I sat down in front of my work PC to post something about Open Access Week, and now all I can think about is the vulgar state of my desktop.
Exhibit A
I’m a librarian so…what do I have to say for myself? In my defense, it’s been a really busy semester! I got a little carried away and started cutting corners. Screen-casting images to the desktop here. Downloading files, and saving to the desktop there. At least 30 percent of these files are duplicate saves, and many are destined for the recycle bin, but I can’t be exactly sure. What I am certain of is this is no way to store and organize digital things! (FYI, my personal desktop is in less of a state.)
Continue reading “Airing dirty laundry for Open Access Week”
What’s new in Academic Works? Bannett on Louisa May Alcott
What’s new in Academic Works? We’re highlighting two book chapters on Louisa May Alcott by Prof. Nina Bannett, Chair of City Tech’s English department. Read them here:
Cuban Femininity and National Unity in Louisa May Alcott’s Moods and Elizabeth Stoddard’s ‘Eros and Anteros.’
and
“Unrighteous Compact”: Louisa May Alcott’s Resistance to Contracts and Promises in Moods
City Tech Open Access Advocates: Maura Smale, Library
This year’s International Open Access Week theme is Open Access in Action. Accordingly, we are profiling City Tech faculty who have made taken the time to repeatedly contribute their work to Academic Works, our institutional repository. Academic Works helps increase the impact of your scholarship but did you know that Open Access is a social good? When your scholarship is open access, everyone, from your students to scholars in less developed countries, can read and use your work!
Wrapping up Open Access Week 2016, our final profile is Maura Smale, Chair, Library.
How was your experience contributing to Academic Works?
Setting up an account and uploading my articles to Academic Works has been easy. I appreciate that I can link from my professional website to Academic Works without fear that my articles will disappear over time, since preservation is a core part of the mission of Academic Works.
Any other comments about Academic Works or Open Access?
Having my articles in Academic Works came in handy when I was preparing my application for promotion last year. The download statistics that the repository provides offer an indication of the impact of my scholarly work, and I was pleased to include them in my PARSE along with citation counts.
City Tech Open Access Advocates: Ashwin Satyanarayana, CST
This year’s International Open Access Week theme is Open Access in Action. Accordingly, we are profiling City Tech faculty who have made taken the time to repeatedly contribute their work to Academic Works, our institutional repository. Academic Works helps increase the impact of your scholarship but did you know that Open Access is a social good? When your scholarship is open access, everyone, from your students to scholars in less developed countries, can read and use your work!
Our second City Tech faculty we’re profiling is Ashwin Satyanarayana, Computer Systems Technology.
How and where did you hear about Academic Works?
I heard about Academic Works from the Library’s summer “Boost Your Scholarly Profile” series.
How was your experience contributing to Academic Works?
It was an easy and smooth experience to upload my articles on Academic Works. The staff were very helpful in making any changes i suggested. Thanks to Monica Berger for the support and help.
Did any of your works get a new or different audience? Tell us more.
Yes! I received a few emails from CIty Tech faculty who without Academic Works would probably not notice my work, and also would like to collaborate. Also, thanks to the Library blog which had the article: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/library/whats-new-in-academic-works-2/
Any other comments about Academic Works or Open Access?
I think Academic Works should be advertised more, as many faculty members would benefit from it. I know that faculty members in our department are still not aware of it.
City Tech Open Access Advocates: Boyan Kostadinov, Mathematics
This year’s International Open Access Week theme is Open Access in Action. Accordingly, we are profiling City Tech faculty who have made taken the time to repeatedly contribute their work to Academic Works, our institutional repository. Academic Works helps increase the impact of your scholarship but did you know that Open Access is a social good? When your scholarship is open access, everyone, from your students to scholars in less developed countries, can read and use your work!
Our first City Tech faculty we’re profiling is Boyan Kostadinov, Mathematics Department.
How and where did you hear about Academic Works?
