October 2nd, 2009 by David Michalski
“Take Control of Your Publications with eScholarship”
An Open Access Week Presentation
Catherine Mitchell
Director, CDL Publishing Group
University of California
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Shields Library, Second Floor Instruction Room
Keep your copyright
Reach more reader
Publish when you want t
Protect your work’s future
…all with no fees
eScholarship offers a robust open access* publishing platform that enables departments, research units, publishing programs, and individual scholars associated with the University of California to have direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship, including:
- Peer Reviewed Journals
- Conference Proceedings
- Books
- Working Papers
- Postprints
- Seminar/Paper Series
Initiated in 2002, eScholarship now houses over 30,000 publications with more than 9 million full-text downloads to date. The rate of usage of these materials has grown dramatically in the past 7 years, now often exceeding 170,000 downloads per month.
Come learn how you can get started publishing with eScholarship today!
“Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions…OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance.”
Posted in Open Access, Publishers, Uncategorized | No Comments Yet »
June 3rd, 2009 by Daniel Goldstein
There’s a new editorial, “Journals Under Threat,” appearing in 61 international history of science, technology and medicine journals. It was issued jointly by the editors of all 61 journals and should be read by anyone involved in the humanities. (Link to editorial in Medical History via PubMed Central.)
This collaborative editorial critiques an initiative from the European Science Foundation called the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH). According to the editors, “The ERIH is an attempt to grade journals in the humanities. . . . The initiative proposes a league table of academic journals, with premier, second and third divisions. But, while the editors direct their objections to this specific initiative, their core critique challenges the underlying premise of any journal ranking scheme as it applies to the humanities.
Journals’ quality cannot be separated from their contents and their review processes. Great research may be published anywhere and in any language. Truly ground-breaking work may be more likely to appear from marginal, dissident or unexpected sources, rather than from a well-established and entrenched mainstream. Our journals are various, heterogeneous and distinct. Some are aimed at a broad, general and international readership, others are more specialized in their content and implied audience. Their scope and readership say nothing about the quality of their intellectual content.
We are in a time when academic publishing is under strain and the University of California is confronting a future of sharply reduced state support. As we, collectively and as individuals, are forced to make difficult decisions about what research to fund or not to fund, where to publish, what journals to purchase or to cancel, the temptation is strong to base our choices on seemingly objective measures like the ERIH. This editorial is a strong and timely reminder that despite their allure, such ranking systems are of questionable value. Indeed, the authors of this editorial feel so strongly that the ERIH is antithetical to interests of the research community that they have all asked to have their journals removed from its lists.
Posted in Current Reading, History, History of Science, Publishers | No Comments Yet »
