If we knew ten years ago what we know now, what would we have done differently in our selection of vendors, and, specifically, in our negotiations with bepress to prevent ourselves from being in the situation we are in today?
Learning from the past to go forward.
multibillion-dollar revenue producing industry,
Where? In the "west?"
That means we need to fully understand the current commercial players’ strategy, and identify specific points of vulnerability in the infrastructure space, as well as places where we have opportunities for potential leverage.
Makes sense.
At the end of the day, they answer to shareholders looking for a return on investment. Expecting, or hoping, that they might deploy strategies and practices that are designed ultimately to do anything other than achieve this goal is a dead end. Instead, we need to build a solid understanding of the business strategy behind these acquisitions, in order to design a pragmatic community response that has the greatest chance of success
Almost like knowing your enemy in order to "take it down." But in this case, in order to work with it.
While this is undoubtedly a smart business move for commercial players, it presents significant challenges and risks not only to libraries, but to the academic and research community as a whole.
Always the struggle. Big money vs. the "little guys."
Here we can learn from Open Source practices. To ensure that the community can take control if necessary, the infrastructure must be “forkable.” The community could replicate the entire system if the organisation loses the support of stakeholders, despite all established checks and balances. Each crucial part then must be legally and technically capable of replication, including software systems and data.
Why do I feel like that is really, really hard to achieve? I think this course is showing me that I'm just really cynical. I don't know if we'll ever get to a point where you can have a system of an organization that can stand on its own if stakeholders take their support away...
At the same time, I realize that grouping people together behind a common cause can create really powerful changes...
Even with the best possible governance structures, critical infrastructure can still be co-opted by a subset of stakeholders or simply drift away from the needs of the community. Long term trust requires the community to believe it retains control.
I have experienced this being at a democratic school. I think it's similar to open access. If you are in a community where you know your vote goes somewhere and counts for something, you have more faith in that system and will trust it more.
Mission-consistent revenue generation – potential revenue sources should be considered for consistency with the organisational mission and not run counter to the aims of the organisation. For instance… Revenue based on services, not data – data related to the running of the research enterprise should be a community property. Appropriate revenue sources might include value-added services, consulting, API Service Level Agreements or membership fees.
Makes sense to me...Though it seems in my experience that non-profit and more community-run sources of money are not as plentiful as private sources.
Living will – a powerful way to create trust is to publicly describe a plan addressing the condition under which an organisation would be wound down
Almost like seeing an organization like a person...
Stakeholder Governed – a board-governed organisation drawn from the stakeholder community builds more confidence that the organisation will take decisions driven by community consensus and consideration of different interests.
Democracy and democratization
Infrastructure at its best is invisible. We tend to only notice it when it fails.
I'd never thought of it that way...But it's true.
They do not answer to any community board. They have no obligations to continue to provide services at their current rates, particularly when that rate is zero.
I feel like this is threatening to the possibility of advancing knowledge...
All these factors explain the different and often irrational big deals made between publishers and subscribers, with university libraries subscribing to a publisher’s entire set or large bundle of journals regardless of their specific needs
I often wonder just how much it costs for a university library to have access to so many journals and articles...
Although the law was initially created to protect the journal’s revenue streams
These journals that the public widely does not have access to have had their interests supported for quite a long time now...
There is such an emphasis put on scientific research, and it seems there is a monopoly put on publishing that research. Those few companies that publish the most research and make the most money off those publications don't want anything to change because then it reduces their profits. This section mentions libraries, which are always at the losing end when it comes to budgeting and money. If these few companies that are making so much money off publications of research really cared about dissemination of knowledge, then I think the reality would look different. That may be a simplistic, idealistic view, but fundamentally, I think it would look different.
monopolized
Like I said...
As a consequence, these scientific societies did not have the means to adapt to the digital era and therefore were more likely to be acquired or have agreements with big commercial publishers for the publication of their journals
This is the story of so many industries...
Yet, there is no large scientific society that regroups researchers from these disciplines and that also publishes the various journals covering these different disciplines.
Perhaps social sciences are seen as not as important, or too "soft?" Or are these disciplines just too broad?
It has also led to a greater dependence by the scientific community on these publishers.
Almost like a monopoly...
At that time, these commercial publishing houses proved more efficient in diffusing them than scientific societies
Because more money can make things happen faster...
This model of open science is not challenging the core values of science.
Can you really call it a "model of open science" then? Doesn't sound very open at all.
understanding the char-acteristics of the research university and building the infrastructures and the intellectualenvironment needed for successful research universities is a top priority
...This just sounds overwhelming and complicated.