Prof. Monica Berger came across my contributions on Researchgate and she contacted me and suggested that I consider making submissions to Academic Works, a newly launched CUNY-wide platform for hosting open access scholarly and pedagogical works. Apparently, many other colleges and universities across the US are using the Digital Commons platform of Bepress for hosting open access institutional repositories.
How was your experience contributing to Academic Works?
I submitted to Academic Works six presentations and articles, and they were all promptly reviewed and approved. The submission procedure was well-structured and simple to follow. It took me only a few minutes to make a submission. I plan to submit there a number of other scholarly and pedagogical works, including open access instructional materials.
Did any of your works get a new or different audience? Tell us more.
I find the Author Dashboard quite useful. In particular, over the last 40 days, since I submitted my works there, they were downloaded 30 times by people from 8 different countries on 5 continents. The Author Dashboard also includes details about the educational and commercial institutions, where the searches originated from.
Any other comments about Academic Works or Open Access?
I am sympathetic to the ideals of the open access movement, which seeks to remove barriers to learning by making information freely available to everybody irrespective of their means, and I do believe this is the future of academic publishing. However, in today’s world, open access academic publishing can be a problematic–faculty need to be careful to avoid predatory publishers, low quality and sometimes unethical publishers which provide immediate open access for a fee.
Don’t sign away your copyright when you publish!
Faculty: You can choose the best publisher for your work and retain some important rights such as being able to add your work to CUNY Academic Works without waiting through an embargo period. Don’t sign away all your rights when you sign a standard publisher’s agreement. How? Learn more at our Author Rights workshop on Nov. 1 and also check out SPARC’s Author Rights information, especially the SPARC Addendum.
Celebrate Open Access Week 2016! Save these dates
The library is featuring a series of events for both faculty and students to celebrate Open Access Week 2016.
For students (and faculty too):
Screening of Internet’s Own Boy, Oct. 27, 12:45-2:30 p.m., Library Multimedia Center, A432. Please consider bringing your class to an additional screening! details: http://bit.ly/2ettAtl
For faculty:
Author Rights Workshop, Nov. 1, 4-5:30 PM, Library Multimedia Center, A432 details: http://bit.ly/2ehYAjy
Academic Works Posting Party, Nov. 2, 10-11:30 AM, Library eclassroom, A540 details: http://bit.ly/2eleivS
Author Rights Workshop, Nov. 1, 4-5:30 PM, Library Multimedia Center, A432 details: http://bit.ly/2ehYAjy
Academic Works Posting Party, Nov. 2, 10-11:30 AM, Library eclassroom, A540 details: http://bit.ly/2eleivS
Academic Works Posting Party Nov. 2
Learn how CUNY’s institutional repository can help maximize your research impact. We will demonstrate how to post your scholarly work to Academic Works and talk more about your rights as an author. Bring your files, including conference presentations, and we’ll guide you through the process of posting your work. The final, peer-reviewed version of an article (not the published version) is best but feel free to bring what you have.
Coffee and cookies will be served! Open to all City Tech Faculty
DATES: November 2, 10-11:30 AM
VENUE: Library Eclassroom, Atrium 540
http://library.citytech.cuny.edu
RSVP and questions to Prof. Monica Berger mberger@citytech.cuny.edu
Academic Works Posting Party This Thursday 10/20!
Learn how CUNY’s institutional repository can help maximize your research impact. We will demonstrate how to post your scholarly work to Academic Works and talk more about your rights as an author. Bring your files, including conference presentations, and we’ll guide you through the process of posting your work. The final, peer-reviewed version of an article (not the published version) is best but feel free to bring what you have.
Coffee and cookies will be served! Open to all City Tech Faculty
DATES: October 20, 2-3:30
VENUE: Library Eclassroom, Atrium 540
http://library.citytech.cuny.edu
RSVP and questions to Prof. Monica Berger mberger@citytech.cuny.edu
can’t make the event on 10/20? A second posting party will run Nov. 2, 10-11:30 am|
Amplifying the Voices of Global-South Scholars
This is a reprint of a post by
“The problem is that, without representation in the research community, developing countries become the object of research and not participants in it,” Sarah Cummings said in an article in SciDev.Net.
