Tag Archives: Top News

2018-2019 Open Access Publishing Fund

OA Publishing Fund, ,

**As of February 1, 2019, the OA Publishing Fund has been exhausted, and we are no longer accepting applications for this fiscal year.**

We are excited to announce that the Libraries will continue our Open Access Publishing Fund in 2018-2019. The fund is open to all current Temple faculty members. Current postdoctoral fellows, residents, and graduate students may also apply, as long as there is at least one faculty member listed as a co-author on the article.

Authors with a journal article that has been accepted or is under consideration by an open access publisher are encouraged to apply. Authors simply fill out a brief application with their information, a copy of the article, and a copy of the journal acceptance letter (if available). Funds will be available on a first come, first served basis. The Libraries will aim to make a final decision regarding the application within two weeks’ time. If the request is approved, Libraries will transfer funds to authors’ research fund or departmental account. The Libraries cannot reimburse authors or pay publishers directly.

Applicant Eligibility

  • Applicants must be a current Temple University faculty member OR a current postdoctoral fellow/resident/graduate student with a faculty member listed as a co-author.
  • Applicants with external grant funding that could cover, either in whole or in part, the cost of any publication and processing fees are ineligible.
  • Applicants must agree to deposit a copy of their publication in our Digital Library, or any future library repository.

Publication Eligibility

  • The publication must take the form of a peer-reviewed journal article.
  • Many subscription journals now offer an open access option in which authors can choose to pay a fee to make their article open access. These publications are sometimes called “hybrid” open access journals. Articles in “hybrid” journals are not supported.
  • The journal must be listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
  • The publisher must be a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), or clearly follow the membership criteria of the organization.
  • Because the Libraries already cover 50% of the APC for BioMed Central journals, these journals are not eligible.

Additional Limitations

  • Each applicant may request up to $1,500 total per fiscal year. This amount may be split across multiple applications so long as funds are available.
  • For articles with multiple Temple authors, the per article payment is capped at $3,000.
  • Funding will cover publication and processing fees only. Funds may not be used for reprints, color illustration fees, non-open access page charges, permissions fees, web hosting for self-archiving, or other expenses not directly related to open access fees.
  • For applicants who have not yet submitted for publication, requests will be conditionally approved awaiting official acceptance by the publisher. All conditional approvals will expire six months after notification. Applicants must provide a copy of the acceptance letter before the invoice is processed.
  • Fees are pro-rated for multi-authored articles. Co-authors from outside of Temple are not supported. If an article includes non-Temple authors, the APC will be divided equally among all authors and then the Temple authors’ portion will be funded. For example, if the APC is $2000, and there are four authors, two of whom are from Temple, the authors can apply for $1000 from the fund ($500 each).

Attribution Requirement

  • Authors who receive support must include the following statement in their acknowledgements: Publication of this article was funded in part by the Temple University Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund.

Download a copy of the application form here.

Questions? Contact Mary Rose Muccie (maryrose.muccie@temple.edu) or Annie Johnson (annie.johnson@temple.edu).

Note: The image above, “Open Access Publishing Fund,” is a derivative of “Open Access at CC” by Amy Collier for Creative Commons, and is used under CC BY 4.0. “Open Access Publishing Fund” is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by Annie Johnson.

2017-2018 Recipients of the OA Publishing Fund

OA Publishing Fund,

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.

We are pleased to announce the 2017-2018 recipients of the Open Access Publishing Fund. Congrats to all!

Janelle Bailey and Doug Lombardi (College of Education). “Meeting students halfway: Increasing self-efficacy and promoting knowledge change in astronomy.”

Eunice Chen (College of Liberal Arts, Psychology). “To a future where everyone can walk a dog even if they don’t own one.”

Konstantinos Drosatos and Matthew Hoffman (Lewis Katz School of Medicine, Pharmacology). “Krϋppel-like factors: Crippling and un-crippling metabolic pathways.”

Andrew Gassman, Edwin Acevedo, Catherine Kilmartin, Suresh Keshavamurthy, and Richard Tyrell (Lewis Katz School of Medicine, Surgery). “Is non-invasive indocyanine-green angiography a useful adjunct for the debridement of infected sternal wounds?”

