Pull quote: “It’s hard to stand on the shoulders of giants if the giants are hiding under the bed.”
Pull quote: “She wishes, however, that RUSQ’s editors and supporters would come clean. Open access has a history of paying a good bit too much heed to rose-tinted glasses. It’s important to get mistakes and failures out there for examination, uncomfortable though that process often is (not least because a few open-access advocates sling blame around with hurricane-force winds, and just as indiscriminately).”
Pull quote: “The deal here is that Open Access is not a fringe issue any more. It’s not just something that idealistic young researchers like to shout about. It’s a major part of the strategy of one — several, actually — of the world’s top universities. I’d argue that it’s been a moral imperative for a long time. Now Open Access has become an economic imperative, too.”
Pull quote: “Refusing these ‘untenable’ conditions will bring pain to the users and the librarians, who must deal with declining collections and frustrated clients. But like those who fought the untenable labor conditions of manufacturing, farming, and transportation, we are beginning to see that uniting our efforts against the unsustainable practices of those who control the the capital of scholarly communication will stabilize the delicate balance of powers and enable the progress of knowledge.”
Pull quote: “The most astonishing thing about this is not so much that it goes on, but that people have put up with it for so long. Talk to university librarians about extortionist journal subscriptions and mostly all you will get is a pained shrug. The librarians know it’s a racket, but they feel powerless to act because if they refused to pay the monopoly rents then their academics – who, after all, are under the cosh of publish-or-perish mandates – would react furiously (and vituperatively).”
Pull quote: “So Harvard’s ‘no, we can’t’ carries a significant subtext: no amount of money, even from one of the richest universities in the world, can satisfy the rapacity of the current system. To the Loon, this has been obvious for years: whatever amount of money a library has, the big-pigs invariably find a way to vacuum it up, so increasing money flow to the library merely increases the big-pigs’ profits without buying much if any additional benefit to libraries or library patrons.”
Pull quote: “Ultimately, the true value of a scholarly book review lies in its proper execution. An inferior review is one that simply describes the book’s content, marching through each chapter (Chapter One does this, Chapter Two does that) as if on a mission to get to the end as quickly and efficiently as possible. Too often, the summary is itself subordinated to fault-finding, as if that’s what reviewing means. A genuinely useful review goes beyond a mere summary of a book’s content, beyond a mere catalogue of missteps, and provides substantive intellectual engagement with, and evaluation of, its argument. What makes a review a serious contribution to scholarship is the reviewer’s contextualization and analysis of the book’s value to scholarship in the discipline.”
Pull quote: “Boycotts and start-ups can fail. Whether you call it an Academic Spring or something else, it looks to me like we’ve reached the point where it won’t ultimately matter if some of them do fail. You can lock up content, but you can’t close up a scholarly culture that’s more and more interested in openness. That culture won’t be satisfied with just being told that copyright is good and piracy is bad. Publishers, how will you adapt?”
Pull quote: “In modes where negative reinforcement predominates, such as at journals with high rejection rates, scholars are much more hesitant to distribute their work until it is perfect or near-perfect. An aversion to criticism spreads, with both constructive and destructive effects. Authors work harder on publications, but also spend significant energy to tailor their work to please the paren, er, editors and blind reviewers who wait in judgment. Authors internalize the preferences of the academic community they strive to join, and curb experimentation or the desire to reach interdisciplinary or general audiences.”
Pull quote: “The one trend all 4 students had in common was their reliance on Google Scholar for search and discovery of scholarly content. When our testing routines asked them to use the search functionality on the SAGE journals site, they often asked if they could use Google Scholar instead. They preferred to go out of the journal site, search Google, and return to the specific page within the site they were after – instead of searching the site itself. They reported only using their library catalog if they were looking for the print copy of something specific.”
Pull quote: “Everything about the way that the scholarly literature is organized is based on the journal, the discipline and the scholarly community that connects those two things. Expecting first-years to get that from the outside is ridiculous. Expecting first years to get that because they’re taught about it by graduate students who are just becoming conversant with their own discourse community is ridiculous. And expecting first years to get that because they spend 50 minutes with a librarian is ridiculous.”