The quote above comes after a study of journals in the field of development studies found very few contributions in those journals come from scholars actually from developing countries. Editorial-board diversity was also lacking. I suspect most academic fields have similar statistics or worse. The article reports that Cummings suggests the need to rethink “the publication process and explore how traditional measures of quality can be balanced against giving the developing world a greater hand in knowledge generation.”
Good point. As April Hathcock has recently written, “If we truly wish to transform scholarly communication on a global scale, then we need to be open and honest about what that entails…The conversation needs to be an actual conversation and not a one-way soliloquy from the global north that gets imported colonial-style to the global south. There needs to be a dialogue, real dialogue, that de-centers white North American and Western European values and knowledge creation. Those of us from the global north need to acknowledge the harm our neoliberal colonizing has done to scholarship around the world and take responsibility. Then, we need to step back and listen.”
Right. But as a scholar from the global South… what is one to do? Wait until the North listens? Because, really, so far the only way to make them listen has been to write in their language, their journals, to their standards of scholarship and hope for the best. Which clearly only works for a minority of us (probably those who studied and/or trained in said global North institutions because… the others don’t get those invisible standards, can’t write to those standards, don’t have access to that research or that mentoring).
The flaws of (some) developing-world scholarship get in the way: histories of plagiarism, poor-quality research methods, and poor writing that native speakers of English can’t follow. But these aren’t things the authors of that scholarship are fully to blame for. It’s not their fault that most journals are subscription-based and they can’t access them (legally), or that English isn’t their first language, or that they have fewer and poorer-quality resources to conduct research or poorly paid research assistants. It’s not their fault that their culture doesn’t discuss plagiarism by Western standards. (Years of education in places like Egypt do not adequately prepare a scholar to respect copyright or understand plagiarism, mostly because those principles are completely ignored through school and university at public institutions.)
In a recent e/Merge Africa seminar I co-facilitated with South African scholar Laura Czerniewicz , one participant suggested Africans should start their own journals, since African scholarship wasn’t getting accepted in international peer-reviewed journals. But there’s a catch: our local institutions value internationally peer-reviewed publications more, much more, than local ones. Building a reputation for local journals takes years of effort. We would still face a quandary: to give those journals legitimacy, we might need to succumb to global-North standards of what is considered scholarly.
I would like to share my own micro-activism in the area of slowly decolonizing scholarship in my field. My approach is by no means revolutionary. It’s just nudging forward slow change within the existing standards.
Good point. As April Hathcock has recently written, “If we truly wish to transform scholarly communication on a global scale, then we need to be open and honest about what that entails…The conversation needs to be an actual conversation and not a one-way soliloquy from the global north that gets imported colonial-style to the global south. There needs to be a dialogue, real dialogue, that de-centers white North American and Western European values and knowledge creation. Those of us from the global north need to acknowledge the harm our neoliberal colonizing has done to scholarship around the world and take responsibility. Then, we need to step back and listen.”
Right. But as a scholar from the global South… what is one to do? Wait until the North listens? Because, really, so far the only way to make them listen has been to write in their language, their journals, to their standards of scholarship and hope for the best. Which clearly only works for a minority of us (probably those who studied and/or trained in said global North institutions because… the others don’t get those invisible standards, can’t write to those standards, don’t have access to that research or that mentoring).
The flaws of (some) developing-world scholarship get in the way: histories of plagiarism, poor-quality research methods, and poor writing that native speakers of English can’t follow. But these aren’t things the authors of that scholarship are fully to blame for. It’s not their fault that most journals are subscription-based and they can’t access them (legally), or that English isn’t their first language, or that they have fewer and poorer-quality resources to conduct research or poorly paid research assistants. It’s not their fault that their culture doesn’t discuss plagiarism by Western standards. (Years of education in places like Egypt do not adequately prepare a scholar to respect copyright or understand plagiarism, mostly because those principles are completely ignored through school and university at public institutions.)
