Of CUNY, By CUNY, For CUNY

I have presented “Of CUNY, By CUNY, For CUNY: Why We Need an Institutional Repository” (or a variation on the theme) several times, to several hundred members of the CUNY community.  (I’ve even linked to it several times already on this blog, but a good message is worth repeating…)

If you haven’t seen me in action yet, you can get a good sense of my message by reading through the slides:

If you can put these slides to good use on your campus, please do so!

Also, here’s an accompanying handout — please feel free share this, too!

Predatory Open Access Publishers

The 2013 list of predatory open access publishers and journals has been released. This year’s list includes over 200 predatory open access publishing operations and over 100 predatory standalone journals.  Last year’s list named only 23 predatory publishers — clearly, there are more and more people out there who don’t really care about high-quality research and just see dollar signs when they learn about the gold open access publishing model. Unfortunately, these shady journals put the reputation of open access more generally at risk.

What, more specifically, are predatory open access publishers?

They are OA publishers whose mission is profit, not dissemination of scholarly information.  It’s not that they publish peer-reviewed scholarship and happen to have fees to cover expenses (a common and perfectly respectable open access model) — no, it’s that they charge fees to make a profit and happen to publish some articles, many of questionable quality, often without any peer review. One of their hallmarks is spamming people with calls for papers and flattering invitations to write or serve as editors — I’ve received many emails like this, and you probably have too.

Don’t fall prey to predatory open access publishers! (And don’t forget that there are predatory and low-quality toll access journals as well!)  Always research a journal’s quality before submitting an article to it!

(For more information, see “‘Predatory’ Open-Access Scholarly Publishers” by predatory-publisher watchdog (and keeper of the list) Jeffrey Beall.)

Amherst College Press: The First Entirely Open Access University Press

Another bold open access move:

Amherst College is launching a new digital publishing venture that will offer peer-reviewed books written by leading scholars in the humanities and the social sciences that are then carefully edited and made available for free online.

Conceived by Amherst College Librarian Bryn Geffert, Amherst College Press will be housed in the college’s Frost Library and will solicit manuscripts from scholars who may be especially receptive to new publishing paradigms at a time when traditional academic presses are reducing the number of titles they publish.

“We will be the first university or college press to publish books solely under an open-access model,” said Geffert. “Although several university presses publish a few books each year under such a model, I do not know of another university press in the United States doing all books, all open-access.”

Geffert observed that the endeavor exemplifies the college’s motto, Terras Irradient, a Latin phrase that means “Let them give light to the world.”

Read more.

Bravo!  (As an Amherst alum, this especially warms my heart!)