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One-hour audio recordings of two recent lectures, “The French policy on research infrastructures and ejournals for the humanities : Adonis and Revues.org“, given in English in May 2009.
Also of interest may be the 2008 full-text PDF “On the usage of e-journals in French universities” and this recent report (in French).
The Global Information Society Watch 2009 Report has been released. It’s a substantial book-length “annual report” on the state of open access to information around the world, complete with chapters about individual nations.
An informed 5,000-word article on open access journals, and the debates swirling around them, in Friday’s Times Higher Educational Supplement. If you don’t know your “green” OA from your “slightly off-mauve” OA, then this is the starter article for you.
I was on holiday at the time, so I couldn’t attend (even though it’s on my doorstep) — but Craig Bellamy has a detailed report on the Tools for Scholarly Editing over the Web workshop in Birmingham, England, on 24th September 2009.
River Valley TV now has a video archive of the recent Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (Sweden, Sept 2009) online.
Sarah Gentlemen at RIN has a report on the July 2009 “The role of open access and repositories in the arts : a forum for discussion” meeting (presentations are now online).
“some people felt often the arts community don’t actually like using technology, so this is a big challenge to overcome”
Apart from a few Luddite painters and lute-pluckers, I suspect what they really don’t like is the level of keyboard-use and reading involved with normal use of the Web. “I don’t like technology” becomes a face-saving shorthand for “I have problems with reading”. But even otherwise-able creatives in the visual arts and music are often not avid readers of dense texts such as the ones in repositories, certainly. And arts managers, especially, have almost always landed in that position because they’re “people people” who prefer talking (and talking and talking and talking while saying very little of substance, while you try in vain to get a word in edgeways) to serious reading.
“The idea that users won’t actually use your repository website directly, but that they access the content via a search engine (like Google) is not yet fully appreciated or understood by institutions.”
Spot on. Although that’s no reason for allowing arts repository pages to remain so visually dull and unappealing.
Daniel Seidell on the curse of the special ‘arts issue’.
A lengthy and referenced overview, based on a recent 2009 conference presentation, of the African Journal Online service — with some statistics.
AJOL seems to be building quite an empire among African journals, and it has over 300 titles with about 28 of those in the arts and humanities. Although (despite the article highlighting that AJOL uses the Open Journal system) all but two of the arts and humanities titles are firmly behind a paywall, and I saw charges asked of up to $18 U.S. per article. I also checked early archive issues of the same arts and humanities journals, only to find that these are also behind paywalls. The only two that are open access are theology journals — HTS Theological Studies and Acta Theologica.
There’s no mention in the article of any IP-address detection method being used, to ensure free access to full-text articles only if one is accessing AJOL from inside Africa. Nor can I find a mention of such a system elsewhere. So I can’t quite see how, in terms of the arts & humanities, AJOL can justify the statement that it is “opening access to information in developing countries such as Africa”.
The non-profit behind the Open Journal System is about to launch a version for monographs, called the Open Monograph Press (OMP). (Background and PDFs).
Sadly, it seems that (judging by the demo version) the OMP is going to produce the same sort of meaningless URLs in search-results as OJS journals currently do…
Having recently got up close and personal with thousands of ejournal URLs, here are seven suggestions for those who are considering launching an independent open ejournal in the arts and humanities.
1. Register your own domain name. Try to make it human-readable and meaningful — e.g.: www.fabric-artists.org rather than using initials or shortened forms such as www.f-art.com. Pay for the domain and all hosted server costs up-front, for at least ten years, with a reliable commercial web hosting provider. This should not cost you more than about £600. Expensive, but it means that the university IT techies can’t capriciously juggle directories and thus break all your inbound links. Store all parts of the journal at your domain, calling no core content in from off-site, or from “slightly-different” URLs.
Problems solved: a) countless dead “404″ links in ejournals list and directories just a few years old, and a circa 80% attrition rate on those more than five years old; b) a niche academic search-engine indexes your home page URL, but doesn’t also index the articles because you’ve stored them at a different URL.
2. Consider using the URL and file name as a carrier for some basic metadata, including clearly indicating if the content is free or pay. For instance…
www.technology-history.org/journal-issue-004/free-full-text/2009_adams_preindustrial_water_mills.html
Where preindustrial_water_mills are the first three words of the article title.
Without even accessing the document, a human can now glance at the URL in search results and read off:
Journal name (Technology History)
Issue number (Number 4)
It’s from a journal
It’s free full-text
The year published (2009)
The author surname (Adams)
The first three words of the article title (“preindustrial water mills“)
As you can see, that’s much more useful than having something impenetrable such as: www.hupt.stetford.edu/caij/admin/contentimages/38-02-106_h894.html and far better than having a huge database-driven scripted URL. You’ll exclude common words such as ‘the’ from the article title, obviously.
Problems solved: a) a useful range of basic metadata is not automatically displayed alongside a link to the journal article, other than the title (if you’re lucky) and an often-misleading text snippet; b) users accessing via a standard public search-engine have to download and manually open your article file to find out simple things like when it was published and if it’s really free full-text.
3. Don’t hang admin pages directly off the main URL. Put them in their own folder, e.g.: www.full-journal-name.org/editorial-files/our_editorial_board.html
Problem solved: Indexing the main domain also brings in all sorts of administrative fluff, old conference flyers, etc
4. Publish in HTML, as well as in PDF.
Problem solved: PDF is print-oriented (so consider linking each issue to a POD book publisher such as Lulu), but with HTML people can do more interesting things with (like browser addons that auto-detect and auto-link citations on a page)
5. Make sure all your articles contain basic information like: the journal title, issue number, and ideally your home-page URL in clickable form. Put this in the body text of the article. Also make sure your PDF file properties are all filled out correctly, as are your HTML headers. It’s just basic marketing really, but also useful for those who would organise knowledge.
