris Kelty’s recent essay on “The Disappearing Virtual Library,” the video from presentations made at the “Protests, Petitions and Publishing: Widening Access to Research in 2012” event held at Columbia University last month, and Barbara Fister’s recent “Dispatches from the Library of Babel.”

Update: Daniel Lende has written a more detailed and sophisticated overview and discussion of the new Anthropologies issue. Find it at Neuroanthropology.

Feb 3

4 Comments

Another World is Possible: Open Folklore as Library-Scholarly Society Partnership

Preface

In the wake of the SOPA/PIPA protests, debate over the Research Works Act, the growing boycott of Elsevier by scholars in many fields, and more local discussions of the ways that various scholarly societies in my own fields of interest (anthropology, folklore studies) responded to the recent call by the [U.S.] White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for comment on public access to federally funded research, there is a great deal of additional attention being given to the changing nature of the scholarly communications (publishing) system and our hopes for its future.

One key issue centers on scholarly society publishing programs and how they can best be advanced in the present and into the future. At the 2011 American Anthropological Association meetings I spoke in two different contexts about these issues. I have shared here previously my remarks to the “Future of AAA Publishing” event (Jackson 2011b; for context, see Nichols and Schmid 2011 and Brown 2011). That presentation was on “Green Open Access Practices.”

I also spoke in the Digital Anthropologies: Projects and Projections panel organized by Mike and Kim Fortun and sponsored by the Society for Cultural Anthropology. In that event (which has been well documented by Daniel Lende (2011), my goal was to describe the Open Folklore project as both a broader community effort and as a specific digital platform, so as to illustrate a more general point about the fruitful possibilities that can come from direct partnerships between libraries and the library community and scholarly societies.

Libraries and scholarly societies now have a customer-to-business relationship and it is one that is growing ever more strained as commercial publishers become central partners in many scholarly society publishing programs. I evoked the alter-globalization motto Another World is Possible in my title because I wanted to suggest that the course that we are on is not the only one available to us. I believe, on the basis of a lot of time spent over the past five years with university librarians around the Midwestern U.S., that the research library community would much rather work with scholarly societies collaboratively in the shared real and digital spaces in which scholars and librarians (and students) already labor together rather than engage antagonistically in a neoliberal marketplace that has been shaped by the business practices pioneered by firms such as Elsevier, Springer and (yes) Wiley-Blackwell. Open Folklore is just one of many university-scholarly society partnerships that are exploring how to make this alternative framework real.

I should have just shared my presentation at the time of the AAA meetings, but I had hope that I could quickly work on it some more before getting it into wider circulation. Time has not been available for that work, but the current interest in these issues suggests that I might now have an interested audience and a second chance to share it below in the form that I presented it in Montreal.

My remarks below should not be taken as an official statement of the Open Folklore project team, the Indiana University Libraries, or the American Folklore Society. They reflect my own experience with these issues, although they of course also draw upon the rich experiences that I have had partnering with talented, committed colleagues working toward the goal of achieving Open Folklore’s aspirations. The paper below has been edited lightly just to recontextualize the language for a reader not at the original panel (meaning simple removal of language like, “so and so will probably speak later this morning about…”). I wish to take this opportunity to especially thank Mike and Kim Fortun for their remarkable service to the field as editors of Cultural Anthropology and as organizers of the Digital Anthropology event.

 

Another World is Possible: Open Folklore as Library-Scholarly Society Partnership

Jason Baird Jackson

Indiana University

Building upon shared values, facing common problems, and recognizing new opportunities, partnerships linking scholars, scholarly societies, and research libraries are a particularly hopeful development in the changing scholarly communication system. In my remarks, and as an example of current possibilities, I will quickly describe the Open Folklore project and situate it in the context of the serials crisis, the corporate enclosure of society journal programs, the erosion of the university press system, the development of open source software for scholarly communication, and the rise of the open access movement as a progressive response to these changes. For those wanting basic information on using Open Folklore associated resources in your research and teaching, I urge you to visit the Open Folklore Portal site online and to consult the instructional screencasts that my collaborators and I have shared there, and on YouTube.

By way of introduction, I can note that OF is a joint project of the American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) Libraries. The two lead partners share as desire to make more reliable folklore scholarship—in many genres—discoverable and freely available online.  The Open Folklore team is doing this work but so are many colleagues in many places. Consulting the Open Folklore website, which I will come to in a moment, provides an eye-opening and encouraging sense of the OA work that a wide and deep network of folklorists have already been pursuing. Launched in 2010, the project has grown rapidly and made significant progress in its efforts to foster and encourage the development of an interconnected and interoperable, but also distributed and low-cost, system of open access projects and resources.

The Open Folklore project is more than its associated portal site. The project is pursuing educational projects aimed at educating scholars about open access issues. Importantly, it is also working with rights holders and publishing partners to encourage the pursuit of sustainable open access projects that comply with the basic technical standards already extant in the broader scholarly communications community. Read more

Jan 18

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The American Folklore Society Expresses Support for Public Access to Federally Funded Peer-Reviewed Research #RWA @whitehouseostp

Bad news abounds, but from the good news file comes today’s release of a letter sent by the President of the American Folklore Society, Diane Goldstein, on behalf of the society. (Diane is also my colleague here at Indiana University). The letter was a response to the recent Request for Information issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (part of the executive branch of the U.S. government charged with advising the president). The RFI focused on “Public Access to Peer-­Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research.”

In the American Folklore Society’s response to the RFI, the society did two things of note. The AFS pointed to, and endorsed the careful and valuable submission that had already been made by the Association for Computers and the Humanities. In addition to supporting public access policies, the ACH statement (and by extension the AFS view) stresses the need for research policy makers working on this (and neighboring issues) to keep humanities research in mind as part of the larger (and relevant) research landscape.

The other theme brought out in the AFS statement is that the society has committed itself to sustainably pursuing public access goals as exemplified by its adoption of an author agreement for the Journal of American Folklore that is consistent with green open access practices (including repository deposit of the publisher’s final version) as well as its work (with the IU Libraries) on the Open Folklore project.

On a day in which SOPA and PIPA were prominent points of discussion, in a moment in which there are powerful interests also pushing the terrible Research Works Act, and on the day that the Supreme Court handed down a decision that signs off on a law that allows works to be taken out of the public domain and moved back into copyrighted status, I am proud to be a member of the AFS Executive Board working with colleagues who share a commitment finding pathways forward toward the full realization of open access scholarly communication in the public interest. Thank you to the Association for Computers and the Humanities for its leadership and for drafting an excellent position statement. Thank you to the White House for soliciting input on this vital public issue.

When the Association for Computers and the Humanities website comes out from under today’s SOPA blackout status, readers should be able to consult the ACH response to the RFI there. If you are in a hurry, the AFS website presents it alongside the AFS letter as a downloadable PDF.  See here: http://www.afsnet.org/news/81409/AFS-Advocates-for-the-Humanities-in-Federal-Research-Policy.htm

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