Jun 9
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.
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.
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
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.
AnthroSource planners explain (ca. 2004) why corporate publishing partners would compromise AAA values and ethical commitments:
The decision to engage a university press [California] in these processes is consequential in the overall picture of rising costs of scholarly journals [= serials crisis] and indicative of AAA’s commitment to the principles of a scholars’ portal as articulated by librarians in 1999. Importantly, in the agreement with UC Press, AAA retains ownership and control over all substantive elements of the AAA scholarly communications program, including content and pricing. Therefore, AAA will continue to make decisions based on the values of the Association. Other professional societies and associations, including some in related fields of anthropology, have chosen publishers whose commitment to investors competes with the goals of scholars and thereby compromises the ability to create a true scholars’ portal.
The whole hopeful and sensible article is: Suzanne Calpestri and Bonnie A. Nardi (2004) “Creating a Shared Vision for AnthroSource.” Anthropology News. 45(3):9. The recent history of scholarly communications work in anthropology is full of sad irony. Calpestri was then the chair of the AnthroSource Steering Committee and Nardi was a member of that group. Their article suggests that they were reflecting principles shared by the committee as a whole. The values that they are suggesting are (were?) fundamental to AAA members are (were?): (1) concern about the sustainability of libraries, (2) progressive intellectual property principles (promoting/protecting author’s rights), (3) opposition to corporate enclosure of anthropological scholarship, (4) treating scholarship and government information as a “public good”, (5) resistance to marketing bias, (6) resistance to commercial values, and (7) avoidance of “unfair” user costs.
May 28
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.
Read more
Congratulations to Arle Lommel on the successful defense today of his Ph.D. dissertation in folklore. His dissertation is titled Semiotic Organology: A Peircean Examination of the Bagpipe and Hurdy-Gurdy in Hungary. His innovative project unfolds at the intersections of Hungarian ethnography and general ethnomusicology, organology, folklore studies (especially of “folk revivals”), material culture studies, and semiotic theory. It was a pleasure to be member of Arle’s dissertation committee.
May 21
This is my first attempt at using SlideShare.
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.”
May 15
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.
Shreds and Patches 