Elsevier!

in case you needed another reason to raise an eyebrow at Elsevier; librarian.net

Not that this should at all be surprising, but: ugh! How hard is it to not do something like this? I hope it was worth it (of course, not telling anyone how much they accepted) to have something this embarrassing come out in a lawsuit. The Scientist article (reg required) has links to PDFs of the articles, which go to great lengths, in my opinion, to look legit. Crummy!

New Forms of Work

ARL’s Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication report details a number of new forms of scholarly work we will want to include in any discussion of the future of research. The report offers several tangible examples of creative uses of digital technologies to expand and enhance the impact of artifacts of scholarly processes– my favorite among them is JOVE— the Journal of Visualized Experiments, which documents, in “video articles” the practical and methodological practices of researchers in biology, neuroscience, and medicine. The additional instructional value of this genre of multimedia cannot be ignored.

What is interesting to me about each of these examples is how the majority of them situate the social interaction of the scholarly communication process alongside the research “products”… Interesting too, how these interactions can serve to build the types of reputations that the traditional peer-review process has long created. One wonders about, specifically in the case of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (which used print supplements to legitimize itself in the eyes of those with a bias against digital publications), the degree to which print publications are given a pass due only to their format.

Great layman’s terms Open Access explanation

Open Access: Promises and Challenges of Scholarship in the Digital Age

Leslie Chan from University of Toronto Scarborough has a nice just-long-enough primer on Open Access and the current challenges of academic publishing. This is the article I’d send to my aunts, uncles, and neighbors to try and get them to understand the issue– it starts with a nice big lists of the questions OA can help us look at in new ways, like:

Why is Google Scholar showing that your colleagues’ articles are cited more than yours?
What could universities do to give the public a better understanding of their mission?
Should funding agencies require that publications resulting from their support be made publicly available?

via Open Access News

6 Projects That Could Change Publishing for the Better

Not since I had dreams of being a book designer & went on some sad post-English degree interviews for which I was thoroughly unprepared had I thought much about the non-academic publishing world, but Tamblyn’s video (via &BoingBoing) was interesting to me for several reasons. He thinks transforming the publishing/bookselling industry demands a new type of buy in, needs to encourage cheap experimentation, embodies a risk-taking and work-in-progress approach, and needs to include people who aren’t currently at the table making the big decisions. Similar to many of the issues we’re looking at in scholarly communication.  Most importantly, his subtext seems to be that we need to ensure that our projects do not fail badly– that all of our eggs are not in the same basket.

6 Projects That Could Change Publishing for the Better

Good use of powerpoint– I love it when slides are both descriptive and funny– here they seem to be a cruch to the note-takers rather than the presenter. Another one to look at is Scott McCloud’s TED talk.