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For those of you who will be attending the AAG in New York at the end of
the month and will still be around on *Tuesday, February 28,* this panel,
open to the public and being held *at noon* that day at Columbia
University, is very apropos indeed. Please do make it if you can! It
promises to be an invigorating debate.
*
Panel to Consider Recent Developments in Access to Research
*
How can access to important research and scholarship be available to all,
not just "the one percent"? On *Tuesday, February 28, at 12:00 PM in
Columbia University's Faculty House Presidential Rooms 2 & 3*, join us for
"Protests, Petitions and Publishing: Widening Access to Research in 2012"
to discuss how Occupy Wall Street, the Research Works Act (RWA), the
boycott of Elsevier journals by a growing number of academics, and other
recent developments are informing the debate over access to research and
scholarship. The event is free and open to the public.

The Occupy movement resonated widely on college campuses in America and
around the world when it began in Fall 2011 and reinvigorated discussion of
socioeconomic inequality and increasing costs associated with higher
education. Current debates about scholarly publishing have further echoed
these themes. Two bills—the RWA, which seeks to end public-access policies
to federally funded research, and the Federal Research Public Access Act,
which seeks to expand the reach of these policies—are currently under
consideration in Congress. In response, over 6,000 scholars have signed an
online petition boycotting the scholarly journals published by the
commercial publisher Elsevier, one of the major financial supporters of the
sponsors of the RWA. Meanwhile, several societies have begun to address
their membership's concerns about publishing practices that may be seen to
exclude scholars at all but the most wealthy institutions. Are scholars and
publishers finally ready to change the process by which scholarship is
distributed?

The speakers bring a variety of perspectives to the issue of access to
research.

*Allan Adler* is Vice President for Legal and Governmental Affairs in the
Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Association of American Publishers
(AAP), where he deals with intellectual property, freedom of speech, new
technology, and other industry-related issues.

*Gail Drakes* is a doctoral candidate in the Program in American Studies at
New York University and Associate Faculty at NYU's Gallatin School of
Individualized Study. Her current teaching and research  interests explore
the ways in which copyright (and other forms of private ownership of
information) serve to regulate access to the stories, sounds, and images
that shape collective scholarly and public understandings of the past.

*Alex Golub* is assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of
Hawaii at Manoa. His general research interests include kinship and
identity, the Internet, resource development, and political anthropology.
He is a founder of the popular cultural anthropology blog "Savage Minds."

*Oona Schmid* is the Director of Publishing at the American Anthropological
Association. She is responsible for the daily oversight and long-term
planning around a complex publishing program that includes more than 20
specialized anthropological journals.

*Peter Woit* is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at
Columbia University. Since 2004 he has written on physics and mathematics
topics for his blog "Not Even Wrong." His current research  is on quantum
field theory and automorphic representations.

This is Columbia University's Scholarly Communication Program’s third event
this academic year in their speaker series, Research Without Borders: The
Changing World of Scholarly Communication. Follow the series remotely via
Twitter at http://twitter.com/ScholarlyComm. For information about Research
Without Borders, please email Kathryn Pope at [log in to unmask], or visit
http://scholcomm.columbia.edu/events.

The Scholarly Communication Program (SCP) explores innovative models for
sharing new knowledge. The Program, based at the Center for Digital
Research and Scholarship (CDRS) within Columbia University
Libraries/Information Services, hosts events and maintains a website to
educate the Columbia community about changes taking place within the
scholarly communication system. Services provided by the SCP and its sister
programs support promising new modes of scholarly exchange.

Columbia University Libraries/Information Services is one of the top five
academic research library systems in North America. The collections include
over 11 million volumes, over 150,000 journals and serials, as well as
extensive electronic resources, manuscripts, rare books, microforms, maps,
and graphic and audio-visual materials. The services and collections are
organized into 22 libraries and various academic technology centers. The
Libraries employs more than 500 professional and support staff. The website
of the Libraries is the gateway to its services and resources:
library.columbia.edu.

To view online, please visit:
http://scholcomm.columbia.edu/2012/02/16/protests-petitions-and-publishing-widening-access-to-research-in-2012/

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 3:43 PM, Darrell Fuhriman <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> I would love to see geographers adopt the arXiv format.  I've often
> wondered if it would be possible to talk the arXiv folks into expanding to
> other disciplines. I think the primary issue there is one of funding. (Or
> maybe no one has asked.)
>
> But I think arXiv's proposed "business model" is generally right way to
> go. It boils down to "get libraries to cough up some money" (see:
> http://arxiv.org/help/support/whitepaper).  I suspect that if university
> libraries could transition even 50% of what they spend on private journals
> into supporting open access journals and services like arXiv, you could
> destroy the dominance of the academic publishers inside of a decade, and
> save hundreds of millions of dollars to boot.
>
> There are already open-source tools for managing the journal lifecycle
> (e.g. "Open Journal Systems" - http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs ), it's not a
> stretch to build on these existing resources.
>
> it's difficult to imagine a system more archaic and ridiculous in the
> Internet age. (Well, maybe medical record systems, but how pathetic is
> that?)
>
> The primary obstacle is not technical, or even necessarily financial, but
> cultural. Sadly, I've seen relatively little interest by Geographers in
> changing their own culture to help empower people through open access to
> knowledge (somewhat ironically when many of them are self-professed
> radicals).
>
> Darrell
>
>
> On Feb 16, 2012, at 08:14, Jonathan Cloke 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.****
>
>  ****
> ** **
>
>
>