Thomas Olino (College of Liberal Arts, Psychology). “Is Parent-Child Disagreement on Child Anxiety Explained by Differences in Measurement Properties? An Examination of Measurement Invariance Across Informants and Time.”

Jinsook Roh (College of Public Health, Kinesiology). “The effects of selective muscle weakness on muscle coordination in the human arm.”

Won Suh, Weili Ma, Geun-woo Jin, Paul M. Gehret, and Neil C. Chada (College of Engineering, Bioengineering). “A Novel Cell Penetrating Peptide for the Differentiation of Human Neural Stem Cells.”

Xiaoxing Xi, M. Golalikhani, Q. Lei, R. U. Chandrasena, L. Kasaei, B. A. Davidson, and A. X. Gray (College of Science and Technology, Physics).  “Nature of the metal-insulator transition in few-unit-cell-thick LaNiO3 films.”

From Blog Post to Book: An Interview with Kenneth Finkel

Publishing, , ,

 

Kenneth Finkel is a Professor of History at Temple. His new book, Insight Philadelphia: Historical Essays Illustrated will be published this month by Rutgers University Press. The book is based on a series of blog posts he first wrote for PhillyHistory.org. He recently spoke with Scholarly Communications Specialist Annie Johnson about how he turned his blog posts into a scholarly book.

How did you get started writing for PhillyHistory.org? Did you know when you started blogging that you wanted to eventually write a book?

As I say in the acknowledgements: “In 2011, Deb Boyer, Azavea’s…project manager, asked if I’d write a letter to support PhillyHistory.org’s nomination for an award by the American Association of State and Local History. The blog won kudos, and a few months later, I wondered if I might join the team as a guest contributor. (No stranger to blogging about Philadelphia, I had published at two previous venues: WHYY’s first foray into the medium, The Sixth Square [2006–2008], and Brownstoner Philadelphia [2010].) My first entry at PhillyHistory was on August 11, 2011.” I always figured that if this worked out, I’d try and see if it would or could become a book. I remembered that [writer] Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and other books, once had a blog with a subtitle declaring that intention. It seemed like a good idea – to parse out the task of book writing over hundreds of weeks…

What do you like about blogging?

There’s a rawness and an independence in the approach to blog writing, especially as it’s not peer reviewed. (Still, I try and hold myself to higher standards.) I could have chosen to rework ground already covered, things I knew from past research. But what I like most is the challenge of doing research for each and every post and revealing and presenting previously unknown or previously unconnected facts. I’m not sure many others see blogging this way, or use it this way, but for me it has been an ongoing challenge with built-in rewards of discovery. I’d be bored otherwise and would have stopped posting a long time ago.

Another essential thing that has kept my interest alive is the choice of images from PhillyHistory.org. Hunting down compelling, viable images with stories to tell–images that in most cases have not been previously researched or published, has made this 7-year project a constant treasure hunt.

Has blogging made your academic writing better?

Hard for me to say. My writing has usually been aimed more for the public. I think blogging has had an impact on my writing, forcing me to choose and develop ideas and commit to conclusions sooner than later.

The amount of preparation and planning involved in developing and writing any post has always struck me as something shaped by academic-level commitment. To my mind, this is academic writing, not because of the format but because of the approach. I literally have lists with hundreds of ideas. (I always like working from a deep well.)

The question is: Have I said anything new about Philadelphia in this work? I like to think I have. As I say in the preface: “Philadelphia’s unique and persistent sense of past and place is captured and refreshed.” In this book, those sensibilities are newly informed and newly reshaped, providing grittier, more bottom up intersections with the past. That level of openness and honesty may be more appealing than some past histories. I like to believe we need meta narratives as much as we need narratives. Together, they make for a broader approach to understanding the past.

How did you find a publisher?

After one false start (see below), Micah Kleit of Rutgers came to me with the idea, which I was very pleased about. It started with email, then coffee with Kleit (formerly of Temple University Press, now director at Rutgers University Press). There’s nothing better than being wanted.

Were you concerned that publishers wouldn’t want to publish a collection of writings that was already available for free online?

My false start (mentioned above) with another publisher came after about 75 posts. I approached a publisher I had previously worked with and sent them links to what I thought were outstanding pieces. The response was something like: “Good posts, they read like a blog. It’s not a book.”

