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Higher Education; Best Practices; Research Universities; Data; Information Management; Librarians; Academic Libraries; Information Technology; Electronic Publishing; Electronic Libraries; Archives; Research Libraries; Library Role; Bachelors Degrees; Masters Degrees

Abstract:
This article describes the fundamental challenges to data curation, how these challenges may be compounded for smaller institutions, and how data management is an essential and manageable component of data curation. Data curation is often discussed within the confines of large research universities. As a result, master's and baccalaureate institutions may be left with the impression that they cannot engage with data curation. However, by proactively engaging with faculty, libraries of all sizes can build closer relationships and help educate faculty on data documentation and organizational best practices. This article describes experiences from one master's comprehensive institution as it engages with data management. In a period of several months, James Madison University went from no formal data advising to a coordinated data management support plan for faculty. Collaboration across campus--and across institutions--can help make data curation an accomplishable goal. This article provides guidance on how to begin the conversation and plan for future engagement with data curation, and makes comparisons to scalable efforts with institutional repositories to further encourage participation with data curation. Research universities account for 297 of the 1,832 four-year institutes of higher education in the United States of America. There must be stewardship of the data from the remaining 1,535 organizations to help preserve the complete intellectual product of the nation. Additional resources and readings are included. Note:The following two links are not-applicable for text-based browsers or screen-reading software. Show Hide Full Abstract

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Higher Education; Academic Freedom; Tenure; Profiles; Information Sources; Reputation; Periodicals; Labor Market; Writing for Publication; Scholarship; Faculty Publishing; Professional Recognition; Faculty Promotion; Library Role; Electronic Publishing; Information Services; Vendors; Teacher Attitudes

Abstract:
With faculty balking at the price of academic journals, can other digital publishing options get traction? University libraries are no strangers to one of the most popular online alternatives, the open-access archive. These archives enable scholars to upload work--including drafts of articles that are published later in subscription journals--so they can be accessed for free by the public. In the current higher education environment, though, no up-and-coming scholar can advance his career by placing articles in an open-access archive alone. In academia, there's no prestige in self-publishing. Fair or not, prestige matters. Publishing in high-profile journals--or failing to do so--can make or break a career in academia, where the American Association of University Professors estimates the ratio of tenure-track openings to new doctorates at around 1:4. Having an article appear in a big-name publication isn't just a win for the scholar. Schools use the prestige of their faculty to bargain for bigger budgets, draw new hires, and recruit students. Prospective students look for programs with high-profile faculty whose reputations will give them a boost in the grad school, post-doctorate, and job markets. The stakes are high, particularly in the hard sciences where there's big money to be won. Which explains why new journals--or new digital modes of scholarship--are slow to take off. It remains to be seen whether there's enough pent-up frustration in academia to overturn systems that are stacked in favor of publishers. There are encouraging signs that new open-access journals--following fair publishing practices--can achieve success online. While much of the anger about journal pricing has been aimed at Elsevier, the truth remains the company is a for-profit business that will charge what the market can bear. The real culprit in all this is the tenure-track culture of higher education that places a market-distorting emphasis on publishing in prestigious journals, often at the expense of academic freedom and efficiency. Note:The following two links are not-applicable for text-based browsers or screen-reading software. Show Hide Full Abstract

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Foreign Countries; Academic Discourse; Faculty Publishing; Scholarship; Periodicals; Writing for Publication; Scientific Research; Global Approach; Researchers; Access to Information; Electronic Publishing; Free Enterprise System; Commercialization; Economic Factors; Publish or Perish Issue; Corporations

