Monica Berger, Associate Professor, Instruction and Scholarly Communications Librarian, Ursula C. Schwerin Library, New York City College of Technology, CUNY, Brooklyn, NY
My master’s degree in Liberal Studies focused on popular culture studies within an American Studies concentration. Subsequent publications at that time were related to popular music: I published a journal article and gave a national conference paper based on my master’s thesis which was an annotated bibliography of scholarly monographs on rock music in American culture and authored half a dozen encyclopedia articles related to popular music. However, it became clear that publication opportunities related to music were limited to me. Bibliographies were no longer being published in book form but I have continued to add citations to new books without annotations to my reference manager. I am in the process of cleaning up my data and moving it into a public group library in Zotero with plans to add it to Omeka for better searching. A PSC-CUNY grant for 23-24 will pay for a research assistant to help with this project.
I pivoted to publishing about open access and scholarly publishing in 2017. My article “Beyond Beall’s List,” co-authored with Jill Cirasella (CUNY Graduate Center) continues to be very influential and frequently cited. My other articles, book chapters, and conference presentations discuss predatory publishing in several regards: 1) unintentional predatory publishing as the results of an information literacy deficit, 2) its impact on authors in the Global South and 3) how inadequate scholarly assessment and “publish or perish” perpetuate predatory publishing. I believe that librarians have an important role in helping authors make thoughtful and informed decisions about where to publish and can also mitigate predatory publishing by supporting library-based open access publishing.