How did you choose which posts to put in the book?

Maybe the toughest aspect in the transition from blog to book was finding and then building narratives. I wanted the essays to flow and build to something greater than the sum of the parts. Some posts, often written years apart, fell in line with one another, providing a stronger basis for each other’s point. Other posts stood along the way didn’t make as much sense. It was painful to leave some treasures behind.

Did you revise any/all of them?

Every one was revised for one reason or another. I and others found more mistakes and inconsistencies than I am happy to admit. A few posts needed more work than others.

Was the book peer reviewed?

Yes, the university press held this to their usual high standards, and for that I am grateful.

Do you think blogging is becoming an important way for scholars to communicate?

Of course it is–and has been for some years. Blogging is the most conservative of the social media platforms.

What advice do you have for other scholars who are interested in starting a blog or writing for an existing blog?

Work with images, if at all possible. The blog medium is incredibly image friendly and can broaden your appeal. Expect to work harder than you imagine. Don’t worry about readership, but extend yours and build your own following by using other social media. I post links and images to my new work on Facebook and Twitter. And find your voice as you keep posting, month after month, year after year.

Thank you Professor Finkel!

All About Impact Factors

In the News, Publishing, , ,

“Impact” by Dru! is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

This week, Clarivate Analytics released its annual Journal Citation Report, which includes new and updated Journal Impact Factors (JIF) for almost 12,000 academic journals. In case you’re not familiar, the JIF is based on the average number of times a journal’s articles were cited over a two year period.

Impact factors are a relatively recent phenomenon. The idea came about in the 1960s, when University of Pennsylvania linguist Eugene Garfield started compiling his Science Citation Index (now known as the Web of Science), and needed to decide which journals to include. He eventually published the numbers he had collected in a separate publication, called the Journal Citation Report (JCR), as a way for librarians to compare journals (JCR is now owned by Clarivate Analytics). Now, impact factors are so important that it is very difficult for new journals to attract submissions before they have one. And the number is being used not just to compare journals, but to assess scholars. JIF is the most prominent impact factor, but it is not the only one. In 2016, Elsevier launched CiteScore, which is based on citations from the past three years.

Academics have long taken issue with how impact factors are used to evaluate scholarship. They argue that administrators and even scholars themselves incorrectly believe that the higher the impact factor, the better the research. Many point out that publishing in a journal with a high impact factor does not mean that one’s own work will be highly cited. One recent study, for example, showed that 75% of articles receive fewer citations than the journal’s average number.

Critics also note that impact factors can be manipulated. Indeed, every year, Clarivate Analytics suspends journals who have tried to game the system. This year they suppressed the impact factors for 20 journals, including journals who cited themselves too often and journals who engaged in citation stacking. With citation stacking, authors are asked to cite papers from cooperating journals (which band together to form “citation cartels”). The 20 journals come from a number of different publishers, including major companies such as Elsevier and Taylor & Francis.

As a result of these criticisms, some journals and publishers have also started to emphasize article-level metrics or alternative metrics instead. Others, such as the open access publisher eLife, openly state on their website that they do not support the impact factor. eLife is one of thousands of organizations and individuals who have signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which advocates for research assessment measures that do not include impact factors. Another recent project, HuMetricsHSS, is trying to get academic departments, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, to measure scholars by how much they embody five core values: collegiality, quality, equity, openness, and community. While these developments are promising, it seems unlikely that the journal impact factor will go away anytime soon.

What do you think about the use of impact factors to measure academic performance? Let us know in the comments.

Can Podcasts Save the Academy?

Events, ,

Photo by Alphacolor 13 on Unsplash.
 

The following is a guest post by English and Communication Librarian Kristina De Voe.

Amid the amid the volume of news and information in today’s 24-hour news cycle, how can scholars, researchers, and academic leaders share their knowledge and expertise outside the classroom, laboratory, or institution? More importantly, how can they make that message relevant for a wider public audience?

On Tuesday, February 27, the Libraries hosted a panel of local experts who discussed podcasting as a viable way for scholars, researchers, and academic leaders to amplify and share their work with a wider audience.