Abstract:
In the context of open-access (OA) academic publishing, the mounting pressure cross global academe to publish or perish has spawned an exponentially growing number of dodgy academic e-journals charging high fees to authors, often US$300-650, and even triple that amount, promising super-fast processing and publication open-access (OA) online. Jeffrey Beall (Scholarly Open Access, http://scholarlyoa.com) has characterized this phenomenon as "predatory OA publishing," since it is oriented largely to extorting a high fee from authors. This exponential growth in start-up cyber-journals galore of questionable quality and dubious upstart origin is driven largely by the globalization of Euro-Atlantic research cultures into the Global South and lower-income economies everywhere, part of the now rapid internationalization of scientific research (Jha 2011) and "researching under the audit" (Illner 2011: 70), and is potentially a form of "academic racketeering." It tends to attract and exploit lesser-privileged academics, often on "knowledge production peripheries." They are a segment of a hugely expanding global constellation of researchers, in some ways a "research proletariat" (Harvie 2000), many of whom can can least afford the "cyber-services" of these start-up, fee-gouging OA journals. Yet researchers anywhere, including doctoral students and others in an "academic precariat," may be lured to publish there, given a turnaround time of three weeks from submission to acceptance and publication often offered and implemented (Stratford 2012). A certain kind of "market cynicism" (Power 2010) may take hold, where young academics are forced to think of themselves largely in economic terms and the "price" of quick dubious publication. In essential ways, the phenomenon of predatory academic journals is also part of the largely ex-colonial and subalternized "academic periphery striking back" against that Eurodominance of research cultures, involving basic contestations about asymmetrical power and representation and the geopolitics of hegemonic and subaltern knowledge production and dissemination on a global scale, the "coloniality of power/knowledge" (Quijano 2000; Grosvoguel 2008; Jaramillo 2012) within the changing face of biopolitical production and the emergence of a new "common" (Hardt 2010; Hardt & Negri 2009) inside globalized immaterial capitalist production. Racist subtexts about "academic scams based in Africa and South Asia" need to be confronted and avoided. In resisting trends toward corporate, high-cost Western-dominated academic publication, cost-free OA knowledge publication paradigms need to be expanded in the (re)appropriation of a "knowledge commons" under late capitalism. These include arXiv.org, journals like JCEPS, the Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Qualitative Social Research (bit.ly/xjc0mD), and more than 7,000 others associated with the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) -- in the spirit of the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics (bit.ly/zPYYFJ) and the work of the Public Knowledge Project (http://pkp.sfu.ca), Open Journal Systems (tinyurl.com/2ydklr), SciELO (http://socialsciences.scielo.org/) in Latin America--and other initiatives for "Green OA" in open-access repositories elsewhere. These OA needs to be reconceived in the struggle for a "communism of the common" (Hardt 2010: 140). That re appropriation and its self-organization should become a main goal in confronting and dismantling the regime of monopolistic knowledge control today by giant "knowledge enclosure" corporations like Thomson-Reuters, Springer and Wiley. A key aim of the present paper is to spotlight these "predatory" journals and urge further empirical research. Despite the huge amount of largely bourgeois analysis of OA, there is very scant critical inquiry into such academic journals and their burgeoning conglomerates. Note:The following two links are not-applicable for text-based browsers or screen-reading software. Show Hide Full Abstract

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Descriptors:
Computers; Educational Technology; Electronic Learning; Publishing Industry; Handheld Devices; Usability; Internet; Information Technology; Books; Electronic Publishing; Computer Software; Users (Information); Information Management; Delivery Systems; Information Storage

Abstract:
Due to the constant performance upgrades and regular price reductions of mobile devices in recent years, users are able to take advantage of the various devices to obtain digital content regardless of the limitations of time and place. The increasing use of e-books has stimulated new e-learning approaches. This research project developed an e-book hub service on a cloud computing platform in order to overcome the limitations of computing capability and storage capacity that are inherent in many mobile devices. The e-book hub service also allows users to automatically adjust the rendering of multimedia pages at different resolutions on terminal units such as smartphones, tablets, PCs, and so forth. We implemented an e-book hub service on OpenStack, which is a free and open-source cloud computing platform supported by multiple large firms. The OpenStack platform provides a large-scale distributed computing environment that allows users to build their own cloud systems in a public, private, or hybrid environment. Our e-book hub system offers content providers an easy-to-use cloud computing service with unlimited storage capacity, fluent playback, high usability and scalability, and high security characteristics to produce, convert, and manage their e-books. The integration of information and communication technologies has led the traditional publishing industry to new horizons with abundant digital content publications. Results from this study may help content providers create a new service model with increased profitability and enable mobile device users to easily get digital content, thereby achieving the goal of e-learning. (Contains 2 tables and 16 figures.) Note:The following two links are not-applicable for text-based browsers or screen-reading software. Show Hide Full Abstract

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Descriptors:
Writing for Publication; Self Expression; Authors; Books; Publishing Industry; Technological Advancement; Electronic Publishing; Internet; Ethnography; Influence of Technology; Economic Factors; Economic Impact; Copyrights; Investment; Peer Evaluation; Games

Abstract:
This article reports on a digital ethnography that examines writing, authorship, and self-publication in an online niche market. Drawing on interview and web data collected over 3 years, it focuses on the writing practices that have supported the production, distribution, and sanction of 13 ebooks self-published by online poker players. The article advances an understanding of authorship as sustained interaction among writers and readers as the work of publishing becomes absorbed into online networks as literate activity. In lieu of the capital investment of publishers that produces the materiality of the book, participants in these spaces have manufactured valued texts through collective literacy practices, coming to a loose consensus on what constitutes a book, and working together to enable proprietorship over texts, even amid environments of mass collaboration. (Contains 1 table and 8 notes.) Note:The following two links are not-applicable for text-based browsers or screen-reading software. Show Hide Full Abstract