Whatthe Twitter survey makes clear, however, is that students, academics, and non-academicsare all sharing articles on social media
I definitely see this as a positive thing, that the articles are being circulated in the public sphere outside of academia. I guess the next step would be figuring out how much engagement there has been with those social media shares...? (Which we know is not easy to measure...)
once again points to the importance of health-related researc
I wonder why health-related research seems to be so popular. I know that in the States, since many people cannot access going to the doctor without paying out of pocket, reading about health online is very popular. I don't know the situation in Latin America, but I wonder if it's similar?
, correlations between citations and tweets are rather weak, which suggests non-academic use
Somehow this doesn't surprise me, but I do wonder why Twitter would be seen as less academic than Facebook...?
I wonder if it has a small part to do with character limits. If you can only describe something in one post in only a few hundred characters, will you be able to represent your work accurately? If not, this would mean it partly goes down to the very language (and limited language) we use to promote ideas...
I'd like to know how they are measuring this. At my workplace, we reference studies once in a while, and we do put a proper citation at the end of the blog post, but otherwise, we link to the website where the article can be found/downloaded/purchased...So is there someone who is just googling to find mentions of research on the web?
informetrics, scientometrics and webometrics
Let's just throw some other "metrics" into the mix!
traces of the computerization of the research process
This is so vague and non-tangible...
And why are they supposed to be inherently different from a citation, which can itself occur invariousshapes: a perfunctory mention in the introduction, a direct quote to highlight a specific argument, or a reference to acknowledge the reuse of a method?
I wonder if part of the question is "who is doing the citing?" If it's someone on Twitter, they could be an academic or someone well respected in a research community, but it will still be seen as a more "casual" setting for the citation to be occurring. Maybe it just comes down to hierarchy and "who's who" in research circles.
citation cartels
Had to look this one up: Citation cartels consist of authors or journal editors that have teamed up to increase the citation of their articles by disproportionately citing articles of cartel members more than other relevant articles. (From https://www.enago.com/academy/citation-cartels-the-mafia-of-scientific-publishing/ )
while researchers are still exploring howto use social media.
Social media seems to be something that is viewed as "casual," and non-academic, which is fair to a certain extent. it also complicates how we live in the world - we are always warned not to put too much of ourselves on social media because prospective employers may look us up and not like what they see. It seems this casual-ness could be some of the root of the skepticism of using social media as a way to disseminate research and its outcomes.
d. However, the growth of new, online scholarly tools allows us to make new filters; these altmetrics reflect the broad, rapid impact of scholarship in this burgeoning ecosystem
I would welcome something that would make a more streamlined process of reading research/academic work and then reading up on the sources they've cited...
inthe course ofits 350-year history the scientific journal has not altered muc
I feel like this is very telling...Why hasn't it changed? What powers are at play that have kept it so static? What is the benefit to having them not change as methods of communication, studying, and as academia changes, not to mention the practice of science itself changing.
s.” That is, when faculty carry out scholarly work that seeks to serve the public, this work cannot be an additional burden that is separate from the main activity of producing knowledge.
I'm annotating this because I have thoughts but can't seem to formulate them well, so I'll come back to this...
a new category that includes activities that aim to disseminate information to a broader public, and that might be seen as a midpoint between research and service
That bridge seems to be essential.
Of course, the undervaluing of service is in itself problematic, especially when considering that women spend more time on such roles, often at the expense of their career progressi
That's a super interesting point that I hadn't thought of. I wonder why that is? Does it go back to a stereotypical idea that women should be serving others more...?
which are often not accessible to the public who ultimately underwrites the work.
The fact that these forms of research aren't accessible to the "public who ultimately underwrites the work" just seems preposterous to me. I'm not sure how to solve that, but if the public is paying taxes to support universities, then they should definitely be able to have easy access to the things the universities are doing.
in order to be successful, faculty are mostly incentivized towards research activities that can be counted and assessed within established academic conventions.
And therefore, not penetrating outside of those conventions/audiences.
On the one hand, public engagement and serving the public good are explicitly recognized and valued while, at the same time, the emphasis on metrics demonstrates how faculty are beholden to an accountability culture that relies predominantly on measurable and quantifiable
So, public engagement and serving the public good are not measurable...
and their work should show evidence of continued impact.
I still don't really get what this means and how it's measured...?
“The number of publications is important, but secondary to their quality and total impact, and to the applicant's contribution to the research publications.”
This is so vague.