The panel included Tom McAllister and Mike Ingram, both Associate Professors of Instruction in the English Department at Temple University and Hosts of Book Fight! podcast; Matt Wray, Associate Professor of Sociology at Temple University; and, Thea Chaloner, Associate Producer, Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Each panelist brought unique perspectives regarding starting, producing, promoting, and participating in podcasts.

With extensive experience in public radio, Thea Chaloner initiated the conversation by highlighting the popularity of podcasts: over 66 million people are listening to podcasts monthly. With over 250,000 podcasts out there, how does one start a (good) podcast, rising above the noise? Chaloner discussed two kinds of podcasts: the two-way (e.g. a relaxed interview or conversation between hosts and guests) and storytelling (e.g. RadioLab, This American Life), pointing out that the two-way is often logistically easier to create as the storytelling podcast usually incorporates background music, sound effects, and additional editing which can be time consuming.

Chaloner indicated that regardless of type, a good podcast needs thematic and narrative structure. Clear connections between episodes help as well as engaging questions that permit guests to paint a picture with words, inviting listeners to lean in to the story as they are washing dishes, commuting to work, or doing something else. The podcast can be niche in scope, too — this can, in fact, help to determine a loyal audience. Chaloner mentioned three free tools to help podcast creators: GarageBand and/or audacity for editing as well as Freesound for accompanying sound effects.

Mike Ingram and Tom McAllister then discussed their motives and considerations for starting their own podcast, Book Fight!. As both are creative writers, they desired to create the kind of program that they would want to listen to — something relaxed with writers bantering about books. While there was a learning curve for them early on, and a need to upgrade their equipment for better sound quality, Mike and Tom eventually found their groove, incorporating various themes (e.g. “Winter of Wayback”) and segments into each 50-70 minute episode.

Both Mike and Tom recognized the value of audience feedback along with building and interacting with their audience via outside channels like Twitter. They have also experimented with different funding models, including small crowdfunding campaigns and, more recently, using Patreon which lets listeners become members and give regular monthly contributions. Contributors then receive a bonus episode each month.

The final panelist, Matt Wray, offered strategies for academics who are podcast guests. Likening the experience to giving interviews to journalists and radio show hosts, Wray noted, however, that the best feature of podcasts is the conversational back and forth between host and guest, highlighting the seeming intimacy with listeners as they’re literally in their audience’s heads.

Wray stressed the importance of doing homework prior to being a guest on a podcast. He noted that, when contacted, potential guests should ask the producer and/or host what role they’re looking for in a guest (e.g. someone to explain, to persuade, to observe, etc.). Based on this information, the guest can let the producer and/or host know what they are comfortable sharing. Further, the guest should also ask for a list of topics and/or questions ahead of time to prepare, in addition to listening to earlier episodes of the podcast so as to get a feel for the program. Prior to the recording of the podcast, the guest should review relevant research — including their own — to avoid embarrassment and ensure that they can summarize key findings succinctly. Wray emphasized the importance of explaining concepts and ideas as if chatting with a neighbor or the dentist. He recommended that academics stick to 1-3 talking points, avoid jargon, and keep all responses short and to the point.

Thanks to everyone who came out to this informative program!

Using Open Textbooks in the Classroom: An Interview with Graham Dobereiner

Textbook Affordability Project, , ,

This week is Open Education Week, a yearly celebration designed to raise awareness about open educational resources. Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are free to read and reuse. Examples of OER include videos, problem sets, slides, and textbooks. At Temple, faculty across the schools and colleges are using OER in their classes. Faculty often assign OER in order to make their course more affordable for students–by choosing an open textbook instead of a commercial textbook, for example, faculty can potentially save students hundreds of dollars a semester. Another benefit for faculty is it that OER are openly licensed, which means that faculty can remix and build upon the content, customizing the material to meet the needs of their particular class.

One Temple faculty member who is experimenting with using an open textbook in his classes is Assistant Professor of Chemistry Graham Dobereiner. Dr. Dobereiner teaches General Chemistry, a series of two semester-long courses for science majors, pre-professional students, and others in science related fields. In General Chemistry, students have a choice between using two different textbooks: Chemistry, an open textbook published by OpenStax and available for free online, or Principles of Chemistry, a traditional textbook published by Pearson. Dr. Dobereiner agreed to answer a few of our questions about how this works:

You recently surveyed your students to find out their attitudes towards and use of both the OpenStax textbook and the Pearson textbook. What did you find?

