Social sciences focus in scholarly communication

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.”

Female Rock Climber
Female Rock Climber by Eric Foltz on flickr

PhD candidate takes advantage of UC San Diego publishing partnerships

The UC San Diego Library is engaged in another recent partnership to leverage publishing opportunities for our campus that support sustainable Open Access publishing. We are seeing engagement as we get notices from the publisher about our authors recent OA publications.

Image credit: The Great Flood of 1927 by Gil Cohen. National Guard, U.S. Govt. work

Ned Randolph published “River Activism, “Levees-Only” and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927” DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/mac.v6i1.1179 in Media and Communication published by Cogitatio Press. Not only does he retain copyright and licenses his work with Creative Commons license, but he has seen 240 views and 29 downloads since publishing in open access on February 9, 2018! That’s 29 downloads in three days!!

Ned Randolph is a Communication Studies PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego.

UC San Diego 2nd highest usage of any institution in North America and 7th highest usage worldwide!

As part of UC San Diego Library’s ongoing support for Open Access, the library pledges funds to “unlatch” books in partnership with Knowledge Unlatched. We are more than pleased to learn that our support has made some impact!

From @KUnlatched Publicity & Communications:

Knowledge Unlatched presents its Open Access Heroes 2018 Berlin, 12th February 2018. Knowledge Unlatched (KU) has released its OpenAccess Heroes for 2017. The “KU Heroes” for 2017, including those institutions worldwide where the highest usage of KU titles in 2017 was recorded. UC San Diego saw the second highest usage of any institution in North America and the seventh highest usage worldwide (based on downloads from the OAPEN and JSTOR platforms)!KU_Heroes_2018

Check back with KU as they will be announcing the title lists for KU Select 2018 at the end of April, including books and journals not only in HSS but also in STEM for the first time. They’ll also be launching new partnerships with Luminos (University of California Press), OpenEdition (French language content), HAU Books (Anthropology) and Open Commons of Phenomenology (Philosophy).