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Descriptors:
Writing for Publication; Personal Autonomy; Fees; Empowerment; Electronic Publishing; Publishing Industry; Comparative Analysis; Bibliographic Databases; Access to Information; Technological Advancement; Delivery Systems; Web Sites; Models; Authors; Role; Library Services; Decision Making

Abstract:
The number of books published by authors using fee-based publication services, such as Lulu and AuthorHouse, is overtaking the number of books published by mainstream publishers, according to Bowker's 2009 annual data. Little empirical research exists on self-published books. This article presents the results of an investigation of a random sample of 348 books from a total population of 385,173 titles available from ninety-three fee-based publication services in 2008. Major findings include publication patterns within the nontraditional publishing industry, availability of self-published titles online and in libraries, state of bibliographic and cataloging control, and subject content of self-published books. The findings provide a baseline "snapshot" of books available from publication services in 2008, a time when the self-publishing industry was established but was still small enough to study overall. The article concludes with implications for librarians from this study of self-published books. (Contains 12 tables and 6 footnotes.) Note:The following two links are not-applicable for text-based browsers or screen-reading software. Show Hide Full Abstract

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Copyrights; Internet; Electronic Publishing; Information Dissemination; Publications; Writing for Publication; Compliance (Legal); Intellectual Property; Influence of Technology; Research Reports; Definitions; Economic Factors

Abstract:
The Internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work "open access": digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access is made possible by the Internet and copyright-holder consent, and many authors, musicians, filmmakers, and other creators who depend on royalties are understandably unwilling to give their consent. But for 350 years, scholars have written peer-reviewed journal articles for impact, not for money, and are free to consent to open access without losing revenue. In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn't, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold. Distilling a decade of Suber's influential writing and thinking about open access, this is the indispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, and policy makers. Note:The following two links are not-applicable for text-based browsers or screen-reading software. Show Hide Full Abstract

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Descriptors:
Undergraduate Students; Textbooks; Publishing Industry; Information Technology; Influences; Student Characteristics; Costs; College Faculty; Teacher Attitudes; Influence of Technology; Educational Technology; Computer Uses in Education; Electronic Publishing; Correlation; Student Surveys; Questionnaires; Predictor Variables

Abstract:
Electronic books are a fast-growing component of the publishing industry. Sales of electronic textbooks (e-textbooks) are growing, but at a slower rate. In this research we use data from an undergraduate student survey to estimate the determinants of e-textbook use. We find that students who are younger, lower-income, and from larger high schools are more likely to use e-textbooks. E-textbooks are more likely to be used by students in the more technically-oriented colleges and especially in the college of Business and Economics, where electronic materials are often required. An environment of continued growth in student technical competence with information technology, continued increases in college cost and a reduction in professor resistance to e-textbooks would bode well for growth in the use of them. (Contains 3 tables and 6 footnotes.) Note:The following two links are not-applicable for text-based browsers or screen-reading software. Show Hide Full Abstract

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Research Libraries; Professional Associations; Periodicals; Writing for Publication; Faculty Publishing; Scholarship; Academic Discourse; Technological Advancement; Electronic Publishing; Publications; Library Role

Abstract:
With the creation of the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) in 1990, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) launched an initiative to focus widespread attention on the dysfunctions in the scholarly publishing system. Through the collection and dissemination of data documenting the serials crisis, a bias for action that led to the creation of SPARC, the employment of an international network of organizations with similar interest in the issue, and a robust education program, ARL-under the leadership of Duane Webster-catalyzed a global movement that is actively working today to create new models of scholarly publishing. (Contains 1 figure and 28 notes.) Note:The following two links are not-applicable for text-based browsers or screen-reading software. Show Hide Full Abstract

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Scholarship; Faculty Publishing; Academic Discourse; Periodicals; Writing for Publication; Access to Information; Ethics; Information Dissemination; Technological Advancement; Electronic Publishing; Publishing Industry; Risk; Income; Context Effect; Educational Finance; Decision Making

Abstract:
In this article, we present the case for regarding the principles by which scholarly publications are disseminated and shared as a matter of academic ethics. The ethics of access have to do with recognizing people's right to know what is known, as well as the value to humanity of having one of its best forms of arriving at knowledge as widely shared as possible. The level of access is often reduced by the financial interests of publishers in a market in which there is little sense of a rational order, given huge discrepancies in prices for similar products. At the same time, there are risks to limiting researchers' access to scholarly resources, both for the quality of the knowledge that is not entirely open to review and for the production of new knowledge that it might inspire. Then, there are issues of access beyond the academy for professional practice and out of human interest, for both of which undue limitations raise what are, for us, more than "academic" ethical questions. (Contains 2 notes.) Note:The following two links are not-applicable for text-based browsers or screen-reading software. Show Hide Full Abstract

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