Scholarly Communication Commons^™

Parallels Of Unintentional Plagiarism And Predatory Publishing: Understanding Root Causes And Solutions, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

Plagiarism and predatory publishing share common attributes. Although students do not publish in predatory journals, both plagiarism and predatory publishing fall under the umbrella of academic integrity and scholarly ethics. Academic misconduct has many faces, ranging from student cheating on exams to purchasing a doctoral thesis and claiming it as one’s own work. Some forms of academic misconduct, such as the examples above are always intentional. However, many manifestations of academic misconduct are less clearly intentional. Students often plagiarize unintentionally because they lack writing skills including paraphrasing and citing. Faculty sometimes publish with predatory journals when they lack scholarly publishing …

Connecting Wikipedia And The Archive: Building A Public History Of Hiv/Aids In New York City., Ann Matsuuchi

Publications and Research

This is an overview of a project that was started in 2015 that was collaboratively designed by archivists and historians with the La Guardia & Wagner Archives and LaGuardia Community College’s faculty/librarians. It involves students in the production of a needed public history of the outbreak and impact of HIV/AIDS in New York City via writing and researching contributions to Wikipedia.

Open Access Outreach: Smash Vs. Suasion, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

Some librarians became open access (OA) supporters because they were outraged—and budgetarily hamstrung—by certain commercial publishers' artificially inflated prices. (We know they are artificially inflated, unjustified by production costs, because these publishers have jaw-dropping profit margins, higher than those of Disney, Starbucks, Google, and even Apple.) Other librarians were won over to OA by its more altruistic aspects, by the promise of a world rich in knowledge. However, in their outreach to patrons, librarians cannot rely on the arguments that swayed them. What convinced a librarian to embrace OA may not convert a student, a faculty member, or an administrator. …

Knowledge Systems And The Colonial Legacies In African Science Education, Edward Lehner, John R. Ziegler

Publications and Research

This review surveys Femi Otulaja and Meshach Ogunniyi’s (2015) Handbook of Research in Science Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, noting the significance of the theoretically rich content and how this book contributes to the field of education as well as to the humanities more broadly. The volume usefully outlines the ways in which science education and scholarship in sub-Saharan Africa continue to be impacted by the region’s colonial history. Several of the chapters also enumerate proposals for teaching and learning science and strengthening academic exchange. Concerns that recur across many of the chapters include inadequate implementation of reforms; a lack …

Teaching Citation Rhetorically: Reading, Not Just Writing, Nancy M. Foasberg

Publications and Research

Citation practices are often taught as a list of rules, rather than a rhetorical practice necessary to the scholarly conversation. This presentation recommends some pedagogical strategies that encourage students to read citations and consider them as messages, rather than a set of rules to follow.

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Predatory Publishing But Were Afraid To Ask, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

Librarians have a key role to play in educating users about predatory publishing. Predatory publishing can be described as low quality, amateurish, and often unethical academic publishing that is usually Open Access (OA). Understanding predatory publishing helps authors to make more informed decisions about where to publish. In the process of educating our users, librarians can set the ground for important conversations that encourage critical thinking about the scholarly communications process. Predatory publishing stems from broader problems including overemphasis on publication quantity, an OA models based on traditional, for-profit publishing, and resource disparities in the Global South. When users take …

Open Access And Global Inclusion: A Look At Cuba, Elizabeth Jardine, Maureen Garvey, J. Silvia Cho

Publications and Research

Is the Open Access movement meeting its goal of equalizing access to research worldwide? What we learned in libraries and archives during a delegation to Cuba inspired us to pursue this question. Latin America has long used OA to share its research, but it still has not achieved parity in access and contribution with the developed world. We consider what the OA movement can do to relieve some of these global inequities.

Learning The Basics Of Scholarly Communication: A Guide For New Subject Liaison Librarians, Madeline Cohen

Publications and Research

Academic librarians are playing a greater role in scholarly communication at their institutions. Scholarly communication has become a part of every academic librarian’s work. In particular, the role of subject liaison librarian often includes responsibilities related to advising discipline faculty on scholarly publishing, open access, institutional repositories and copyright. Liaison librarians might take on these responsibilities without having a firm grasp of the landscape of scholarly communication due to lack of experience or education in this area. This article is a guide to the key issues and concepts of scholarly communication for librarians new to this facet of academic librarianship. …

Open Educational Resources And Rhetorical Paradox In The Neoliberal Univers(Ity), Nora Almeida

Publications and Research

As a phenomenon and a quandary, openness has provoked conversations about inequities within higher education systems, particularly in regards to information access, social inclusion, and pedagogical practice. But whether or not open education can address these inequities, and to what effect, depends on what we mean by “open” and specifically, whether openness reflexively acknowledges the fraught political, economic, and ethical dimensions of higher education and of knowledge production processes. This essay explores the ideological and rhetorical underpinnings of the open educational resource (OER) movement in the context of the neoliberal university. This essay also addresses the conflation of value and …

Why Is The Journal Of Critical Library And Information Studies Needed Today?, Andrew J. Lau, Alycia Sellie, Ronald E. Day

Publications and Research

The editors’ introduction to the first issue of the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, which was established in response to a perceived need in the landscape of library and information studies scholarship for an open platform and venue for critical discourse and inquiry.