Problem solved: A downloaded article from an open access ejournal very often has no embedded data giving the full journal title and issue number. Future generations won’t thank a researcher for telling them, “um yeah, but I once had that stuff via my personal copy of Zotero”.
6. Zero tolerance for broken URLs and 404 errors. Never ever let your IT techies or web designers change your directory structure once it’s set. If they really have to for some world-shattering technical reason, then make sure you force them to set up durable (five-year minimum) working redirects for every article, or use some server magic to make the new structure look like the old structure to the outside world.
Problems solved: a) too many dead “404″ links in ejournals directories just a few years old; b) blogs, discussion forums have many broken direct links to journal articles they’re discussing; c) there are even sometimes broken links on the journal website itself(!) caused by directory-juggling.
7. Publicise. There’s nothing more disheartening than doing a Google search for link:www.your-established-ejournal.org — and finding that the only people who link to it are your university and a lone blog post from 2006. Being a journal on an obscure topic doesn’t mean you should be invisible. Google will bury you if you don’t have any inbound links, and (I would imagine) your authors may drift away if no-one links to or reads their articles. There’s also a whole planet out there, and the next expert in hyperkinetic light-art might be a kid sitting in a bush college in Uganda. She needs to find your excellent new article giving an overview of hyperkinetic light-art.
“A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing”, over at the U.S. Chronicle of Higher Education (12th Jun 09)…
“the first key to a stronger and more vital university press is in the embrace of a broader array of fields, notably the professions, including medicine; engineering; computer, environmental, information, and management sciences; graphic design; and finance. [ all of which ] are often seen as peripheral to the humanities-centered core mission of universities, and to the heavily humanities-oriented program of university presses.”
“While naysayers may argue that publishing more books on the professions subverts the university press’s historical commitment to the humanities and culture, one could counter that those professional fields are themselves coming to define culture. Think of the growing influence on society of fields such as telecommunications, financial engineering, and cognitive science, as well as the increasingly ubiquitous influence of statistics and applied mathematics in everyday communications.”
An interesting point from the publisher of an independent commercial academic journal…
The [ universities and their various Research Assessment Exercises ] have created, and they sustain, an academic assessment system that is very heavily dependent on academic journals, but which gives no credit whatever for the editing of such journals. The universities offer precious little encouragement (read “no material support” and “no workload allowance”) for the editing or publication of academic journals.
The managing director of Thames & Hudson gives a clear overview, in The Art Newspaper of some of the problems in the contemporary publishing of art books. It seems a sound article, but I’d like to pick up a couple of points.
He writes that the…
“preoccupation with low prices has had the pernicious effect of devaluing books in the minds of consumers”
…but seems to imply that Amazon is mainly to blame. He doesn’t mention the effect of near slave-labour printing in the Far East, as a factor that has allegedly allowed publishers to drop prices for huge coffee-table tomes that might have otherwise retailed at twice the price.
He also mentions in passing (and might have said more about) another trend that is, in a different way, “devaluing books in the minds of consumers” — the journalistic hunger to sniff at the dirty-linen drawer of dead artists and thus to…
“appropriate art for contemporary society’s great mass-market fuel: celebrity”
A new article at the German Goethe-Institut website…
“The ‘universal’ library of the American search engine company Google, on the other hand, has no primary significance for the desirable exchange of scientific and scholarly information”
/Cough/
A casual search turns up what sounds like something of a rebuttal: “Google Scholar versus PubMed in Locating Primary Literature to Answer Drug-Related Questions” (March 2009)…
“No significant differences were identified in the number of target primary literature articles located between databases. PubMed searches yielded fewer total citations than Google Scholar results…”
And another: “Google Scholar Search Performance: Comparative Recall and Precision” (January 2009)…
“a comparative evaluation of Google Scholar and 11 other bibliographic databases (Academic Search Elite, AgeLine, ArticleFirst, EconLit, GEOBASE, MEDLINE, PAIS International, POPLINE, Social Sciences Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, and SocINDEX), focusing on search performance within the multidisciplinary field of later-life migration. The results of simple keyword searches are evaluated with reference to a set of 155 relevant articles identified in advance. In terms of both recall and precision, Google Scholar performs better than most of the subscription databases. This finding, based on a rigorous evaluation procedure…”
And of course this recent article, which I blogged a few days ago: “How Scholarly is Google Scholar? A Comparison to Library Databases” (PDF pre-print paper for College & Research Libraries journal, accepted 30th June 2008)…
“We found that Google Scholar is, on average, 17.6% more scholarly than materials found only in library databases and that there is no statistically significant difference between the scholarliness of materials found in Google Scholar across disciplines.”
“Academia 2.0: What Would a Fully Interactive Journal Article Look Like?”…
“We wrapped up the paper yesterday and it got me thinking about what a fully interactive version of the paper would look like. What if all the maps and charts were embeds? What if you could download all the data sets used for the analysis right from the paper? While many journal have come online and some even in openly accessible venues – I don’t think we’ve really tapped the power of the Web for interactivity, data sharing, innovation, or peer review.”
The full article, on “Geospatial Modeling of Supply Shocks”, is included in the post…
“Opening up the commenting and feedback process could foster even better critique of work. By also making data available, an incentive is created for fellow researchers to interact with the research, provide feedback, and collaborate with authors. Potentially you could create a journal in such a format leveraging interactive tools across the web. To give this idea a go I’ve created an example of what such an article could look like with our oil paper as the guinea pig”
A short film about Open Access academic journals and books – in Dutch, but with English subtitles.
There’s also another video, along similar lines, now online: Tim O’Reilly makes the argument for Open Publishing @ TOC 2009 from Open Publishing Lab @ RIT on Vimeo.
