Social Science Space

Academic capitalism exhibit a lack of transparency and accountability where it truly matters. Peer review and the ways in which journals often handle peer reviews are one key site of such intransparency and unaccountability.

Edited collections, are one of the most disparaged forms of academic writing, often written off as low quality, or a poor career choice. In contrast, Peter Webster argues for the unique benefit of edited collections, as a creative form of collective academic endeavor that does not sit easily within an academy that is averse to creative risk.

One of the proposed advantages of open access publication is that it increases the impact of academic research by making it more broadly and easily accessible. Reporting on a natural experiment on the citation impact of health research that is published in both open access and subscription journals, Chris Carroll and Andy Tattersall, suggests that subscription journals still play an important role in making research discoverable and useful and thus still have a role to play even in open publication strategies.

“We felt it’s important to dissociate the specific paper from making policy recommendations, because this is taking things to a different level. Now, if you ask my opinion about whether it does have policy recommendations or implications separate from the study, I think what it says is that this is a very common infection, and very often it is asymptomatic, so it goes below the radar screen. “

Getting named on a journal article is the ultimate prize for an aspiring academic. Not only do they get the paper on their CV (which can literally be money in the bank), but once named, all the subsequent citations accrue to each co-author equally, no matter what their contribution.

The move towards including the first person perspective is becoming more acceptable in academia, notes the University of Queensland’s Peter Ellerton, who adds, there are times when invoking the first person is more meaningful and even rigorous than not.

The necessity of rigorous if uninspiring academic writing is perhaps best illustrated with the story of a prominent 18th-century intellectual named Franz Anton Mesmer. He believed that illnesses were caused by blockages that interfered with the healthy flow of magnetic fluid through the body.

A new report from the Committee on Publication Ethics, or COPE, offers an intriguing way to look at the differences between academic disciplines: what do journal editors routinely identify as struggles?

The academic publishing paradigm is changing, driven in large part by calls for open access to publicly funded research. In this second of two parts, the university librarian for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill explains the thinking behind of a pilot program UNC inked with a major academic publisher.

As the educational reading landscape shifts to digital, Naomi Baron argues we must find proven strategies to help students become more aware of the best ways to read and study online – especially as regular printed textbooks gradually begin to disappear.

The future of the academic monograph has been questioned for over two decades. At the heart of this ‘monograph crisis’ has been a publishing industry centred on the print publication of monographs and a failure and lack of incentives to develop business models that would support a transition to open digital monographs. In this post Mike Taylor argues that if monographs are to be appropriately valued, there is a pressing need to further integrate monographs into the digital infrastructure of scholarly communication. Failing this, the difficulty in tracking the usage and discovery of monographs online, will likely make the case for justifying further investment in monographs harder.

In the wake of Elsevier shuttering access to its current journal articles at the University of California, the university librarian at UC-Davis reviews the context of the dispute and argues open access offers the best path for academia’s future.