10 challenges scholarly publishers are facing

By Rick Anderson - Interim Dean, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah
"....I have polled some of my colleagues who work for publishers, vendors,  consultants, and other service providers on the commercial side of the scholarly communication equation. Here, based on the input I received ... are ten of the biggest challenges publishers are currently facing, presented in no particular order...........

 I was interested to see Altmetrics, Open Access and Amzon on the list!  (Eileen)

How to reach the many offline students | News | Times Higher Education

Educators cannot assume that all young people are old hands online, research shows... Academics and university administrators may be struggling to keep up with social media, but research shows that the digital divide is not just generational. It is racial, ethnic and socio-economic, and there are even differences in the way that men and women communicate online.

How to reach the many offline students | News | Times Higher Education

Scopus, you’re unravelling

NZ eResearch Librarian takes Scopus to task for indexing of non-academic journals

Scopus, you’re unravelling. The urge to be inclusive may be partly well-intentioned but when you move into uncharted territory you need to be more than normally vigilant. Instead you’ve tucked your shirt into your underpants and are grinning fixedly and hoping no one has noticed. We’ve noticed. It’s just embarrassing. - See more at: http://masseyblogs.ac.nz/library/2013/08/19/scopus-youre-unravelling-2/#sthash.7EjdIhz7.dpuf

Scopus, you’re unravelling. The urge to be inclusive may be partly well-intentioned but when you move into uncharted territory you need to be more than normally vigilant. Instead you’ve tucked your shirt into your underpants and are grinning fixedly and hoping no one has noticed. We’ve noticed. It’s just embarrassing. - See more at: http://masseyblogs.ac.nz/library/2013/08/19/scopus-youre-unravelling-2/#sthash.7EjdIhz7.dpuf

Scopus, you’re unravelling. The urge to be inclusive may be partly well-intentioned but when you move into uncharted territory you need to be more than normally vigilant. Instead you’ve tucked your shirt into your underpants and are grinning fixedly and hoping no one has noticed. We’ve noticed. It’s just embarrassing. - See more at: http://masseyblogs.ac.nz/library/2013/08/19/scopus-youre-unravelling-2/#sthash.7EjdIhz7.dpuf

Scopus, you’re unravelling. The urge to be inclusive may be partly well-intentioned but when you move into uncharted territory you need to be more than normally vigilant. Instead you’ve tucked your shirt into your underpants and are grinning fixedly and hoping no one has noticed. We’ve noticed. It’s just embarrassing. - See more at: http://masseyblogs.ac.nz/library/2013/08/19/scopus-youre-unravelling-2/#sthash.7EjdIhz7.dpuf

Scopus, you’re unravelling. The urge to be inclusive may be partly well-intentioned but when you move into uncharted territory you need to be more than normally vigilant. Instead you’ve tucked your shirt into your underpants and are grinning fixedly and hoping no one has noticed. We’ve noticed. It’s just embarrassing. - See more at: http://masseyblogs.ac.nz/library/2013/08/19/scopus-youre-unravelling-2/#sthash.7EjdIhz7.dpuf

Reaching Students: Developing a Library Student Ambassador Program

Interesting concept?

“Once a Library Ambassador, Always a Library Ambassador!” Using Peer Mentoring to Integrate the Library into the First-Year Academic Experience and Beyond

Andile Mncwabe's Farewell Presentation

Andile Mncwabe

Please visit Facebook to view Andile Mncwabe's Farewell Presentation photo album.

What to expect from academic journal publishers in the future?

The new AudioSlides option is available to authors of articles in selected Elsevier journals.

Find out more about this service and how to participate -  and listen to examples from the Audio Slides Gallery

AudioSlides are short, webcast-style presentations that are shown next to the online article on ScienceDirect. This format gives authors the opportunity to present their research in their own words, helping readers to quickly understand what a paper is about and appreciate its relevance.

Embracing Change (in Academic Libraries)

Serials Review 1 August 2013

The Internet, Google, e-journals, packages, e-books and patron driven acquisitions have all been perceived as “a threat to libraries as we know them.” Yet, in spite of these developments and under the weight of chronic budget pressures, the typical academic library now offers more users better access to more content and services than ever before. In this session we will look at how librarians and the vendors that serve them have responded to these “threats” to their future to create new and improved services ...

 

several areas of change.

•

The collection: moving to electronic

•

The library as a place (physical and virtual)

•

Services available from the library

•

Librarian's role in curating and managing data sets

•

Discovery tools and access to content

•

How and where users can be reached

•

Library's role in exposing the institution's research and knowledge assets on a world stage.

 

12 Cats Who Are Serious About Reading

Reading books is serious business, and no one knows that better than these twelve cats.

Top 5 social media platforms for research development

Top 5 social media platforms for research development

Get to Know Your Personal Librarian - outside the Day Kaif

Please visit the Rhodes University Library facebook page for an update on the day's activities.

Social media’s politics of circulation have profound implications for how academic knowledge is discovered and produced.