Open Access And The Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual, Jill Cirasella, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

The process of completing a dissertation is stressful—deadlines are scary, editing is hard, formatting is tricky, and defending is terrifying. (And, of course, postgraduate employment is often uncertain.) Now that dissertations are deposited and distributed electronically, students must perform yet another anxiety-inducing task: deciding whether they want to make their dissertations immediately open access (OA) or, at universities that require OA, coming to terms with openness. For some students, mostly in the humanities and some of the social sciences, who hope to transform their dissertations into books, OA has become a bogeyman, a supposed saboteur of book contracts and destroyer …

Opening Education, Linking To Communities: The #Inq13 Collective’S Participatory Open Online Course (Pooc) In East Harlem, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz, Polly Thistlethwaite, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

Drawing on experiences with the JustPublics@365 participatory open online course, or POOC, this chapter discusses the politics and possibilities of open access pedagogy and the broader engagement with communities that academics might achieve. We situated the POOC in New York City’s East Harlem neighborhood and to use the course to form an academic-community partnership. Rather than replicate the broadcast model employed by many MOOCs, in which an instructor delivers education to a broad audience of otherwise disconnected students, the POOC sought to engage participants through open site-based and online experiences, including lectures and class readings posted openly for any member …

The Future Of Web Citation Practices, Robin Camille Davis

Publications and Research

Citing webpages has been a common practice in scholarly publications for nearly two decades as the Web evolved into a major information source. But over the years, more and more bibliographies have suffered from “reference rot”: cited URLs are broken links or point to a page that no longer contains the content the author originally cited. In this column, I look at several studies showing how reference rot has affected different academic disciplines. I also examine citation styles’ approach to citing web sources. I then turn to emerging web citation practices: Perma, a “freemium” web archiving service specifically for citation; …

Being A Scholar In The Digital Era: Transforming Scholarly Practice For The Public Good, Polly Thistlethwaite, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

What opportunities do digital technologies present scholars? How do developments in digital media support scholarship and teaching, and how can academics apply them to further social justice activism? The authors, a sociologist and a librarian, examine scholarly practice in the digital era to explore how academics, journalists, and activists can combine efforts to support social justice issues. With scholarly communication undergoing rapid change, and with digital innovation applied in higher education for many reasons, authors outline what scholars can do to channel their work to benefit the public good.

Scholarship That's Scholar-Led: An Introduction To Open Access, Megan Wacha

Publications and Research

This webinar provides an introduction to open access publishing models, and the foundation for understanding them not only as a recent development in scholarly communication, but as a return to scholar-led publishing practices.

Should The New England Education Research Organization Start A Journal In The Age Of Audit Culture? Reflections On Academic Publishing, Metrics, And The New Academy, Edward Lehner, Kate Finley

Publications and Research

A large regional educational research association can straightforwardly establish a scholarly journal associated with its annual meeting. However, this work underscores the complicated scholarly ecosystem that an association enters when publishing a journal. The social sciences’ scholarly literature exists in a related series of networks that could be described as a type of “audit culture.” Within audit culture, two major academic publishers, Elsevier and Thomson Reuters, have established competing, yet strikingly collinear, journal metrics systems: Scopus and Web of Science, respectively. These and other bibliometrics systems are used to assess, order, and rank the supposed value of a researcher’s work. …

At Last, A Good, Long Look At Open Access For The Humanities, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

Book review of Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future by Martin Paul Eve, published by Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Open Cuny: 24 Colleges, 5 Boroughs, 1 Repository, Megan Wacha

Publications and Research

In March 2015, CUNY Libraries launched an open access institutional repository, CUNY Academic Works, to collect and provide public access to the intellectual output of the students, faculty, and staff at the City University of New York. This presentation details a collaborative model in which the Office of Library Services at the Central Office partners with libraries at each of CUNY’s campuses to adopt more open practices.

Die Hard: The Impossible, Absolutely Essential Task Of Saving The Web For Scholars, Robin Camille Davis

Publications and Research

The web is fragile and littered with broken links. This poses a problem for the scholarly record and one’s own academic history. In this presentation given at the Association of College & Research Libraries – Eastern New York chapter conference, I review the stats on link rot and reference rot, and I give a brief overview of web archiving and its challenges. I review some web archiving tools: the Internet Archive, Perma.cc, WebRecorder, and GitHub. I advise creators of web projects to design their websites to be accessible and archivable, and to think about preservation (afterlife) of their projects from …

The Labor Of Informational Democracy: A Library And Information Science Framework For Evaluating The Democratic Potential In Socially- Generated Information, Jonathan Cope

Publications and Research

This essay outlines a framework that LIS can use to analyze socially-generated information. The proposed evaluative framework involves three democratic horizons of analysis: the level of access, the level of production, and the level of communicative speech. This inquiry synthesizes the political economy of communication/librarianship, autonomist Marxist insights about the dematerialization of labor in late capitalism, and the concerns of contemporary democratic theory. The essay concludes with a set of proposals for LIS to pursue research and policies that use a critical theoretical framework linking the realm of production (i.e., labor) with communicative democracy.