Among the 172 students that responded to the survey, course performance was independent of the choice of book. Use of a textbook – any textbook – correlates with performance in the course. Students who reported that they completed all readings received higher grades, regardless of textbook used.

Attitudes towards the open textbook (OpenStax) were mixed. Adoption rates were high: 75% of respondents used OpenStax at some point during the semester and 59% only used OpenStax. But when asked to give advice to students in next year’s class, 40% recommended OpenStax, 24% Principles of Chemistry, and 28% both textbooks.

Were you surprised by these results?

Yes, some results were surprising. We often hear students are hesitant to purchase a traditional textbook, particularly if it isn’t required for a course. But 30% of survey respondents read from the traditional textbook at some point during the semester. 17% of the respondents only read from the traditional textbook, and in general they showed greater satisfaction with their textbook choice – even though their course performance matched the rest of the class.

Other results were sobering. Only 14% of respondents completed all of the assigned readings, and only 10% of OpenStax readers did so.

Will the results of the survey have any impact on how you teach the course next year?

Yes, it may. I want to look at strategies to boost student textbook use. The course syllabus may need to be rearranged; it is currently organized around the traditional textbook, and so the assigned OpenStax readings were out of order, which may have reduced student textbook use.

What would you tell other faculty who are considering using an open textbook?

Free, open textbooks have their advantages, but they are not a panacea. I would encourage faculty to critically evaluate an open textbook just as they would any traditional text.

Thank you Dr. Dobereiner!

Are you interested in learning more about using open textbooks in the classroom? Sign up for one of our upcoming workshops: March 15, 12:00-1:00 pm and March 21, 3:30-4:30. The first 10 instructors who register and write a brief review of an open textbook that is accepted for publication by the Open Textbook Library will receive a $200 stipend.

The Importance of Fair Use and Standardized Rights Statements for Digital Cultural Heritage

Uncategorized, ,

In honor of Fair Use Week 2018, the following is a guest post from Digital Projects and Services Librarian Rachel Appel and Bibliographic Assistant III for Digital Projects Gabriel Galson. At the Libraries, Appel and Galson work on the PA Digital project. PA Digital is a statewide partnership that collects materials from Pennsylvania cultural heritage organizations and transmits them to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The DPLA aggregates digital collections (images, photographs, text, maps, audio and video) shared by libraries and archives’ special collections all across the United States.

Fair use is a US legal doctrine that allows limited reuse of copyrighted materials. It is an invitation to the sort of intellectual/artistic exchange that keeps our culture vibrant, and a counterbalance against the the US’s increasingly strict copyright laws. Sampling, artistic appropriation, creative or educational quotation, parody, and text mining/textual analysis are all activities that flourish under fair use’s protection, shielded –to a degree at least– from the threat of litigation. Likewise, libraries, archives and museums around the country have been able to digitize their archival objects and make them freely accessible online because of the fair use doctrine. Many digital collections that are available through PA Digital and the Digital Public Library of America, for example, are in copyright; digitizing and making them publicly discoverable through a database platform is considered fair use. However, it is important to communicate clearly to users, such as scholars and researchers, that such works remain in copyright and have use restrictions and limitations. Fair use is a key concept that enables both digitization and reuse of digital facsimiles and is the rationale for making cultural heritage collections available online, in local repositories as well as the DPLA.

That’s where RightsStatements.org comes in. The site provides 12 normalized, standardized statements that cultural heritage institutions can use to describe the copyright status of online cultural heritage materials. A joint global project of Digital Public Library of America, Europeana, New York Public Library, University of Michigan, and other institutions, Rightsstatements.org went live in 2016. It creates three categories of statements (with four statements in each) to be used with cultural heritage materials, including some terms for use in the EU. The goal is to provide cultural heritage institutions with simple and standardized terms to summarize the copyright status of works in their collection and how those works may be used.

