Open sesame [article on open access, research and scholarly publishing] The Economist

Posted by Celia Walter | 13 Apr, 2012

When research is funded by the taxpayer or by charities, the results should be available to all without charge

 

 

 

PUBLISHING obscure academic journals is that rare thing in the media industry: a licence to print money. An annual subscription to Tetrahedron, a chemistry journal, will cost your university library $20,269; a year of the Journal of Mathematical Sciences will set you back $20,100. In 2011 Elsevier, the biggest academic-journal publisher, made a profit of £768m ($1.2 billion) on revenues of £2.1 billion. Such margins (37%, up from 36% in 2010) are possible because the journals’ content is largely provided free by researchers, and the academics who peer-review their papers are usually unpaid volunteers. The journals are then sold to the very universities that provide the free content and labour. For publicly funded research, the result is that the academics and taxpayers who were responsible for its creation have to pay to read it. This is not merely absurd and unjust; it also hampers education and research...[more]

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Coercive Citation... article from Science Magazine

Posted by Celia Walter | 22 Mar, 2012

Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing

Allen W. Wilhite*,†,
Eric A. Fong*

+ Author Affiliations

  1. College of Business Administration, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL 35899, USA.
  1. ↵†Author for correspondence. E-mail: wilhitea@uah.edu

Despite their shortcomings (1–4), impact factors continue to be a primary means by which academics “quantify the quality of science” (5). One side effect of impact factors is the incentive they create for editors to coerce authors to add citations to their journal. Coercive self-citation does not refer to the normal citation directions, given during a peer-review process, meant to improve a paper. Coercive self-citation refers to requests that (i) give no indication that the manuscript was lacking in attribution; (ii) make no suggestion as to specific articles, authors, or a body of work requiring review; and (iii) only guide authors to add citations from the editor's journal. This quote from an editor as a condition for publication highlights the problem: “you cite Leukemia [once in 42 references]. Consequently, we kindly ask you to add references of articles published in Leukemia to your present article” (6). Gentler language may be used, but the message is clear: Add citations or risk rejection.

  • ↵* Authors contributed equally to this work.

Read the Full Text
 
 

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Developing Your Research Career – Univ of London Podcast

Posted by Celia Walter | 17 Feb, 2012

Getting Journal Articles Published

with:
Professor Miriam Zukas
Professor Li Wei
Professor Esther Leslie

In 2011-12 BISR is running a new series of lunchtime workshops on ‘Developing your research career’.  The workshops offer opportunities to develop and share knowledge about key aspects of a successful academic career: publishing journal articles, gaining grants, getting book contracts, networking and getting promoted. All the workshops are relevant to early career researchers, some will also be useful to research students and to more experienced staff.

This session will examine useful practices for increasing your chances of getting articles published in academic journals.  The panel is made up of Birkbeck academics who serve as editors for both traditional and open access journals.  The session will look at the question of where to publish and how to produce articles that are likely to be accepted.  Research students and staff at all stages of their careers are welcome. http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/01/developing-your-research-career-getting-journal-articles-published/

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Elsevier Publishing Boycott by Academics

Posted by Celia Walter | 1 Feb, 2012

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, who won the Fields Medal for his research, has organized a boycott of Elsevier because, he says, its pricing and policies restrict access to work that should be much more easily available. He asked for a boycott in a blog post on January 21, and as of Monday evening, on the boycott’s Web site The Cost of Knowledge, nearly 1,900  scientists have signed up, pledging not to publish, referee, or do editorial work for any Elsevier journal.

The company has sinned in three areas, according to the boycotters: It charges too much for its journals; it bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money to buy things they don’t want in order to get a few things they do want; and, most recently, it has supported a proposed federal law (called the Research Works Act) that would prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by its grant recipients freely available.

Read the Complete COHE Article by Josh Fischman

 

From INFOdocket

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Lulu, a web-based self-publishing service

Posted by Celia Walter | 24 Jan, 2008

7 Things You Should Know About Lulu

Lulu is a web-based self-publishing service, providing online access to the tools an individual needs to design, publish, and print original material, including books, brochures, reports, calendars, and posters. Self-publishing offers an alternative to traditional publishing by allowing authors and creators of content to decide what gets published and in what form, allowing anyone to publish a book inexpensively and much more quickly than with traditional publishing. Faculty can use the service to publish more timely textbooks and other material for courses, and by having access to the tools of production, students can see and understand the processes involved.

+ Full Document (PDF; 105 KB)

Source: EDUCAUSE

Resourceshelf

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Publishing Advice for Graduate Students

Posted by Celia Walter | 21 Jan, 2008

Publishing Advice for Graduate Students
Source: Social Science Research Network (SSRN)

Graduate students often lack concrete advice on publishing. This essay is an attempt to fill this important gap. Advice is given on how to publish everything from book reviews to articles, replies to book chapters, and how to secure both edited book contracts and authored monograph contracts, along with plenty of helpful tips and advice on the publishing world (and how it works) along the way in what is meant to be a comprehensive, concrete guide to publishing that should be of tremendous value to graduate students working in any area of the humanities and social sciences.

Several options available for retrieval of full text (PDF; 176 KB).

Permalink Docuticker

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15 Trends [in publishing] to Watch in 2008

Posted by Celia Walter | 14 Jan, 2008


...There is an overarching theme to the changes already taking place. Consumer media in the 20th century tended to be horizontal and format-specific. The New York Times and Random House define “horizontal”: they publish across all interests and markets. The Internet will drive 21st-century publishing enterprises to be more like what professional publishing has always been: highly vertical and format-agnostic... http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6516743.html 

 

By Mike Shatzkin -- Publishers Weekly, 1/7/2008 3:00:00 AM


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