From LSE
As social media and other new forms of media emerge as influential ways to communicate academic knowledge, David Beer argues academics may need to pay more attention to the politics of circulation that increasingly define how academic knowledge is discovered and transmitted. If we don’t understand the politics of data circulations that define contemporary media cultures then we may also find that academic practice is reshaped without sufficient reflection and reaction.

The Structure of Scholarly Communications Within Academic Libraries

This article provides a brief review of the findings recently published in a SPEC Kit, which focuses on ARL Libraries. The main intention, though, is to provide a wider context of  *scholarly communication activities across a variety of academic libraries. To do that, a survey of non-ARL Libraries was administered to review relevant positions, library organizations, and the variety of scholarly communication services offered. Lastly, a set of scholarly communication core services is proposed.

Definitions from Wikipedia
*Scholarly communication is the process of academics, scholars and researchers sharing and publishing their research findings so that they are available to the wider academic community (such as university academics) and beyond.

*Scholarly communication is the creation, transformation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge related to teaching, research and scholarly endeavors. Among the many scholarly communications issues include author rights, the peer review process, the economics of scholarly resources, new models of publishing (including open access and institutional repositories), rights and access to federally funded research, and preservation of intellectual assets

Interesting new feature: Elsevier and Dryad Implement Reciprocal Linking Between Datasets and Published Research Articles

Link to this press release

"Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, and the Dryad Digital Repository, a leading archive for scientific and medical research data, today announced that they have implemented two-way linking between their respective content. The Dryad Digital Repository provides facilities for archiving, discovery and accessibility of data files associated with any published article in the sciences or medicine, as well as software scripts and other files important to the article. Dryad is a nonprofit organization committed to its mission of making data publicly available for research and educational reuse. All datasets stored by Dryad receive persistent, resolvable Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to allow their proper citation. ....."

10 Emerging Educational Technologies and How They Are Being Used Across the Globe

10 emerging ed technologies

Cloud Computing (12 Months or Less)

Mobile Learning (12 Months or Less)
Tablet Computing (12 Months or Less)
MOOCs (12 Months or Less)
Open Content (2-3 Years)
Learning Analytics (2-3 Years)
Games and Gamification (2-3 Years)
3D Printing (4-5 Years)
Virtual and Remote Laboratories (4-5 Years)

Wearable Technology (4-5 Years)

Embargoes Can Only Go So Far to Help New Ph.D.'s Get Published, Experts Say

From the CHE
 .......editors at two university presses backed away from offering her a book contract for a revised version of her dissertation, which is about urban public hospitals and the care of the poor in Houston in the mid-20th century, upon learning that it was posted online. Some half-dozen other editors voiced interest in her work at scholarly conferences and then said they could not publish a monograph based largely on a dissertation readily available online.
She was forced to shelve efforts to publish a revised version of her dissertation with a university press.......

The Impending Demise of Greedy For-Profit Scientific Publishers (Part I)

The Impending Demise of Greedy For-Profit Scientific Publishers (Part I)

Historians Seek a Delay in Posting Dissertations

Historians Seek a Delay in Posting Dissertations

.... why would someone work years to produce a dissertation and then insist that it not be seen for as many as six more years?....university presses are known to be skeptical about agreeing to publish a book when the Ph.D dissertation it is based on is readily available online.......“The idea of locking up ideas for six years is not right,” said Heather Joseph, the executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, which favors open research. “The thing that bothered us the most is that it was a one-dimensional response to a multidimensional issue, and a missed opportunity.”........

Bibliometrics of individual researchers

Bibliometrics of individual researchers

....key topic at a special plenary at the 14^th ISSI Conference two weeks ago in Vienna. The plenary was an initiative taken by Jochen Gläser (Technical University Berlin), Ismael Rafols (Ingenio, Spanish National Research Council / Polytechnical University Valencia), Wolfgang Glänzel (Leuven University) and myself. The plenary aimed to give a new stimulus to the debate how to apply, and how not to apply, performance indicators of individual scientists and scholars. Although not a new debate – the pioneers of bibliometrics already paid attention to this problem – it has become more urgent because of the almost insatiable demand for objective data and indicators in the management of universities and research institutes. ......

Publishing Your Dissertation Online: What’s a New Ph.D. to Do?

Publishing Your Dissertation Online: What’s a New Ph.D. to Do? (from CHE)

Early this week, the American Historical Association (AHA) released a controversial statement that strongly advised graduate programs and libraries to adopt a policy allowing the embargoing of the publication of completed dissertations online for up to six years. The statement has generated much praise and much criticism. Supporters of the statement argue that it protects junior authors, given that in the current academic climate a completed, published, single-authored monograph continues to be the standard for tenure and promotion in fields like history. Opponents of the statement counter with several arguments: that making the dissertation research public, rather than keeping it embargoed for years, allows the junior scholar to gain credit for his or her work; that the revision necessary to turn a dissertation into a book makes the two significantly different scholarly works; and finally, that the AHA should actively consider rethinking the book as a gold standard for advancement.

Makanaskop Senior Residential Facility

 You may visit the RUL Facebook page for more pictures!