There will be a workshop on the topic on march 30 in Brussels under the framework of ‘slow science’; atelier
3 is exactly about seeking alternatives like ArXiv…Participation is free, welcome to join
Maarten
- Please do circulate this
invitation in your networks! -
INVITATION SLOW SCIENCE WORKSHOP, 30 MARCH 2012 - VUB, BRUSSELS
The dismissal of Barbara Van Dyck from KULeuven – for her public support of an action of civil disobedience against a genetically modified potato field in May 2011 – and the arguments used to justify it, caused a public controversy.The controversy is
the symptom of a deeper malaise and reveals the
restructuration of the university into a science enterprise, increasingly dependent on industrial and other outsider interests, market mechanisms, and competition. Science has come to be seen mainly as a purveyor of technological innovation and increased competitiveness
on a globalized market. It is argued that this shift not only restricts the choice of research topics and curricula but also threatens the quality of the knowledge.
Confronted with this, the Slow Science movement - that just like the 'slow food' movement defends qualitative food against fast food - urges rethinking the current university, against the fast, competitive, benchmarked research.‘Slow Science’ is about thinking
a Science prepared for the future, it is about the quality of research.
On March 30th, 2012 (13h-18h),
we organise a series of workshops to reflect on different
strategies for keeping Slow Science possible. It will take place at the VUB, campus Etterbeek (Auditorium
QD).
Isabelle Stengers and Chris Kesteloot will introduce the Workshops with A
Plea for Slow Science.
After that you can participate in one of the parallel workshops
Atelier 1 _ Festina Lente! Discussing
a Slow Science Charter and action plan to
work with it
Atelier 2 _ 'Citizen
Science’: bridging the gap
Atelier 3 _ Contesting the commodification
and enclosure of scientific knowledge: Towards
a University of the Commons
We conclude the day with feedback from the Ateliers and strategies for the future.
You find the invitation for the workshop, including all details here or
you can dowloand the pdf here.
Download the “plea for Slow Science” by Isabelle Stengers here.
You can find the public lecture online 1intro, 2stengers, 3stengers, 4debat
The workshop is free of costs, but please do
confirm your participation at [log in to unmask] and
indicate which Atelier you
would like to participate in!
The workshop is open for everybody who is interested in what scientists do and the conditions shaping this.
We hope to welcome you at the workshops!
The Slow Science Comité
Visit our blog http://threerottenpotatoes.wordpress.com/news/
_____________________
PS. SUPPORT THE COURT CASE BarbaraVanDyck_KuLeuven! Support
Account : ‘Slow Science Comité’ BE69 5230 8047 1578
In a few days only a petition to request the withdrawal of the dismissal of Barbara Van Dyck was signed by more than 4000 people, including academics, human rights and environmental activists, and many concerned citizens. The petition was handed over to KuLeuven
rector Mark Waer at the beginning of the academic year. Talks have been going on over summer to organise Barbara’s reintegration. Yet the dismissal has not been cancelled! Therefore she has been forced to bring the case before the labour court. You may want
to support the court case financially. It is important to win it! The case will be discussed at the Labour Court in Leuven on 2012,
April 19th.
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of joshua j. kurz
Sent: donderdag 16 februari 2012 18:49
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Occupy Elsevier
There's a list of academics boycotting Elsevier, along with more info, here: http://thecostofknowledge.com/
joshua j. kurz
PhD Candidate, Comparative Studies
The Ohio State University
451 Hagerty Hall
1775 College Rd.
Columbus, OH 43210
no trees were harmed in the sending of this email, but trillions of electrons were severely inconvenienced...
On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 11:14 AM, Jonathan Cloke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
It seems that Maths is ahead of us re the Elsevier matter plus more open refereeing proposals (see cross-post below); is anyone up for setting up a similar Google+
site for Geographers, or do we think that isn’t necessary?
This list should surely be at the forefront of a similar ‘Occupy Geography’ movement…
“The future of academic publishing
February 10, 2012, Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe (http://mathbabe.org/2012/02/10/the-future-of-academic-publishing/)
I’ve been talking a lot to mathematicians in the past few days about the future of mathematics publishing (partly because I gave a talk about Math in Business
out at Northwestern).
It’s an exciting time, mathematicians seem really fed up with a particularly obnoxious Dutch publisher called Elsevier (tag line: “we charge this much because
we can”), and a bunch of people have been boycotting them (http://gowers.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/elsevierstatementfinal.pdf), both for submissions (they
refuse to submit papers to the journals Elsevier publishes) and for editing (they resign as editors or refuse offers). One such mathematician is my friend Jordan, for example.
Here’s a page that simply collects information about the boycott -
http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Journal_publishing_reform#The_cost_of_knowledge. As you can see by looking at it, there’s an absolutely exploding amount of conversation around this topic, and rightly so: the publishing system in academic
math is ancient and completely outdated. For one thing, nobody I’ve talked to actually reads journals anymore, they all read preprints from arXiv (http://arxiv.org/), and so the only purpose publishers provide
right now is a referee system, but then again the mathematicians themselves do the refereeing. So publishers are more like the organizers of refereeing than anything else.
What’s next? Some people are really excited to start something completely new (I talked about this a bit already here (http://mathbabe.org/2012/01/18/change-academic-publishing/)
and here (http://mathbabe.org/2012/01/19/followup-change-academic-publishing/) but others just want the same referee system done without all the money going to
publishers. I think it would be a great start, but who would do the organizing and get to choose the referees etc? It’s both lots of work and potentially lots of bias in an already opaque system. Maybe it’s time for some crowd-sourcing in reviewing? That’s
also work to set up and could potentially be gamed (if you send all your friends online to review your newest paper for example).
We clearly need to discuss.
For example, here’s a post (http://occupypublishing.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/scientific-journals-in-e-publishing-age.html)
hat tip Roger Witte) about using arXiv.org as a collector of papers and putting a referee system on top of it, which would be called arXiv-review.org. There’s an infant google+ discussion group (https://plus.google.com/113026609770667182181/posts)
about what that referee system would look like.
Update: here’s another discussion taking place (http://www.math.ntnu.no/~stacey/Mathforge/Math2.0).
Are there other online discussions going on? Please comment if so, I’d like to know about them. I’m looking forward to what happens next!”
Jon
Dr Jon Cloke
Lecturer in Human Geography
Geography Department
Loughborough University
Leicestershire LE11 3TU
Room JJ 0.14
Phone 44 (0)1509 228193
“The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege
which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic
pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions
and no longer are; they merely have” - Paulo Freire.