CIT Infobits - October, 2001
Issue 40
ISSN 1521-9275
About INFOBITS
Infobits is an electronic service of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ITS Teaching and Learning's Center for Instructional Technology. Each month the CIT's Information Resources Consultant monitors and selects from a number of information and instructional technology sources that come to her attention and provides brief notes for electronic dissemination to educators.
Scholarly Publishing: Costs and Concerns
Resources for Scholarly E-Journal Editors
Text-E Virtual Symposium
Archive of Academic Computing Articles
MERLOT Conference Presentations Online
Gargoyles on the Web
Recommended Reading
SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING: COSTS AND CONCERNS
Recently, here at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and elsewhere, there has been more than the usual talk about the exceptionally-high and constantly-rising costs of scholarly journals and what scholar, editors, and libraries can do about the situation. Here is a summary of some of the discussion and reading:
At the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Information & Library Science 2001 Lucile Kelling Henderson Lecture, John Vaughn, Executive Vice President of Association of American Universities (AAU), presented some possible solutions to the problem. He suggested that scholarly publishing be non-revenue generating, funded on a cost-plus basis, as are research activities. He said that scholars need to retain their copyright, or at least sufficient rights to keep their publications accessible to the scholarly community. Vaughn proposed the following actions:
-- a high quality study of the economics of scholarly publishing in the print environment that can then be extrapolated to the digital environment,
-- a series of discussions with key actors and stakeholders in the academic community, and
-- the establishment of a group of experts with an oversight board to develop a business plan to transform the current system.
For more info on AAU's position on scholarly publishing, see "Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing" at http://www.aau.edu/issues/Principles5.10.00.html
Alison Buckholtz, Associate Enterprise Director for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) spoke to the UNC-Chapel Hill Scholarly Communication Working Group on what SPARC is doing to promote STM (science/technology/medical) journals that offer alternatives to the high-priced commercial STM journals. SPARC also assists editorial boards in negotiating with commercial publishers to bring down the costs of their existing journals. Buckholtz described two SPARC projects: "Declaring Independence," which is a guide to creating community-controlled science journals [http://www.arl.org/sparc/DI/]; and Create Change, a resource for faculty and librarian action to reclaim scholarly communication [http://www.arl.org/create/home.html]. For more information, see Buckholtz's article, "Declaring Independence: Returning Scientific Publishing to Scientists," (The Journal of Electronic Publishing, vol. 7, issue 1, August, 2001) at http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-01/buckholtz.html
One of the researchers in scholarly publishing that Buckholtz mentioned in her talk is Ted Bergstrom (University of California-Santa Barbara Economics Department) who studies journal pricing and refereeing. For details on his work, link to http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/
Elsewhere this month, Michael Jordan, Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of California at Berkeley, shared a letter of resignation on the Web from the editorial board of Machine Learning Journal (MLJ). The board resigned over issues such as the journal's cost and restriction of the communication channel between authors and readers. The letter is on the Web at http://www.cs.orst.edu/~dambrosi/uai-archive/0822.html
Stevan Harnad, Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Southampton, responded to the en masse resignations of the MLJ editorial board with a posting to the Electronic Journal Publishing List (VPIEJ-L@LISTSERV.VT.EDU). His response is available online at http://www.cs.orst.edu/~dambrosi/uai-archive/0835.html
RESOURCES FOR SCHOLARLY E-JOURNAL EDITORS
A recent request was made on the ARL (Association of Research Libraries) listserv
Learned Publishing
Journal of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
http://www.alpsp.org/journal.htm
"Publishing Electronic Journals Online" by Tom Abate (BioScience, vol. 47, no. 3, March 1997)
http://www.aibs.org/biosciencelibrary/vol47/Mar97abate.html
The Open Archives Initiative
Develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content
http://www.openarchives.org/
International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication
A Canadian e-journal publishing initiative
http://www.icaap.org/
The Resilience Alliance
An attempt to develop manuscript processing software for e-journals
http://www.resalliance.org/consortium/
Project Euclid: A New Model in Scholarly Communication
http://projecteuclid.org/
Berkeley Electronic Press Partnership
Provides a suite of electronic publishing tools
http://escholarship.cdlib.org/bepress.html
Commercial services for e-journal editors:
ScholarOne
http://www.scholarone.com/applications.html
Rapid Review
http://cjs.cadmus.com/rapidreview/index.html
The Bibliothèque publique d'information (BPI), the Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS), and Euro-Edu have launched "text-e," the "first entirely virtual symposium dedicated to investigating the impact of the Web on reading, writing and the diffusion of knowledge." Beginning on October 15, 2001, and ending in March 2002, every two weeks, a paper will be published and discussed online by contributors and guests. Discussions will be chaired by the organizers. The first paper is "Readers and Reading in the Age of Electronic Texts" by Roger Chartier, Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris.
