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.
Today (August 2, 2019), the UC negotiating team issued a fact-check of Elsevier’s claims in their multi-pronged messaging campaign.
Understand the reasons behind the UC’s efforts to ensure access to research generated at our campuses and practice fiscal responsibility for the research funding provided by taxpayer dollars. Open Statement: Why UC terminated journal negotiations with Elsevier (March 2019)
Have questions? Talk to your librarian!
The U.S. PIRG group, consumer and antitrust groups, and SPARC are submitting letters to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to protest the merger of Cengage and McGraw-Hill, two of the largest textbook publishers.
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.
Educational Technologies and Student Data – Briefing for Libraries, (July 31, 2019) International federation of Library associations and institutions, FAIFE (Committee on Freedom of Access to Information and Freedom of Expression) https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/92339
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.
Due to a new (announced July 10, 2019) NIH Requirement for ORCID iDs for Individuals Supported by Research Training, Fellowship, Research Education, and Career Development Awards Beginning in FY 2020, Scholarly Communication at the UC San Diego Library has received an increasing number requests for training and best practices by our faculty, research centers, and campus administration. UCSD has an institutional membership but we have not yet integrated with our RIM, profile, IR, or ETD submission systems. Contact us for more information or a training.
In other news: Presentations are available from Open Repositories 2019 recently concluded in Hamburg, Germany. Several presentations on ORCiD have been posted:
Some other #OR2019 lectures especially relevant to the UC campuses:
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: Little Red Riding Hood by Luis Prado from the Noun Project
May 23 at 12:30 – 2pm in BLB Classroom 3 brought to you by the Scholarly Communications Working Group’s eScholarship and UC Open Access Policies Team
Come get your questions answered and your scholarship and research into the Library’s section of eScholarship or your program’s section. Get your works visible and accessible so that we can walk the talk of open!
Image credit: atlas negative image, SDASM Archives, no known copyright restrictions. Accessed on flickr
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.
RSVP and give us your questions on this form. UC San Diego locals only.
@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.
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.
Where are the social sciences on the scholarly communications continuum?
In the blog post, “If you use social media then you are not working” – How do social scientists perceive altmetrics and online forms of scholarly communication?, based on the authors’ (@stl90 , @Isabella83,c@warfair) co-written article, “When You Use Social Media You Are Not Working”: Barriers for the Use of Metrics in Social Sciences, the authors voiced concern that social scientists are missing opportunities to directly engage in the public discourse due to discipline culture.
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.”
A great commentary by Mita Williams putting the commodification of scholarly communication workflow into perspective.
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/
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