There are three overall categories with four specific rights statements within each: In Copyright, No Copyright, and Other. Rights Statements and Licenses are critical for digitization and data reuse. A normalized rights statement or Creative Commons license makes it so much easier for a member of the public to understand how that item can be used. The Digital Public Library of America has incorporated RightsStatements.org statements into their portal to function as a facet for searching because they are all machine readable and normalized. A similar metaphor is shopping through an online retailer – when we buy from online retailers what do we look for? Ideally, items with Free Shipping. This makes it easy for scholars to look for works that can be used in their publications and research.

Example DPLA record from Penn State University with NoC-US statement

 

Beyond traditional scholarship, normalized rights statements can also encourage creative reuse of works if people know what they can and can’t do. For example, DPLA’s annual GIF IT UP campaign, where users make images into gifs, and the #ColorOurCollections nationwide promotion by galleries, libraries, archives and museums, where end users are encouraged to reuse digital objects as coloring pages.

Gif made by Michael Carroll for GIF IT UP 2017. Drawing (Two Birds on Flowers) from the Free Library of Philadelphia.

 

Rightsstatements.org is still getting off the ground, but it promises to make the process of identifying usable works far simpler and less time-consuming for researchers, scholars, and students. Take a look at the Europeana aggregator’s eight million plus ‘free reuse’ results for an example of what’s possible via machine-readable statements. Go forth and reuse!

More resources:

Ballinger, Linda, et al. “Providing Quality Rights Metadata for Digital Collections Through RightsStatements.org.” Pennsylvania Libraries: Research & Practice, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017, pp. 144–158. http://palrap.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/palrap/article/view/157

Fair Use Checklist: http://copyright.psu.edu/checklist/

RightsStatement.org Resources: http://rightsstatements.org/en/

PA Digital webinars:

Menand, Louis. (2014). Crooner in Rights Spat. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/crooner-rights-spat

Making Peer Review More Open

Publishing, ,

“Marginalia” by Open Library is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Traditional peer review relies on anonymous reviewers to thoughtfully assess and critique an author’s work. The idea is that blind review makes the evaluation process more fair and impartial–but many scholars have questioned whether this is always the case.

Open review has the potential to make scholarship more transparent and more collaborative. It also makes it easier for researchers to get credit for the work they do reviewing the scholarship of their peers. Publishers in both the sciences and the humanities and social sciences have been experimenting with open review for almost two decades now, but it is only recently that open review seems to have reached a tipping point. So what exactly is open review, and what does it entail?

There are two main types of open review: named review and crowd-sourced review. With named review, the names of the peer reviewers as well as their reports are published online alongside the scholarship in question, making them available for anyone to read. A number of open access journal publishers use named review, including BioMed Central, Frontiers, F1000, and eLife. The open access journal Nature Communications allows authors to choose whether or not they want open review. About 60% of them do so. Elsevier recently started allowing peer-review reports to be published alongside articles for a few of its journals. However, peer reviewers do not have to attach their names to reports (and a little less than half do so). Giving reviewers the choice to remain anonymous if they wish, while making the reports open, can be one way to address one of the main critiques of open review: that it will cause scholars to be less candid. Early career faculty might be particularly sensitive to this issue.

With crowd-sourced review, a draft of the article or book is made available online for the public to comment on before it is officially published. This allows for the authors to get feedback from a greater variety of individuals, including people who might never have been approached to be a peer reviewer. One of the first monographs to go through this type of review was Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence (NYU Press, 2010). MediaCommons Press, which hosted this draft of Fitzpatrick’s book, used CommentPress, a WordPress plugin, to facilitate feedback from interested readers. Most recently, Matthew J. Salganik used crowd-sourced review for his book, Bit By Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2017). Salganik created the Open Review Toolkit (which uses the annotation tool hypothes.is) in order to help other scholars do the same thing. Crowd-sourced review can occur before traditional peer review, or concurrently. One of the challenges associated with this type of review is letting the world know that the manuscript is online and ready to be commented on. It may require that the author take a more active role in the review process than they are used to. Another challenge is directing readers to leave the type of substantial comments that would be most useful to the author.

In addition to these more formal types of open review, which are usually facilitated by publishers, researchers are also taking it upon themselves to use the web in different ways to solicit feedback on their work. More and more scholars, particularly in the sciences, are posting preprints. Some humanities scholars are even sharing drafts of their work in public Google docs and enabling commenting.

What do you think of open review? Would you be willing to make your peer-review reports public?

