publishing
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Launching Meta EdTech Journal
The other day I was trying to find a list of Open Access journals. I found this very useful open list from George Veletsianos. While looking through the journals it occurred to me that what would be useful would be a regular review of these, or a kind of meta-journal. Not one that just lists all the papers, but rather a filtered view. I mentioned it on Twitter and Doug Belshaw pointed me at the new Google/Wordpress collaboration, Annotum – a WordPress theme for creating open access journals. So in the a spirit of DIY, I have created Meta EdTech Journal. The idea is simple – three times a year…
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JIME editorship
The second of my 'what does Martin do every day?' posts. I've recently taken over editorship of JIME – this was a highly innovative journal when it was first started up by Simon in KMi over ten years ago. It was open access before anyone talked about open access and had an open peer review model. But as with so many academic journals, particularly when there isn't a big publisher behind them, it operates on the margins of everyone's time, and it's kind of stuttered over the past few years. So we're planning a relaunch next year. We are currently working through a backlog of papers, so no new submissions…
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Why don’t academic authors self-publish?
<Photo by MonsierLui http://www.flickr.com/photos/monsieurlui/316350341/> I got an invite from Frank Rennie the other week to contribute a chapter to a book he is thinking of putting together around the subject of the mismatch (or distance) between academic thinking and the potential of new tools. Frank is a big fan of the self-publish sites and has suggested we eschew an academic publisher, and just publish ourselves via Lulu or Blurb. This got me thinking as to why more academics don't do this, and still chase the book contract. It certainly isn't for the money, so it must be for the prestige. This can be broken down into personal and external I think.…
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References are like airport security checks
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/4228752706/ by Mike Licht> This is the penultimate post in my week-long series of reflections on the book writing process (you have been reading them all, right?). I've moaned before that referencing is largely an anachronistic practice which is located in dealing with physical objects. As I said in that post, there are two main reasons that I can see: To properly acknowledge the work of others. The act of referencing provides a clear framework for avoiding plagiarism since it positively encourages students to reference others and thus removes ignorance as an excuse. To allow readers to locate any sources for themselves. This acts as both a check on the author…
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Comparethejournal.com
A journal comparison site? Simples. This another post from the stable of 'Martin's great business ideas that never get taken up, and which he never progresses.' One of the themes in my digital scholarship book is that of alternatives – new technology driven approaches give us alternatives when previously we had none: we can join in a conference remotely, we can choose which medium we wish to convey our message in, we can make our outputs as detailed or as general as we like and we can chat about professional interests, sport, politics, film, or whatever we like all in the same space. Looking at academic publishing, it strikes me…
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A failure of ownership
In writing my digital scholarship book several themes keep recurring. One that I hadn't really set out to explore, but find depressingly persuasive is that of a failure of ownership by scholars over their own practice. This is particularly related to their use of technology to help refine their ways of working. Inevitably this has meant we have outsourced functions to for-profit companies. There may not be anything intrinsically wrong with this, I'm happy for a company to run the catering facilities for instance. But for complex activities that go to the heart of scholarship, once we outsourced them we became reliant on them, and effectively lost control. Here are…
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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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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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Why academic publishing is doomed
You may recall that a while ago I said I would only review for open access journals. Whenever I get asked to review for a journal now, I send back a polite reply saying telling them this, as I figure if they hear it enough it may encourage them to take an open access approach. After sending one such response to an editor, they forwarded it to the commercial publisher, to try and raise their awareness. The reply from the publisher set out a number of things they try to do, but this one caught my eye: "Sponsored articles: Over 350 [publisher's name] journals offer authors the option to pay…