The text-e site, available to the public in English, French, and Italian, is located at http://www.text-e.org/
The Bibliothèque publique d'information is a major French public reference library, providing the general public with open access to virtually all of its holdings. For more information, link to http://www.bpi.fr/
The Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS) "brings together researchers working on the relationship between the cognitive and the social sciences." For more information, link to http://www.institutnicod.org/
Euro-Edu (Association Européenne pour le Développement de l'Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche sur Internet -- the European association for the development of higher education and research on the Internet) is a non-profit organization devoted to developing web tools, web workshops, discussion groups and research papers on the changes of educational systems and the diffusion of culture. For more information, link to http://www.euro-edu.com/
ARCHIVE OF ACADEMIC COMPUTING ARTICLES
In celebration of its tenth anniversary, Lingua Franca has put together several special archives of articles "dealing with some of the particular issues that shaped nineties academic life most dramatically." One of the collections, on academic computing, can be read at http://www.linguafranca.com/print/10/computing.html
Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life [ISSN: 1051-3310] is published nine times a year by Lingua Franca, Inc., 135 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 USA; tel: 212-684-9884; fax: 212-684-9686; email: web@linguafranca.com; Web: http://www.linguafranca.com/
Note: As of this month, Lingua Franca has suspended publication. For more information see http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/18/college/coll18MAG.html
(Access to The New York Times on the Web articles requires registration; the registration is free.)
MERLOT CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS ONLINE
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Teaching) is a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students in higher education. The Inaugural International Conference of MERLOT, hosted by the University of South Florida in Tampa, was held in Tampa on August 12--15, 2001. Participants included faculty, librarians, instructional designers, academic administrators, technical support specialists, faculty development professionals, members of professional organizations, and authors of instructional materials. The Conference served to showcase the ways in which authors and faculty use MERLOT learning materials in their classrooms and enable discipline communities to share information on teaching and learning with web-based materials. Links to the conference presentations are available at http://taste.merlot.org/conference/program.html
For more information about MERLOT, link to http://www.merlot.org/
The subject of this year's Halloween links is gargoyles (or gargouilles).
Sculptor and stone carver Walter S. Arnold carved dozens of gargoyles for the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. His website at http://www.stonecarver.com/ has links to examples of his work, step-by-step photos showing how the carving is done using traditional methods, a brief history of gargoyles, and a teacher's guide.
Denis Hsiung's "Les Gargouilles" website at http://users.skynet.be/dhs/gargouilles/ provides a large collection of close-up photographs of gargoyles from several cathedrals, monuments, and other buildings in Belgium.
"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to kotlas@email.unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column.
"If someone walks rather than drives his car to the corner store to get a loaf of bread, we consider that person a good user of technology precisely because s/he didn't use it. Being a balanced technology user requires knowing when to use it and when not to."
-- quotation from Then What? A Funquiry into the Nature of Technology, Human Transformation, and Marshall McLuhan
Then What? is a novel dealing with the future of learning and technology by Infobits subscriber, Jason Ohler <jason.ohler@uas.alaska.edu>. Since 1986, Ohler has been Director of the Educational Technology Program at the University of Alaska Southeast.
For more information and excerpts from the book, link to http://www.jasonohler.com/thenwhat/
For more information about Ohler's non-fictional side, link to http://www2.jun.alaska.edu/edtech/jason/