This last quote shows how community-engaged scholarship is expected to orient research activities towards serving the public good while explicitly requesting that the ideas developed as a result of the research become publicly accessible.
These last 2 descriptions are way more detailed. I had a project at my job once where I had to look into what different universities define as "service" for tenured professors, and it was astounding how many of them didn't define it at all in their literature.
For each term and concept, we used a chi-square analysis of contingency tables to determine whether the frequencies across categories were significantly different from a uniform distribution. Statistically significant differences are indicated in the Figures below with the following symbols: *: p < .05; **: p < .01; and ***: p < .001.
OK here's something I'm realizing...I don't know how to read data in academic papers. Most of the time, a lot of this just seems like jibberish. I hate to admit it, but it's true. I really don't know what this means. Off to ask some academic friends.
Moreover, there is little evidence that mentions on social media are correlated with citations (see Konkiel, 2016 for an overview)or that they can serve as indicators of public uptake
Is this because of the type of people who are accessing the citations and then posting about them on social media? Maybe their audiences are academics in the majority who would be interested in their social media posts, as opposed to people not involved in academia?
to whom are higher education organizations accountable
Definitely a good question, one I ask myself a lot, as I see universities operate like businesses...
A second dimension of publicness that is often invoked in discussions about universities relates to the widespread notion that public universitiesshould be as close as possible to free of cost, or the cost should not be a barrier to access through the use of financial mechanisms of assistance
Yet, cost is still a barrier for many people, even in Canada where university is heavily subsidized, or in the United States where going to a public university in the state where one is a resident means relatively cheaper tuition...And not everyone will qualify for assistance, either. This kind of thing definitely helps people who can't normally access university, but there are still some major problems, so does that mean it's really "public" if many citizens cannot access it?
juridical
juridical - relating to judicial proceedings and the administration of the law.
suggests that policy compliance ismore readily achieved through so-called ‘integrative decision-making’ aimed at maximizing the common good, rather than abargaining process.
This seems to be obvious to me, but I'm not sure how it gets put into practice. Maybe I'm just really cynical, but there's always someone who is trying to sway the decision in their favour for their gain without thinking about other people, and unfortunately, there are lots of those kinds of people who are very loud in most governments...
within the normative premises of thedominant discourse
It always comes back to the dominant discourse.
conflicting discoursesneed to be overtly juxtaposed
But...how do you do that? And aren't they already overtly juxtaposed just by their nature of being conflicting...?
involves inevitable trade-offs and compromises byinvolved interests. A typical example is the difficulty of fittingtogether short-term economic growth and environmentalprotection of resources
To my point earlier - or maybe on another article? - about how things aren't done to improve our environment if there is no economic gain.
This is also an example of how media plays a role in reporting on issues that a government is discussing and handling. The way that issue is framed will have a huge impact on shaping public opinion.
exiting
exiting? Or existing?
strictly choreographed citizenconsultation
This reminds me of something Trudeau's government has tried to do. They have put surveys online about how to regulate legalized cannabis (I took part in this one), and they claim that they surveyed Canadians about whether or not they prefer proportional representation in the election system (I don't remember seeing this survey). And governments are constantly "choreographing" consultations in forums for citizens, but in the end, I'm not sure if they actually take those citizens' views into account, or if they just go ahead and do what they wanted anyway. I don't have evidence either way.
or ‘experienced-based experts’
I'm tripping up on the word "experience." As in, politicians who have been in politics a long time? Or lay people who read a lot on Wikipedia and in the news? Is the term "experienced-based 'experts'" sarcasm?
Power plays a huge role in what policies will be accepted and implemented. It seems to me one of the biggest reasons that we're not making greater headway on combatting climate change, for example, is the fact that there are certain people with certain agendas and certain beliefs in power. In some countries, there has been a little more progress than in, say, the United States or even Canada, because there is a different worldview or overall belief that those in power hold. Alongside power, of course, is money. No one wants to implement policies that are going to cripple the economy to combat climate change, without realizing that there will be no economy if climate change isn't dealt with...
present solutions which focus only on uncertainty.
This is an interesting point. I think when it comes to politics/policy, sometimes uncertainty is what politicians are banking on to get them followers/supporters. Yes, they stand on their stages and say they will do everything in their power to make certain things happen, or keep things from happening, but they also have to use uncertainty to manipulate their supporters, ie "We live in an uncertain and scary world where x, y, and z is happening and this person and that person are threatening our freedoms/healthcare/education/whatever, but if you put your faith in me, I will make the world even more certain!"
...If that makes sense.