In a recent e/Merge Africa seminar I co-facilitated with South African scholar Laura Czerniewicz , one participant suggested Africans should start their own journals, since African scholarship wasn’t getting accepted in international peer-reviewed journals. But there’s a catch: our local institutions value internationally peer-reviewed publications more, much more, than local ones. Building a reputation for local journals takes years of effort. We would still face a quandary: to give those journals legitimacy, we might need to succumb to global-North standards of what is considered scholarly.
I would like to share my own micro-activism in the area of slowly decolonizing scholarship in my field. My approach is by no means revolutionary. It’s just nudging forward slow change within the existing standards.
- I review as many articles as possible for journals. I have found some journals will give me articles by non-native speakers. I make a concerted effort to review those as fairly as possible, focusing on substance and overlooking minor problems with language, and giving constructive feedback to authors. Sometimes an article is a borderline reject but I ask the editor to consider giving authors an opportunity to improve upon their work (and if needed, get help improving their English; the importance of the language barrier for some people should not be underestimated).
- I make as much of my own work as possible open access. It is an ethical imperative for me that scholars in developing countries can access my scholarship. Many scholars aren’t affiliated with a powerful institutional library. Egypt’s EKB initiative will help locally, but that’s just local. It isn’t enough. I still advocate for open access. And access, of course, should go beyond being able to download an article; it should mean being able to actually read and understand it.
- If I am ever offered a position of some power, such as being an editorial-board member, I accept those opportunities. I advocate for more diverse boards. And more diverse authorship. And openness.
- When I can, I mentor junior scholars to help them find outlets for their research and to prepare their research papers for publication. I also point people toward an online mentoring network called AuthorAID that helps junior scholars work with more established scholars in their field. Unfortunately some Egyptian scholars worry about sharing their article with a stranger lest someone steal it as their own. Many junior scholars have experienced such theft firsthand, by people they trusted and worked with locally.
None of the above challenges the dominance of global North standards of scholarship. What would challenge such dominance of the global North?
- It would be a great start if we created our own journals and set our own standards and our institutions accepted and valued them. Unfortunately, the only way I see such journals gaining legitimacy in the short term would be if board members were credible, established scholars. Which is again based on international (read: North) standards. Which means they’re successful at conforming to Western standards. Would they be willing to challenge and subvert Western scholarly norms or would they fear risking their reputation internationally?
- If we wrote our scholarship in our own language. And again, not something I can do or have done much—thanks to the Al-Fanar Media translation team for being responsible for the majority of my online Arabic content. But perhaps content in our journals can and should include multiple linguistic versions of articles (some journals already do French/English— there could be Arabic/English. I know of a few such journals but not ones that translate every article). I know of one U.S.-based journal that wanted to experiment with authorship in different languages. I suspect some editors will be amenable to this idea—but implementation will be difficult. It would make scholarship accessible to many more readers. Worth it, for some of us, but admittedly quite difficult and costly.
- Conferences. I am sick of attending conferences where I listen to panel after panel of older men in suits. What if we challenge conferences to have more diverse and strong keynote speakers—women, international scholars, people of color—more intentionally and not in tokenizing ways? Local as well as international conferences? (see Rafranz Davis’ post on this). I have been on steering committees of international conferences. I am often the only international, or at least the only Southern, person there. I understand why this is the case, but accepting the status quo isn’t getting us anywhere.
As April Hathcock wrote: “It is possible to disrupt the way these conversations tend to take place, but it will take intentional, thoughtful, and critical work.”
I’m sure I haven’t highlighted all possible ways to strengthen the voices of scholars from the Global South. What do you do to challenge global-North dominance of scholarship? What else do you think we could do?
