Month: October 2013

Posted on

To Catch a Predator: How to Recognize Predatory Journals and Conferences

You are invited to the second event in the Information Interventions @ CUNY series:

To Catch a Predator: How to Recognize Predatory Journals and Conferences
Friday, November 15, 2013, 10am – noon
The Graduate Center, Rooms C203/C204 (Concourse Level)
Refreshments will be served

Evaluating journal quality is increasingly difficult: there are many new journals and publishers. Some are predatory, claiming peer review where there is none and being far more interested in profit than the dissemination of high-quality scholarly information. (Many others are simply low quality — not predatory but not a desirable publishing venue for most scholars.) Predatory publishers have always existed but, due in part to the growth of online publishing, they are becoming more visible, more aggressive, and more important to understand.

Come learn about their spammy, scammy practices, as well as how to distinguish simply less-good publishers from truly predatory ones, why the existence of predatory publishers should not scare us away from open access publishing more generally, and how to respond when others conflate predatory and open access publishing.

RSVP by Thursday, November 7 to Jill Cirasella or Maura Smale.

Sponsored by the LACUNY Scholarly Communications Roundtable, the CUNY Office of Library Services, and Just Publics @ 365.

There are more Information Interventions @ CUNY coming up: Stay tuned for Spring 2014 events about open educational resources and the controversy surrounding dissertations and open access!

Image Source: Simon Fraser University Library, http://http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/26696/Shark2.jpg

 

Posted on

Curl Up with a Good (Open Access) Book

Don’t just look inside on Amazon — get Twelve Years a Slave for free from archive.org!

This just in from LaGuardia Community College, in honor of Open Access Week 2013:

LaGuardia’s library has 28 older model e-book readers (Sony Reader Touch PRS-600) that have been used with specific classes in past semesters. The library is now making these e-book readers available to the college community. The readers are old devices (no wireless, no extra features, b&w screen) but work fine for just reading e-books. They can be checked out for 3 weeks just like a print book.

The Sony Readers are pre-loaded with 25 open access and public domain books ranging from recent novels by Cory Doctorow to Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (read it before/after seeing the movie!) to the Works of Edgar Allan Poe (great for Halloween!) — here is the complete list of titles.

If you’re not at LaGuardia Community College, that doesn’t mean you can’t read these books. They’re open access, so of course you can read them (see the list of titles for links to the full text) — you’ll just have to read them on your own device.

Posted on

Happy Open Access Week!

Open Access Week is here! There are lots of great events across the university this week, check out our Open Access Week 2013 page to see them all.

And of course there’s a dizzying array of blog posts, news, tweets, and other information about OA activities around the globe this week. Here are two that caught our eyes:

Open Access guru Peter Suber wrote a terrific article in The Guardian this week called Open Access: Six Myths to Put To Rest, a must-read for any open access fan who advocates for OA in their department, college, university, or profession.

Sarah Werner, a digital humanist who works at the Folger Shakespeare Library, wrote a great post on her blog about negotiating her contributor’s contract for a book chapter she authored. As Barbara Fister’s Library Babel Fish column in today’s Inside Higher Ed reminds us, book chapters often fall through the cracks when we talk about OA, and it’s great to see folks trying to free their work in books as well as journals.

Happy Open Access Week to all! Please share your thoughts, strategies, and observations in the comments.