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An unbundled publishing business proposal
For my digital scholarship book I have been reading about the tenure process a lot (I'll blog it soon). One of the issues that arises is that peer-review is always perceived as the gold standard. Promotion committees in universities, faced with the complexity of judging research in highly specialised fields, revert to using peer-review publication as a proxy. This is becoming problematic in the humanities in particular where the academic book is seen as the main evidence of excellence in research. Such monographs were often published by university presses. But in financially straitened times, many presses are closing, and if they are staying in business then they need to make…
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Tenure, publishing and Tony
As Tony Hirst has blogged, his recent promotion case was unsuccessful. I'm obviously disappointed by this, for his sake, and because it was our first attempt at pushing through a digital scholarship case. We don't know why it was unsuccessful yet (detailed feedback will follow I suspect), but today I was reading an excellent report from the Center for Higher Education Studies at Berkeley titled "Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Valuesand Needs in Seven Disciplines". There are several points it raises which I think reflect on Tony's experience and others like him. Here are some key quotes with my interpretation of each of them:…
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The way I’m working is (kinda) working
I read Tony Schwartz's The Way We're Working Isn't Working recently (and after my last post, yes it was on the Kindle). Some of it irritated me and much of it I couldn't relate to (not being a high-powered AMERICAN executive who works 15 hour days), but after Scott blogged about the meditation app he found useful, I thought I'd post some thoughts on what I did take away from it. The first is that napping is good! I like an afternoon nap, but in an open plan office the sight of someone sprawled across their desk with a small puddle of drool congealing by the keyboard is, for some…
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Kindle & the iTuning of book purchasing
Probably my favourite app on my iPad is, errm, Kindle. Yes, getting my £600 device to behave like a £100 one is where it's at. That aside, what is interesting about the Kindle is the way it is beginning to alter my book buying behaviour. In short it is iTuning my purchasing behaviour, in that I am tending to buy more on impulse – a recommendation or thought comes to me, and I don't add it to a wishlist, I buy it. This means I am adopting a more exploratory approach, buying books I wouldn't do otherwise, or ones I know I only want a section from. But this behaviour is…
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An open Open University course on openness
[Update – see James' comment below, and to clarify this is a course produced as a result of a research project in a collaboration with many others: the Hellenic Management Association, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland, SPI in Portugal, ELIG, and UNU Merit. As such it's not an OU course that has been through the normal course production process, nor does it carry OU credit] Like Tony I think the OU has been a bit slow to start creating truly open courses – I'm partly to blame since I suggested doing one a couple of years back and then didn't do anything. Before that…
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Twitter as interdisciplinary tool & culture
I have been writing a chapter on interdisciplinarity for my book on digital scholarship, and thought I would share this section which explores the idea that social networks (Twitter in this case) can be viewed as interdisciplinary tools. One of the ideas I am particularly interested in is that a barrier to interdisciplinary work has been the existence of different cultures in various disciplines. It may be that tools such as Twitter and blogs have a culture of their own, which can to some degree, compensate for these other differences. Put simply, do bloggers in different disciplines have more in common than non-bloggers and bloggers in the same discipline? In…
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Bellow’s Law
In my talk for George last week, I proposed 'Bellow's Law', which I thought I'd share here. In that Great American Novel, The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow famously observes that ‘there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining'. When we look at the impact of new technologies, the reverse would seem to be true also: there is no targeting of liberation; if you release one thing, you also release the adjoining. It is this knock-on effect that creates the era of uncertainty we are in now. This can be seen as the law of unintended consequences,…
