Tag: faculty

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Event Announcement: “Open, Connected, Accessible: Navigating the Road to Digital Scholarship”

“Open, Connected, Accessible: Navigating the Road to Digital Scholarship”

Date: Thursday, April 18, 2013
Time: 2:30-4pm
Location: 6304.01, Psychology Department, Graduate Center
Hashtag: #DigitalGC

How are digital technologies changing how we, as academics, do our jobs? What are the implications for faculty, for graduate students, and those in between? This conversation will highlight the most crucial issues in higher education and offer guideposts about how to navigate the road to scholarship in the digital era.

Publishing & Open Access in the Digital Era

  • Jill Cirasella, Assistant Professor, Library Department, Brooklyn College (for a few more weeks) & Graduate Center (in a few weeks), @jillasella

Networked Scholarly Collaboration and the CUNY Academic Commons

  • Matthew K. Gold, Associate Professor, English, City Tech, @mkgold

Tools for Making Scholarship Accessible

  • Joan Greenbaum, Professor Emerita, City University of New York, @Ashanda100
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Teaching about Open Access Without Saying “Open Access”

Do you know anyone who, full of misconceptions about open access, has a knee-jerk negative reaction to discussions of open access?  I certainly do.  Correcting the misconceptions that float around CUNY (and everywhere) about open access (e.g., the mistaken notion that “open access” means “vanity publishing,” the fear that open access leads to more plagiarism, the failure to realize that openness and rigorous peer review are completely independent issues) will take years of patient instruction.  One tactic to try now is teaching about open access without actually uttering the phrase “open access.”  I decided to give that approach a whirl in Brooklyn College’s upcoming newsletter for faculty; here is what I wrote:

After a journal accepts your article, you have to sign a copyright agreement — usually long, dense, and difficult to understand.  What exactly are you agreeing to when you sign that document?  Historically, you were signing away all rights to your article — only the publisher could copy, distribute, and republish your work.  Often, the agreement even prohibited you from sharing copies of your article with colleagues or students.  But you signed because you had to, because that’s what people who wanted tenure did.

Now, the vast majority of journals have more author-friendly agreements.  Some journals let authors retain copyright and simply ask for a license to the work.  Some journals still claim copyright but then give authors back a variety of rights, including the right to post the article online on a personal website, a disciplinary repository (e.g., arXiv, SSRN, RePEc), or an institutional repository (coming soon to CUNY, we hope!).  Some journals allow authors to self-archive the pre-refereed version of the article; some journal allow authors to self-archive the post-refereed version; some journals even allow authors to self-archive the final, formatted PDF version!  More specifically, according to SHERPA/RoMEO, a tool that summarizes journals’ copyright and self-archiving policies:

  • 87% of scholarly journals allow immediate self-archiving of some version of the article
  • 27% of scholarly journals allow immediate self-archiving of the pre-refereed version of the article
  • 44% of scholarly journals allow immediate self-archiving of the post-refereed version of the article
  • 16% of scholarly journals allow immediate self-archiving of the final, published PDF
  • After the expiration of embargo periods (usually 6 to 24 months), 94% allow self-archiving of the post-refereed or PDF version of the article

So, chances are that you have the right to make most of your articles freely available online.  Take advantage of your rights!  If you do, more readers will find your work, and more researchers will cite your work!  Learn more at the presentation about authors’ rights on Faculty Day (May 22)!

Yes, that blurb is entirely about green open access.  Nope, I didn’t use the phrase “open access” once.  If you know any open access naysayers, give this tactic a try.  And, of course, feel free to use (or improve upon!) my language.

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True for University of California, true for CUNY

Michael Eisen (UC Berkeley professor and Public Library of Science co-founder) makes clear, strong comments about access to faculty scholarship in “UC Research Should Be Free.”  Read it and replace every instance of “University of California” with “CUNY”: just as maddening, just as true.

Don’t have time to read the whole article?  Start with this:

That the public does not have unlimited access to the intellectual output of academic scholars and scientists is one of the greatest-ever failures of vision and leadership from the men and women who run our research universities — all the more so at a publicly funded institution like the University of California.

And then think a bit about this:

No single action would accelerate this process more than a clear endorsement from university leaders that free public access to the works people produce is not just a good— it is a priority. The university should take the lead by making such a declaration and openly altering the criteria for hiring, tenure and promotion to emphasize the value and importance of public access and ultimately require it.

Here at CUNY, we all need to act.  Read.  Discuss with your departments.  Discuss with your administrators.  Discuss with your campus’s faculty governance bodies.  Discuss at University Faculty Senate.  Vote.

Some of us are doing this already.  Here are some of the open access resolutions already passed by CUNY faculty:

Departmental policies are important and meaningful, and I very much hope more departments will pass them soon.  But, ultimately, departmental policies are not enough for university-wide change.

No, some of us is not enough.  Everyone at CUNY needs to be tackling this problem.

Yes, that means you.