Most or all faculty get “spam” email messages asking them to to publish or present. These are usually so-called predatory publishers. Whether these publishers or conference providers are just low-quality or truly nefarious, faculty should avoid them.
I save every message that comes to my work email that is likely to be from a predatory publisher so I can use them for future workshops and other purposes. Usually the journals have ambiguous scopes and titles but not this one! When I saw that the lead journal listed was the International Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, I thought “oh no, that sounds really legitimate.”
So I invite you to think about why you might not want to respond to an email sent by Addyson@ankoufor.net to publish:
What information is missing? What else seems strange about this message? There are a fair number of red herrings beyond the obvious concept that any unsolicited message like this is most likely from a predatory publisher. Learn more about predatory publishing here and take a few minutes to review our guide on publication quality and how to find the best journal to publish in!
Take Control of Your Scholarship: An Author’s Rights Workshop
Learn more about copyright, Creative Commons licenses, and how to
better understand publisher contracts. Did you know that you can keep
key rights to your scholarship by using the SPARC Author Addendum, a
legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement? Workshops
are open to all City Tech faculty members.
DATE: Monday, March 21, 2015
TIME: 3:00-4:00 p.m.
VENUE: Small Library Classroom, Atrium 441
RSVP is encouraged to Prof. Monica Berger, mberger@citytech.cuny.edu
Open access: six myths to put to rest
Peter Suber debunks the key myths related to Open Access. We invite you to read his piece in The Guardian entitled: Open access: six myths to put to rest
Why Be Open Access? City Tech’s Sean Scanlan Shares His Story
It’s Open Access Week 2015 and we’re highlighting City Tech’s own Open Access journal, NANO: New American Notes Online http://www.nanocrit.com/. NANO‘s mission is to “invigorate humanities discourse by publishing brief, peer-reviewed reports with a fast turnaround enabled by new technologies.” Issues are themed and articles often incorporate multimedia. Sean Scanlan, English Department, is NANO‘s founder and editor. We recently asked Sean to tell us more about NANO.
Monica Berger: Why specifically did you choose to make NANO an open access journal? I read your Open Access Statement, but please tell us more about how you and others involved in the creation of the journal reached this place.
Sean Scanlan: Thank you for inviting me to share my ideas on Open Access and academic journals. My journal was conceived to be Open Access from the beginning and I’d like to tell that story now.
In 1997, when I was getting my Master’s degree in English at the University of Missouri St. Louis, I applied to go to a critical theory conference at Cornell University. I met people from all over the world, and one of my friends, Thomas, was from Kerala, India, and he was the most excited person I’ve ever met to be at a literary conference. The reason that he was so excited was that his travels and commitment to come to New York relied upon a funding operation that exceeded the usual travel funds of his university by an enormous factor. Simply put: everybody he knew had contributed to his arrival at Cornell.
But I didn’t understand the core issue of what scholarly access meant until Thomas and I talked about libraries. During our down time, we often visited the main library at Cornell. It was a thing to marvel at—nearly 8 million volumes. Many times he said to me: there is nothing I could not accomplish with such a library at my home institution. And now, after seeing this, I feel that there is nothing I can accomplish back in Kerala.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because I have to compete to get my work published in US journals against scholars who have access to all this.”
Even though I was in the US, it hit me that my small state university had a small fraction of Cornell’s holdings, and so I too would face such access problems. I’ve talked to many colleagues who have shared a story or two about not getting at a vital piece of research due to access. I realized that the institution of the academy, an institution that I thought was ethical and open to all had a dirty secret: it had good qualities but it was grossly unequal. Scholars should not be limited to their small research holdings, they should not be constrained even by small consortiums of libraries, they should be able to access world-class holdings.
In addition to Thomas’s story, I want to add an idea I gleaned from the legal scholar Eben Moglen, who has written about intellectual property and sharing. He argues that potential Shakespeares and Einsteins of the world should not suffer because of a lack of scholarly resources—but as of now, they do. Why? Because rules that protect intellectual property have been contorted to protect not the thinker, but the employer of the thinker. Intellectual property rights now are ways to provide funding streams to publishers who want to not only cover their costs, but also provide shareholder returns. If universities were selling sneakers, then perhaps such a profit model would be ethical, but education is not sneaker selling, especially not public university education.
In fact, the public university has an ethical obligation to make, at the very least, some of the research it produces available for no cost to the public. This is not only ethical, it will help bring in new students, new teachers, and even more funding. Sharing scholarly information is the way that new scholarship is enabled, and the result of newest, best ideas will be growth in a following of eager students and eager faculty. And following them will be increased resources. This happens all the time, look at those research institutions that have promoted cognitive neuroscience or digital humanities.
Open Access is an idea accelerator and impact accelerator, thus, it is resource generator, only certain factions cannot see this very positive event horizon.