Open Access Theses & Dissertations: Airing The Anxieties & Finding The Facts, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

Writing a thesis or dissertation is hard, and now that most theses and dissertations are deposited and distributed electronically, graduating students face an additional complication: they must decide whether they want to make their dissertations immediately open access (OA), or, at universities that require OA, they must come to terms with the fact that their work will be OA. In this presentation, I survey and scrutinize the anxieties and myths surrounding OA theses and dissertations.

Opening Cuny: Academic Works At Work, Megan Wacha, Miriam Deutch, William A. Casari, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

Academic Works, CUNY’s new open access institutional repository, collects and provides public access to the scholarly and creative works produced by CUNY faculty, students and staff. This program will show how opening content to the world impacts CUNY, as each speaker addresses collections at their institution: dissertations at The Graduate Center, Open Educational Resources at Brooklyn College, the “Save Hostos” archival collection at Hostos Community College and faculty research from across CUNY.

Cuny Academic Works Workshop: Increase The Reach Of Your Research, Megan Wacha, Jill Cirasella

Events

This slideshow was presented at an Open Access Week event hosted by the LACUNY Professional Development Committee. It introduces the CUNY Academic Works repository and reviews concepts about copyright and authors' rights.

Public Scholarship For The Public Good: An Introduction To Open Access, Megan Wacha

Publications and Research

This workshop provides an introduction to open access publishing models and discusses its implication for faculty research and student learning. Participants leave with a solid understanding of open access and important related areas, such as copyright, that empowers them to make informed decisions when publishing and contribute public scholarship for the sake of the public good.

Randall Munroe’S What If As A Test Case For Open Access In Popular Culture, Nancy M. Foasberg

Publications and Research

Open access to scholarly research benefits not only the academic world but also the general public. Questions have been raised about the popularity of academic materials for nonacademic readers. However, when scholarly materials are available, they are also available to popularizers who can recontextualize them in unexpected and more accessible ways. Randall Munroe’s blog/comic What If uses open access scholarly and governmental documents to answer bizarre hypothetical questions submitted by his readers. His work is engaging, informative, and reaches a large audience. While members of the public may not rush to read open access scientific journals, their availability to writers …

Beyond Beall’S List: Better Understanding Predatory Publishers, Monica Berger, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This article discusses the phenomenon of predatory publishing and examines the benefits and limitations of Jeffrey Beall's blacklist of "potential, possible, or probable" predatory open access (OA) publishers. It also describes the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a whitelist of scholarly OA journals, and other tools for evaluating open access journals. It concludes by discussing the role of librarians, who must help researchers avoid low-quality journals and also need to counteract the misconceptions and alarmism that stymie the acceptance of OA.

Course Shell For Introduction To Oer Class, Steven Ovadia

Open Educational Resources

This is the course shell for the fully online OER class used to train CUNY faculty in OER implementation. It includes five modules plus a final project. The modules are:

• Class introduction
• An Introduction to Open Education Resources
• Finding and Evaluating Open Education Resources
• Using Open Education Resources in Your Class
• Creating and Hosting Your Own Open Education Resources

Discussion prompts are included as a separate document.

You Know What You Write, But Do You Know Your Rights? Understanding And Protecting Your Rights As An Author, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

When you publish a journal article, you sign a copyright or licensing agreement. Do you know what you’re agreeing to when you sign it?

Different journals have different policies: Some journals require you to relinquish your copyright. (You then have to ask permission or even pay to share your article with students and colleagues!) Some journals allow you to retain some rights (e.g., the right to post online). Some journals leave copyright in your hands. (You simply give the journal a non-exclusive license to publish the article.)

How can you find out a journal’s policy? How can you negotiate your …

Open Scholarship For Open Education: Building The Justpublics@365 Pooc, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz, Polly Thistlethwaite, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

This article outlines the collaboration between librarians at the Graduate Center Library of the City University of New York (CUNY) and JustPublics@365 (http://justpublics365.commons.gc.cuny.edu/about/), an initiative designed to open scholarly communication in ways that connect to social justice activism, part of which involved producing an open, online interdisciplinary course with a geographical focus on East Harlem. This Participatory Open Online Course, or POOC, was developed locally without a licensed provider platform or licensed scholarly content. It was designed to be open to CUNY students, to citizens of East Harlem, and to a global public with an interest in social …

Do We Speak The Same Language? A Study Of Faculty Perceptions Of Information Literacy, Jonathan Cope, Jesús E. Sanabria

Publications and Research

The authors analyze twenty in-depth interviews with faculty members about how they perceive information literacy (IL) to examine two key factors: how disciplinary background influences conceptions of IL among faculty members in academic departments and how the instructors’ perception of information literacy differs from that of professionals in library and information science. The investigators analyzed these interviews by utilizing a phenomenological method. The faculty members were interviewed at a four-year college, the College of Staten Island, and at a community college, the Bronx Community College, both part of the City University of New York.