Scholarly Communication Commons^™

If Not A Transformative Agreement, Then What? Nine Questions And Answers About An Alternative, Arthur J. Boston

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

Librarians are increasingly coming to agree that the scholarly record should be open and available to anyone who seeks it without financial barriers. But the topic gets murkier when we ask the question: how. How do we open the full scholarly record? One of the swiftest ways to get a mass amount of scholarly articles opened up in a short period of time is through Transformative Agreements (TA). TAs can be attractive offerings to institutions with a need or a desire to make their scholarly output open.

It is likely someone in your library has been asked by a …

Popcast: A Music Podcast With Unexpected Scholarly Angles. A Review And Highlighted Episode Selection, Arthur J. Boston

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

Short review with episode highlights of the New York Times Music Popcast podcast. Written specifically for librarians with an interest in the similarities/disparities between popular digital media content models and scholarly digital media. This includes a short overview of the podcast, its general relation to scholarly communication, a highlight of seven episodes that relate to copyright, archiving, peer-review, vertical integration, metrics, open repositories, and piracy.

Read & Let Read: An Alternative To The Transformative Agreement, Arthur Boston

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

In March 2021, the University of California and Elsevier announced a new transformative deal which included slightly-discounted article processing fees as UC's route to open access in Elsevier journals. Librarians and researchers expressed immediate concern that this deal upheld inequities in the research system. The UC/Elsevier transformative deal, however, is just one of many that include expensive pay-to-publish structures. This commentary proposes an alternative contract between libraries and publishers that would enable wider reading and lower costs, called Read & Let Read. The three main points of a Read & Let Read deal include a half-dollar valuation of individual journal …

Eartharxiv: Today And Tomorrow, Tom Narock, Rochelle Taylor, Evan Goldstein, Arthur J. Boston, Dasapta Erwin Irawan

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

EarthArXiv is a preprint service for the Earth sciences — a web-based system that enables open access publishing of non peer-reviewed scholarly manuscripts before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. In this presentation, we provide analytics on the usage of EarthArXiv across a number of sub-disciplines of Earth science. Data indicate that the service in general is growing, but with submission rates varying amongst discipline. The trend of the preprint-to-postprint ratio for each discipline also provides insight into how the various Earth science communities are using the service. We investigate were preprints are published after submission to EarthArXiv and examine how …

Interested In Institutional Open Access Policies? Coapi Can Help!, Arthur J. Boston, Jere Odell, Mona Ramonetti, Alainna Wrigley

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

Open access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Institutional open access policies serve as a pledge by institutional authors to make their works open access in a repository to ensure that anyone can access and use their research—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives. Librarians that support policy implementation connect readers from far and wide to research—getting to the heart of what an academic library should be. Often trained in providing faculty guidance and familiar with scholarly publishing, librarians are well …

Thinking Politically About Scholarly Infrastructure: Commit The Publishers To 2.5%, Arthur J. Boston

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

Maybe it’s unsurprising that I think about scholarly communication in terms similar to U.S. politics. I originally drafted this article for the Library Publishing Coalition blog before the 2020 election and revised it for C&RL News during the weirdly long interregnum period before the actual inauguration. The 2016 Republican National Committee was the backdrop to my becoming a scholarly communication librarian in February of that year. That’s also when I joined Twitter, to better follow politics and librarianship, and maybe that’s to blame.

The Values Of Library Publishing And Open Infrastructure: Recapping #Lpforum21, Arthur J. Boston

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

Who leads, participates in, and is served by global knowledge infrastructure? Check out these takeaways from the recent Library Publishing Forum Conference from the perspective of a member of the planning committee.

Open Peer Review, Christine L Ferguson

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

In this issue of Serials Review, the Balance Point column delves into issues surrounding peer review, paying particular attention to open peer review. Beginning with some discussion of the history and development of peer review, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of traditional peer review, the column addresses open peer review (OPR) processes and the pros and cons of OPR. Topics such as the mechanisms of open peer review, faculty credit for peer review, as well as open peer review in the Library and Information Science (LIS) field are also touched on.

Copyright, Fair Use, And Creative Commons: An Active-Learning Exercise For Studio Art Students, Arthur J. Boston

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

This article describes an active-learning exercise intended to help teach copyright, fair use, and Creative Commons licenses. In the exercise students use a worksheet to draw original pictures, create derivative pictures on tracing paper, select Creative Commons licenses, and explore commercial usage, fair use, and copyright infringement. Librarian-instructors may find the completed worksheets to be useful aids to supplement copyright lectures; student perspectives will be integral because they are generating the examples used in discussion. Although a scholarly communication librarian developed this exercise to help introduce some basic copyright information to an undergraduate studio art and design class, the exercise …

What Do You Mean? Research In The Age Of Machines, Arthur J. Boston

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

What Do You Mean?” was an undeniable bop of its era in which Justin Bieber explores the ambiguities of romantic communication. (I pinky promise this will soon make sense for scholarly communication librarians interested in artificial intelligence [AI].) When the single hit airwaves in 2015, there was a meta-debate over what Bieber meant to add to public discourse with lyrics like “What do you mean? Oh, oh, when you nod your head yes, but you wanna say no.” It is unlikely Bieber had consent culture in mind, but the failure of his songwriting team to take into account that some …

Open Access And Closed Minds? Collaborating Across Campus To Help Faculty Understand Changing Scholarly Communication Models, Elizabeth Price, Leslie Engelson, Candace K. Vance, Rebecca Richardson, Jeffrey Henry

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

This chapter highlights the efforts of a team of librarians at Murray State University to help the university faculty members understand the Open Access publishing environment.