The last part of this longish answer borrows from a blog post by Daniel Cohen who writes about Digital Humanities and the cost of publishing online. He says the Social Contract of Scholarly Publishing is what happens between authors, editors, and readers. This contract says that readers will read published work if they know that the manuscript has minimal errors, that the footnotes are accurate, that the fonts and navigation systems are clear and high quality. But does it matter if it is printed on paper, if the book is hardcover, if the imprint has grudging respect? I want to propose the idea of the Public University Social Contract. Such a contract improves the supply side of Cohen’s metaphor by putting more into the editing and less into the prestige of paper and bindings, more into the fast turnaround of publishing—and less into the cues of name-brands. The Public University Social Contract would state that publishing means sharing above all else—not as money-loser, but the complete opposite: as a way to enhance the missions of educate and improve knowledge, validate, build-upon, and propagate conversations and collegial bonds: in short to build trust among a vastly larger network of scholars, thereby gaining the respect of the world, so that Thomas can cite a vast number of articles and books, and so that Thomas’s work can, in turn, get cited by scholars at City Tech and beyond.
Open Access in Three Minutes!
Learn the basics of Open Access in this video from SPARC …
original URL: https://vimeo.com/6973160
How Can Faculty Make Their Work Open?
Barbara Fister in Inside Higher Ed has written a wonderful piece, Open Access Without Tears, on how faculty can make their scholarship open and more widely read.
Faculty: did you know that you can self-archive your work in City Tech’s own repository, Academic Works? Just create your account and then either click on “submit research” under Author’s Corner or contact Monica Berger for help at mberger@citytech.cuny.edu.
Open Access Month 2015 at City Tech
Oct. 20, 4:00-6:00 p.m., Faculty Lounge, Atrium. Open Scholarship Matters! Talks by Jessie Daniels (JustPublics@365) and Megan Wacha (CUNY Academic Works) on how can your scholarship be more visible and meaningful and how you can reach new readers and make a difference in the world through open scholarship. Wine and cheese will be served. more details
Oct. 21, 2:00-4:00 p.m. and Oct. 22, 10 a.m-12:00 p.m., Library Multimedia Center. Internet’s Own Boy. Watch this riveting film about the life of Aaron Swartz, a computer programmer, political organizer, and Internet activist. The film documents his early life, to his eventual suicide, along with the complicated issues surrounding technology, human rights, and the free access of information. more details
Open Scholarship Matters! A Program for Faculty
Open Scholarship Matters!
Oct. 20, 2015, 4-6 PM, Atrium 632, Faculty Lounge, New York City College of Technology Google map :: Wine and cheese will be served.
RSVP to Prof. Monica Berger
City Tech Library and the Faculty Commons invite you to celebrate Open Access Month 2015* with a presentation and discussion featuring guest speakers: Megan Wacha (CUNY Office of Library Services) and Jessie Daniels (JustPublics@365).
How can your scholarship be more visible and meaningful? Reach new readers and make a difference in the world through open scholarship!
Connect with more scholars across the globe.
CUNY’s Academic Works is our new showcase for CUNY faculty scholarship and creative work and helps make scholarship more easily found and, accordingly, read and cited more often.
Make a difference in the world. JustPublics@365 (CUNY Graduate Center) is “reimagining scholarly communication for the public good.” This initiative teaches academics and others how they can use digital media to get their work out to broader audiences as well as how they can apply their work to social justice.
More about our guest speakers:
Megan Wacha, Scholarly Communications Librarian, CUNY Office of Library Services [more about Megan]
Jessie Daniels, Professor of Public Health, Sociology and Psychology at the Graduate Center, JustPublics@365, CUNY Graduate Center
*We’re so excited about Open Access Week 2015, October 19 – 25, that we’re celebrating it all month! Look for more events at City Tech and throughout CUNY.
Attend a Faculty panel on Open Educational Resources
Wed. October 14th, 4:30 – 6:30 p.m., Namm 227 (Faculty Commons)
RSVP to: ccooney@citytech.cuny.edu
Join a City Tech faculty panel discussion about integrating open educational resources (OER) into the classroom.
Featured panelists:
Prof. Amanda Almond, Psychology
Prof. Raffi Khatchadourian, Computer Systems Techonology
Prof. Jeremy Seto, Biology
Moderator: Prof. Cailean Cooney, Library
As the Fall semester progresses, the Library will offer an OER workshop, and will solicit applicants to participate in the Spring cycle of our Open Educational Resources Initiative, founded last year in response to growing concern over textbook costs, the program will fund 10 faculty to select no-cost open/alternative course materials to replace textbooks.
Want to learn more about OER now? Browse the Library’s new OER guide!
Panel co-sponsored by City Tech Library and the Faculty Commons as part of the college’s Open Access Month programming!
Who’s Archiving the Internet?
This week’s New Yorker had a great article about the Internet Archive. Jill Lepore, the author, leads this piece with the story of last year’s downing of the Malaysia Airlines plane over eastern Ukraine. A Russian-backed separatist gloated via social media about downing the plane but once the news hit that the plane was not a military aircraft, the separatist deleted his post to hide the evidence. However, the Internet Archive captured the separatist’s tweet, providing that libraries and archives, whether digital or analog, play a critical role not only in preserving history but also in current events.
The article also raises many fascinating questions about how copyright affects the Internet. Lastly, check out Memento, an initiative lead by Herbert Van de Sompel–it is a Chrome extension that lets you see a website at a specific date.