Recently in Scholarly Communication Category

A Forum for Authors and Creators of Academic Works

Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Values:
Choosing our Future

Wednesday, May 12, 2010
1:30-3:30 p.m.
Walter Library, Room 402

Jason Baird Jackson
Associate Professor of Folklore,
Indiana University

Jason Baird Jackson is an ethnographer whose work bridges the fields of folklore studies, cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and ethnomusicology. He is the editor of the open-access scholarly journal Museum Anthropology Review, published by the Indiana University Libraries as part of the IUScholarWorks Journals project. Jackson launched the journal after becoming dissatisfied with publisher policies while serving as editor of Museum Anthropology, published by the American Anthropological Association and Wiley-Blackwell. He was part of a group that recently published an article entitled "Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies," which appeared in Cultural Anthropology and is now freely available. More about Professor Jackson...

The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion and Q&A with faculty members from the Academic Health Center, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Institute of Technology.

Learn more: http://staff.lib.umn.edu/communications/email/2010/jackson/

Yesterday the Academic Council at Duke University unanimously adopted an Open Access policy for scholarly articles written by the Duke faculty.

http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/2010/03/19/open-access-at-duke/

http://blogs.nature.com/mfenner/2010/03/08/evaluating-usage-patterns-of-online-journals

Researchers looked at how Oxford Journals were used and found the following:

-One third use journals at non-work hour times (weekends and evenings)
-Around 40% of sessions originated from a Google Search
-Little time on pages but frequent visits
-The median age of articles was 48 months (life sciences), 73 months (economics), and 90 months (history)
Life sciences users rarely read abstracts on publisher platforms

Here is the academic article on this research:
Nicholas, D., Clark, D., Rowlands, I., & Jamali, H. (2009). Online use and information seeking behaviour: institutional and subject comparisons of UK researchers Journal of Information Science, 35 (6), 660-676 DOI: 10.1177/0165551509338341

This could be used as part of an assignment--by reading it and asking students to reflect on how they use the journal literature or library literature or Google and how long they spend. It would be interesting to ask students to budget out the time they spend doing research (e.g. x% Google, x% reading x, x% Library database searching, etc.)

How to Prepare Your College for an Uncertain Digital Future
"How can a university organize and preserve the deluge of digital data before it washes away--and preserve it for uses that have not been imagined yet?
The data could be anything from student-produced course work to raw research results to informal material like blogs and wikis."

Paolo U. Mangiafico does a job that is not easy to describe. Duke University calls him director of digital information strategy. But the work isn't just information technology, or scholarly communication, or library services. It's all of them...

http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Prepare-Your-College/49455/

image by ecstaticist

October 19-23 is the first International Open Access Week.
Open Access is an idea, a movement, and an approach to distributing information and research. Open Access publications make their contents freely available online to all.

The University of Minnesota Libraries are marking Open Access Week with a public awareness campaign. Celebrate with us!

Posters
You will soon see orangey-yellow Open Access posters all over campus. They are aimed at students, researchers, creators, soon-to-be graduates, and everyone else, and are intended to get people thinking about how open access might affect them personally.
If you spot one of these posters out in the wild, let us know - or better yet, snap a quick picture! - we'll be collecting them to share with others celebrating Open Access Week around the world.

Visit the Open Access Week website
Watch Open Access 101 and "Voices of Open Access" videos; learn some myths about open access; read "Piled Higher and Deeper" comics, and more.

http://www.lib.umn.edu/scholcom/openaccessweek.phtml

Elinor Ostrom, winner of the Nobel Prize for economics co-edited a book called, Understanding knowledge as a commons : from theory to practice. This book contains a chapter written by our own Library Director, Wendy Pradt Lougee, "Scholarly Communication & Libraries Unbound: The Opportunity of the Commons."

Not surprisingly the book is checked out!

"Offering a crucial little-heard voice in the debate over the Google Book Search Settlement, 21 leading University of California faculty members have written a letter to the court asking for supplementary provisions to address their concerns. In the letter, the scholars speak on behalf of academic authors more interested in the public interest than in supporting themselves from their book revenues."

"We are concerned that the [plaintiff] Authors Guild negotiators likely prioritized maximizing profits over maximizing public access to knowledge, while academic authors would have reversed those priorities," the faculty members wrote. "We note that the scholarly books written by academic authors constitute a much more substantial part of the Book Search corpus than the Authors Guild members' books."

Read more: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6678948.html

http://beta.cell.com/

"Article of the Future...is an ongoing collaboration with the scientific community to redefine how the scientific article is presented online. The project's goal is to take full advantage of online capabilities, allowing readers individualized entry points and routes through the content, while using the latest advances in visualization techniques. We have developed prototypes for two articles from Cell to demonstrate initial concepts and get feedback from the scientific community."

"Primary Recommendation: Campuses should initiate discussions involving administration and faculty about modifying current practices and/or its intellectual property policies such that the university retains a set of rights sufficient to ensure that broad dissemination of the research and scholarly work produced by its faculty occurs."

http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume44/TheUniversitysRoleintheDissemi/163801