Scholarly Publishing Commons^™

Opting Out Is Not An Option: Why All Academic Librarians Must Understand Open Access, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This presentation challenges the still-too-prevalent notion that scholarly communication competencies are essential only for scholarly communication librarians and optional for other academic librarians. It focuses on one competency in particular: a robust understanding of open access.

Global North And South In Scholarly Publishing: The Affiliations Of Authors And The Situating Of Journals, Beth Evans, Beth Evans, Nanette Johnson

Publications and Research

An important goal of the open access movement in scholarly publishing has been to broaden access to research globally. Electronic delivery and removing paywalls has allowed published, open access research to flow more readily across borders. Furthermore, although subscription publishing platforms continue to be maintained as they have been historically in the Global North (GN), new publishers, often located in the Global South (GS), have seen an opportunity to offer platforms of their own that publish in an open access environment. Journals situated in the GS, nonetheless, have often been suspected as being predatory, in part, because of their unfamiliar …

The Roles Of Academic Libraries In Shaping Music Publishing In The Digital Age, Kimmy Szeto

Publications and Research

Libraries are positioned at the nexus of creative production, music publishing, performance, and research. The academic library community has the potential to play an influential leadership role in shaping the music publishing life cycle, making scores more readily discoverable and accessible, and establishing itself as a force that empowers a wide range of creativity and scholarship. Yet the music publishing industry has been slow to capitalize on the digital market, and academic libraries have been slow to integrate electronic music scores into their collections. In this paper, I will discuss the historical, technical, and human factors that have contributed to …

Reaching Faculty Where They Are: Lessons Learned On Outreach, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

Successful scholarly communications outreach centers on a consistent, flexible, and holistic approach. We provide training and support throughout the lifecycle of scholarly communications. Our work has had a strong, positive impact at our college and our institutional repository is the centerpiece of our work.

The value of one-on-one is critical. We reach out to faculty when receiving a Google Scholar alert for new publications. Encouraging self-depositing allows us to train on using the IR and discuss author’s rights and using the SPARC Addendum. We have taken the approach that educating faculty is our ultimate goal.

Buy-in from administration has been …

The Doctoral Dissertation And Scholarly Communication: Adapting To Changing Publication Practices Among Graduate Students, Roxanne Shirazi

Publications and Research

As graduate students begin to publish earlier in their careers, the relationship between the doctoral dissertation and scholarly publishing is evolving. Many students now include their own previously published work in a dissertation, requiring instruction in publication contracts and copyright transfer agreements at the point of submission to the graduate school. There are repercussions to publishing as a graduate student for which our institutions are not well prepared, and to which librarian could apply our expertise. This article briefly reviews the history of dissertation publishing and introduces issues surrounding the use of previously published materials in doctoral dissertations.

Amplifying Cuny Voices With Cuny Academic Works, Jill Cirasella, Adriana Palmer, Roxanne Shirazi

Publications and Research

While most conversations about open access literature center on journal articles and books, research takes many other forms. CUNY Academic Works provides a platform for, and public access to, a wide range of CUNY-created scholarship. In this presentation, we discuss the importance of including Women's Studies Newsletter (the predecessor of Women's Studies Quarterly), Latino Data Project Reports, and theses and dissertations in Academic Works, and report on a recent census of journals published by the CUNY community.

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 …

Communicating Science Through A Novel Type Of Journal, Michelle T. Juarez, Chloe M. Kenet, Chiandredi N. Johnson

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

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. …

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 …

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. …

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.

Critical Friendship For Librarians: Striving Together For Scholarly Advancement, Yoko Inagi Ferguson, Helena Marvin

Publications and Research

Critical friendship is a form of non-hierarchical developmental relationship in which there is no mentor or protégé. In critical friendship, individuals with similar aims and differing experiences and knowledge aid each other in achieving goals by critically observing each other’s performance and progress. Bonded with trust, critical friends serve as sworn friends who strive and struggle side by side and share joy and pain throughout their journey. Originating from within the field of higher education, the critical friendship methodology has primarily been used by educators to improve their teaching skills, but has been found to be a powerful resource for …

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.

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.

White Paper On Research Opportunities And Cuny Library Faculty: The Need For Annual Leave Parity, Psc Cuny Library Faculty Committee (2014-­2015), Jay H. Bernstein, Jill Cirasella, John A. Drobnicki, Francine Egger-Sider, Lisa Ellis, Robert Farrell, William Gargan, Bonnie Nelson, Mariana Regalado, Sharon Swacker, Tess Tobin

Publications and Research

This White Paper provides an exposition and analysis of how annual leave disparity has arisen for Library Faculty at the City University of New York (CUNY) as compared to other CUNY faculty, its effects on librarians, and what a positive solution to the problem would look like.

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 …

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).