Newman Library Idea Lab

Today’s New York Times has a must-read article about the way some journals are beginning to experiment with the traditional peer-review process. Shakespeare Quarterly recently posted online recently submitted articles and asked for comments from users who would register on the journal’s site. Comments were then fed back to the authors, who revised their works accordingly and saw them ultimately published by the journal.

The Times article mentions Dan Cohen, a historian at George Mason University and who has helped develop the Zotero citation management software at the Center for History and New Media, whose critique of the traditional system is worth noting here:

Advocates of more open reviewing, like Mr. Cohen at George Mason argue that other important scholarly values besides quality control — for example, generating discussion, improving works in progress and sharing information rapidly — are given short shrift under the current system.

“There is an ethical imperative to share information,” said Mr. Cohen, who regularly posts his work online, where he said thousands read it. Engaging people in different disciplines and from outside academia has made his scholarship better, he said.

To Mr. Cohen, the most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia,” he said, “is caught in the middle.”

Cohen, Patricia. “Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review.” The New York Times, 24 Aug. 2009. Web. 24 Aug. 2010.

The University of California is balking at the 400 percent price increase that Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is proposing for next year. UC is telling NPG that unless the publisher is willing to negotiate a more reasonable price, UC might drop all NPG subscriptions and encourage its researchers to stop submitting new articles and reviewing others.

More details at:

Howard, Jennifer. “U. of California Tries Just Saying No to Rising Journal Costs.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 Jun. 2010. Web.

Salo, Dorothea. “California Throws the Gauntlet in NPG’s Face.” Book of Troogol, 8 Jun. 2010. Web.

Strong, Gary. “Possible Boycott of Nature Publishing Group Journals: an Open Letter from Gary Strong, University Librarian, to UCLA Faculty.” Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library Blog, 8 Jun. 2010. Web.

Annette Day and Hilary Davis have published a great post about what an academic library needs to do when it is trying to make cuts in its serials and database subcriptions:

The experience of a serials and databases review-reviewing all continuing expense obligations-can be a painful, traumatic process for any library. But it can also give a library some tremendous insights into its collection, its level of credibility within its parent organization, and just how well-positioned it is to fully support the needs of its constituents. A review can unveil some interesting issues in the business of librarianship, publishing, and scholarly communication – from the tools and skills necessary to make value judgments about a library collection to the potentially fatal future of some segments of the publishing industry. In this article, we outline the steps of a serials and databases review from the perspective of an academic library and unpack some of the big issues and questions that face our profession as surfaced through the experience of a conducting a review.

Read the full post here at the group blog, In the Library with the Lead Pipe.

Day, Annette and Hilary Davis. “A Look at Librarianship through the Lens of an Academic Library Serials Review.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, 8 July 2009. Web. 8 July 2009.

Colleagues:

For an interesting article about Elsevier’s publication of allegedly peer-reviewed journals, which in fact were not, see NPR, “On the Media,” WNYC, May 29, 2009, http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/05/29/04