Scholarly Communication Commons^™

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.

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.

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.

Open Access, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This article describes some problems with the traditional system of scholarly journal publishing and explains how scholars can make their works open access, or freely available online. It also discusses some of the benefits of open access, as well as some of the challenges to achieving widespread openness.

Engaging Academics And Reimagining Scholarly Communication For The Public Good: A Report, Jessie Daniels, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

JustPublics@365 began as a discussion about how an interdisciplinary group of scholars at the Graduate Center, CUNY (located at 365 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan) might be able to bring their work together to foster greater social justice by sharing it in the public sphere.

We live in an era in which inequality is rampant. Media reports on inequality often gain little traction in a 24-hour news cycle dominated by the trivial. Activists work to address inequality in a myriad of ways, online and on the ground, but often lack connections to research or media that could further their cause. Key …

Talking About Open Access: Smash And Subtler Tactics, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This slideshow covers different ways of answering the question “Why open access?” It reviews the knee-jerk reactions many people have when they hear about open access, describes the many benefits of open access, invokes @openaccesshulk’s strategy of SMASH, and discusses what arguments work best with different populations (students, faculty, administrators, etc.). Finally, it addresses why librarians should try to talk about open access without resorting to constant use of the term “open access” and describes a few ways to sneak open access advocacy into other conversations.

Whose To Use? And Use As They Choose? Creative Commons Licenses In Wikipedia And Scholarly Publishing, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

Unlike traditional scholarly journals, Wikipedia and open access journals do not ask contributors to sign away their rights. Contributors to these venues retain the right to copy, distribute, and reuse their own words and works. This presentation takes a careful look at the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (used by Wikipedia) and the Creative Commons Attribution License (used by many open access publishers).

Librarianship, Art, And Activism. A Transatlantic Interview With Alycia Sellie, Alycia Sellie, Martin Persson

Publications and Research

Alycia Sellie is an activist, librarian and the editor of the zine The Borough is My Library. She joined Martin Persson for a talk about hardships and possibilities for librarianship today, the intersection between art and libraries, and the struggle to promote free/open access culture and readers' rights.

Speaking As One: Supporting Open Access With Departmental Resolutions, Madeline Cohen, Maura A. Smale, Jill Cirasella, Cynthia Tobar, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

Library faculty at the City University of New York (CUNY) have engaged in promoting and advocating for open access publishing at each of our campuses as well as across the University. Inspired by the passing of a faculty senate resolution in support of the creation of an open access institutional repository and associated policies, many CUNY librarians felt the need to raise their level of commitment. In this article, the authors—four library faculty members and one faculty member from outside the library—share their experiences creating and approving open access policies in the library departments of four CUNY schools and promoting …

Just Roll With It? Rolling Volumes Vs. Discrete Issues In Open Access Library And Information Science Journals, Jill Cirasella, Sally Bowdoin

Publications and Research

INTRODUCTION Articles in open access (OA) journals can be published on a rolling basis, as they become ready, or in complete, discrete issues. This study examines the prevalence of and reasons for rolling volumes vs. discrete issues among scholarly OA library and information science (LIS) journals based in the United States. METHODS A survey was distributed to journal editors, asking them about their publication model and their reasons for and satisfaction with that model. RESULTS Of the 21 responding journals, 12 publish in discrete issues, eight publish in rolling volumes, and one publishes in rolling volumes with an occasional special …

Scientific Communication Before And After Networked Science, John Carey

Publications and Research

Recent decades have seen extensive changes in how researchers in the sciences work. Online platforms enabled by Web 2.0 technologies (collectively known as “open” or “networked” science) have created multiple new channels for informal communications, revolutionizing the ways in which scientists collaborate and share results. Meanwhile, digitization and open access publishing have brought fundamental change to modes of publication and distribution for scientific journals. Yet the primary vehicle for the formal publication of results, the scientific article, has been much slower to alter in format. This paper will examine the functions that peer-reviewed journals have served within the scientific community …

A New Polemic: Libraries, Moocs, And The Pedagogical Landscape, Nora Almeida

Publications and Research

The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) has emerged in the past few years as the poster child of the online higher education revolution. Lauded and derided, MOOCs (depending on who you ask) represent the democratization of education on a global scale, an overblown trend, or the beginning of the end of the traditional academic institution. MOOCs have gained so much critical traction because they have succeeded in unmooring educational exchanges and setting them adrift in the sea of the internet. Although the MOOC is a new and evolving platform, it has already upended facets of education in which librarians are …

Searching Mindfully: Are Libraries Up To The Challenge Of Competing With Google Books?, Amrita Dhawan

Publications and Research

Traditional research tools used by libraries, such as encyclopedias and catalogs (OPACs) were created in an age of print and information scarcity. They have not kept up with changes in the information world which assume an abundance of online information in different formats and interdisciplinary topics which attempt to solve ‘real world’ messy problems and not traditional theoretical questions. The traditional tools rest on an unwieldy and somewhat outdated collaboration between OCLC, LOC, private aggregators, librarians and faculty. The search results they deliver offer excessive information with very little guidance on how to systematically sift through them. This makes the …