Allegra Swift is the UC San Diego Library’s Scholarly Communications Librarian. She spends her days infusing research and scholarship support with critlib, digital citizenship, and digital literacy ideals.
The groups opposing the merger of Cengage and McGraw-Hill are growing. Textbook authors and SPARC, a “global coalition committed to making Open the default for research and education,” have joined a coalition of students to bring legislation and focus advocacy efforts on stopping the merger of the textbook publishing giants.
When Cengage and McGraw Hill announced the merger, the companies claimed it would promote affordability by increasing the use of access codes — where students pay to submit homework online, and automatically bill students for materials. However, due to the lack of other options, the combined company would be able to effectively lock students into paying to submit homework, and eliminate the used book market.
U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups, and partners submit letters to DOJ opposing Cengage -McGraw Hill merger. July 29, 2019
At UC San Diego, the LMS has been replaced with Canvas, a system embedded with Cengage, and Wiley, among other systems and products. The Wiley name might be familiar as one of the major journal publishers but the company has been moving into product development engaging the entire research lifecycle as we’ve seen with another high-profile publisher. (ongoing data collection of the rent-seeking and financialization of the academic publishing industry.)
It is worth libraries being conscious of the growing role of Edtech in the schools, colleges and universities that they serve. IFLA has produced this briefing to outline the key ethical and security concerns for libraries to consider, and suggest some ways for libraries to promote responsible and ethical use of Edtech.
Contact us if you’d like to develop courses that include #OER and affordable course materials to ensure all of your students have access to the educational materials that you assign. Don’t add to the cost burden that students face! This campus is in a high cost housing area and we have high numbers of transfer students and low-income students. OER have been shown to lead to #studentsuccess #retention.
In other news: Presentations are available from Open Repositories 2019 recently concluded in Hamburg, Germany. Several presentations on ORCiD have been posted:
Good Publishing Practices and the Risks of Predatory Publishing workshop is brought to you (all UC San Diego faculty, staff and students) by the UC San Diego Library and the UC San Diego Research Compliance and Integrity Office (RCI) Research Compliance Hot Topics and Training Program.
In this session, you will be introduced to strategies and tools to avoid predatory publishers and conferences and to identify reputable publishing opportunities that are worth your time and resources. Questions? Contact scholcomm [at] ucsd [dot] edu
Date: Wednesday, August 21, 2019 Time: 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm Location: Leichtag Auditorium, Room 107
Continuing Education Units (CEUs) will be available through the UC Learning Center. Light refreshments will also be provided.
REGISTRATION (Register by August 19, 2019): To register, please click UC Learning Center for a direct link to the session registration. Select Register in the dropdown menu. Select Add and click Submit in the lower right corner of the page. You will receive an email registration confirmation.
Image credit: atlas negative image, SDASM Archives, no known copyright restrictions. Accessed on flickr
Bulk upload?
Content or location questions?
Is there a bug or barrier bothering you?
Just want to get your works in or help your academic community raise the visibility and access to their work?
Alainna Wrigley, Publication Management System Coordinator, and Justin Gondor, the Senior Product Manager, Publishing for the California Digital Library (CDL) will be here to answer questions and help you get as many items as you want into eScholarship. This is a hand-on session that we will repeat in late October for Open Access Week.
@tmvogel will be teaching the workshop that is open to all UC San Diego researchers, faculty, students, and staff.
May 8, 2019, 10:00 am – 11:30 am in the UC San Diego Library, Dunst Classroom.
Scholars and researchers are increasingly asked to explain the impact of their research, whether for promotion and tenure, or grant applications and reports, even for visa applications. This workshop will provide an overview of the tools available for gathering citation-based metrics (bibliometrics) and alternative metrics (altmetrics). We will cover their key features and caveats of, and share some examples of how this data can be incorporated into CVs, P&T files, and other places where you want to communicate your scholarly impact. While the focus is on journal articles, metrics for other sources will be briefly covered.
Metric CC-BY Christina Welsh https://flic.kr/p/9uasz8
Image from page 200 of “Hill’s album of biography and art : containing portraits and pen-sketches… https://flic.kr/p/of2bGX
UC San Diego is the #10 Knowledge Unlatched (KU) Hero when it comes to total usage of KU Books on OAPEN and JSTOR in 2018! See the @KUnlatched Heroes graphic which also includes other Top 10 data on titles, publishers, etc.
About Knowledge Unlatched (KU): Knowledge Unlatched (KU) is committed to free access to academic content for readers around the world. The online platform is the central point of contact for libraries worldwide to support open access models, publication collections of leading publishing houses and new OA initiatives.
Meanwhile, MIT visiting scholar and sociologist, Philip N Cohen, wrote a primer for Scholarly Communication in Sociology that “will offer useful guidance for your career – to help you succeed in a competitive, opaque, inefficient system with little accountability. Knowing how the scholarly communication system works will help you navigate it successfully for your career ends. However, I also aspire to help you see the bigger picture in your career, and become an engaged citizen within this system so that we may work together to improve it.”
Disc Ploughs. Powerhouse Museum Collection on Flickr Commons https://flic.kr/p/4MB33q.
No known copyright restrictions.
1. The Social Graph of Scholarly Communications is becoming more tightly bound into institutional metrics that have an increasing influence on institutional funding 2. The publishers of the Social Graph of Scholarship are beginning to enclose the Social Graph, excluding the infrastructure of libraries and other independent, non-profit organizations
Williams, M. (2019, March 3). If the map becomes the territory then we will be lost [Blog post]. retrieved from https://librarian.aedileworks.com/2019/03/03/if-the-map-becomes-the-territory-then-we-will-be-lost/