Little Reviews

On “Concepts of Openness and Open Access,” and “Sharing Your Work in Open Access,” from the UNESCO curriculum, Open Access for Researchers

On “Concepts of Openness and Open Access,” and “Sharing Your Work in Open Access,” from the UNESCO curriculum, Open Access for Researchers

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The UNESCO curriculum Open Access for Researchers was developed under UNESCO’s Open Access Program. As their website states, “The carefully designed and developed sets of OA curricula for researchers and library and information professionals are based on two needs assessment surveys, and several rounds of face-to-face and online consultations with relevant stakeholders” (n.p.). I’ve read over a couple of the modules that appear to be most pertinent for my research, and will offer brief responses below. Module 2, “Concepts of…

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On “Beyond Open: Expanding Access to Scholarly Content,” by Alice Meadows

On “Beyond Open: Expanding Access to Scholarly Content,” by Alice Meadows

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Alice Meadows provides a review of major low cost or public access initiatives  in “Beyond Open: Expanding Access to Scholarly Content.” She summarizes the New School for Social Research’s Journal Donation Project , Research for Life, the International Network for Access to Scientific Publications (INASP), Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL), patientACCESS, Access to Research, Emergency Access Initiative (EAI), and Strengthening Research and Knowledge Systems (SRKS). Meadows’ review is useful insofar as it provides a broad sense of low cost / public…

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On “Beyond Open Access to Open Publication and Open Scholarship,” by John Maxwell

On “Beyond Open Access to Open Publication and Open Scholarship,” by John Maxwell

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In “Beyond Open Access to Open Publication and Open Scholarship,” John Maxwell imagines what a humanities-based digital scholarly communication system would look like if it was modeled after prevalent web technologies, practices, and metaphors. He compares the opportunities that this approach might bring against traditional (read: current) academic publishing practices. This “webby model of scholarly communication” (5) would need to produce recognizable academic artifacts. Maxwell concludes that for digital scholarly artifacts to succeed in our current climate, they require at…

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On “Delivering Impact of Scholarly Information: Is Access Enough?,” by Heidi McGregor and Kevin Guthrie

On “Delivering Impact of Scholarly Information: Is Access Enough?,” by Heidi McGregor and Kevin Guthrie

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Heidi McGregor and Kevin Guthrie look beyond open access in their article, “Delivering Impact of Scholarly Information: Is Access Enough?” Their sentiments reflect some of my own, that is, just because you put something online, and its free, doesn’t mean that folks are going to engage with it. McGregor and Guthrie write explicitly from their experience with JSTOR, the not-for-profit organization that negotiates access to scholarly journals and articles and in turn supplies this access to institutions and individuals on…

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On “Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research,” by Gargouri et al.

On “Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research,” by Gargouri et al.

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In “Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research” (2010), Yassine Gargouri, Chawki Hajjem, Vincente Larivière, Yves Gringas, Les Carr, Tim Brody, and Stevan Harnad compare the relative impact of open access and non-open access articles that are archived in a repository because of mandate or due to self-selection. They confront the previously asserted conclusion that the so-called OA Advantage (i.e., the increased citation levels of OA articles) is a self-selection bias rather than a causal…

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On “Open Access Publishing and Academic Research” by Rowly Lorimer

On “Open Access Publishing and Academic Research” by Rowly Lorimer

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Rowly Lorimer begins this chapter by surveying the history of corporate journal publishing as we know it today. It began, Lorimer tells us, shortly after the Second World War by a fellow named Robert Maxwell, whom Lorimer paints as a “scoundrel, thief, probable spy, and publisher” (177). He traces it to the release of the World Wide Web, and the Internet’s gift to scientists of allowing them to share their work online at a much lower cost than publishers charge…

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On “Publication Fees in Open Access Publishing,” by David J. Solomon & Bo-Christer Björk

On “Publication Fees in Open Access Publishing,” by David J. Solomon & Bo-Christer Björk

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In their article “Publication Fees in Open Access Publishing: Sources of Funding and Factors Influencing Choice of Journal,” David J. Solomon and Bo-Christer Björk report on a study of authors who have recently paid Article Processing Charges (APCs) to publish journal articles open access. Solomon and Björk consider journals across the disciplines, although they only include 1 humanities journal out of their survey of 74. They aim to determine the author reception of APCs, as well as what factors are…

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On Open Access, by Peter Suber

On Open Access, by Peter Suber

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In Open Access, Peter Suber offers a general overview of what open access (OA) to research is. He is rather upfront about his mission: Suber wrote a book that is “… a succinct introduction to the basics, long enough to cover the major topics in reasonable detail and short enough for busy people to read” (ix). He does not go into the significant history of scholarly communication, like John Willinsky might, or the legal precedents for digital rights management, like…

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On “The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment,” by Yochai Benkler

On “The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment,” by Yochai Benkler

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In yet another excellent chapter from The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (2006), Yochai Benkler considers the digital environment (or sphere, or network, or whatever you like to call it), as an “institutional ecology.” He does this in order to examine the forces that shape the way we create, navigate, consume, and share electronic content, with a distinct eye to legal forces. Focusing on legal actions is critical; as Benkler notes, “we have seen a…

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On the Budapest Open Access Initiative & the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

On the Budapest Open Access Initiative & the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

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What more can I say? Consume, embody, enact. [pdfviewer width=”600px” height=”849px” beta=”true/false”]http://www.alyssaarbuckle.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Berlin_OADeclaration.pdf[/pdfviewer] [pdfviewer width=”600px” height=”849px” beta=”true/false”]http://www.alyssaarbuckle.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Budapest_OAInitiative.pdf[/pdfviewer]