Faculty Support of Open Access: An Interview with David Sarwer

Uncategorized, , ,

No matter what discipline you are in, it is hard to ignore the major shift from traditional journal publishing to open access publishing. In honor of Open Access Week 2017, we are celebrating faculty at Temple University who support open scholarship in a variety of ways.

One of these faculty members is David Sarwer, the Associate Dean for Research, and Director of the Center for Obesity Research and Education at the College of Public Health. Sarwer is also the Editor-in-Chief of an open access journal, Obesity Science & Practice. He sat down with Biomedical & Research Services Librarian (Ginsburg Health Sciences Library) Stephanie Roth to discuss his experiences as the editor of a new open access journal.

Please tell us more about Obesity Science & Practice. How did you become involved as the Editor-in-Chief?

Obesity Science & Practice is a Wiley journal. They publish four other journals in the area of obesity and were quick to recognize that there was an increasing number of high quality papers not making the cut in those journals. When they approached me about serving as the inaugural Editor-in-Chief, I was still skeptical about publishing in open access journals. The more the Wiley team taught me about their approach, I came to believe that open access publishing was likely to play a significant role in the future of academic publishing.

What gave you confidence to believe in open access?

The early success of the journal has given all of us a great deal of confidence. We have quickly moved to publishing four issues a year. We now receive a steady stream of articles that are either direct submissions to the journal or are referred to us by other Wiley obesity journals. Many of the papers published in the journal have come from internationally recognized authorities in the field of obesity. All of these developments give me a great deal of confidence about the future of the journal and open access publishing more generally.

When you first heard about open access publishing what were your immediate thoughts?

Like everyone else, I was familiar with the old school publishing model. So, I was hesitant and skeptical. The Wiley team did a great job to make me comfortable that open access represented the path to the future.

Did you ever publish to an open access journal prior to becoming the editor of one?

No, but I wouldn’t hesitate to publish in a high quality, reputable open access journal today.

Now as an editor, what are your thoughts about open access publishing?

I am very impressed with open access compared to traditional publishing and especially by our journal. The speed at which we are able to process papers and push them out to our readers is a great strength. We have published a number of high quality, impactful papers in the field. Several of them have received mass media coverage as well, which is an important, yet often overlooked aspect of academic productivity.

What has been your experience with OA journals vs. traditional publishing?

I haven’t noticed much of a difference. Many non open access journals are now putting their papers online. That shows the potential growth and acceptability of open access in the future.

What has contributed to more authors embracing your journal?

It has helped that Wiley is well recognized for their journals. That has helped to increase our journal’s credibility. Wiley has also done a good job identifying high quality submissions that were rejected from one of their four other major obesity journals. When a paper is referred to us from one of those journals, we often use the previous reviews to inform the editorial process and decision making. This has allowed us to move papers through the review process quickly.

What are your future plans for the journal?

I would like to stay on our current path of success. We recently moved to publishing four issues a year and continue to receive a steady stream of papers. I would like to see the first impact factor be appropriately robust and to have it grow over time.

Do you provide tools for graduate students or residents to publish in your journal?

At the journal level, we aren’t doing anything specific for graduate students. We do receive a fair amount of submissions from those who may be working on their first papers and launching their own independent careers and that is also encouraging.

What tips would you give to researchers looking to publish in an OA journal?

I would like to encourage them to make sure they don’t discount them. Be thoughtful. Make sure the journal is a legitimate outlet, and not one associated with predatory publishing. Researchers should see open access as an important and central part of academic publishing in the future.

What Do Acquisitions Editors Do?

Temple University Press,

Photograph courtesy of Nikki Miller.

The following is a guest post from Sara Cohen, Editor at Temple University Press.

Confession: when I interviewed for my first job as an acquisitions assistant six years ago, I had no idea what acquisitions editors do—I just knew I wanted to work in scholarly publishing and that a job as an editorial assistant would be my entrée into that world. I was fortunate enough to get a job offer despite my ignorance, likely based on my chops as a reader, writer, and researcher, honed in an English PhD program.

Since then, I’ve learned a lot about what acquisitions editors do and who they are.

Acquisitions editors are your first point of contact at a press. We’re the folks who read book proposals and decide whether to accept or reject them.

Acquisitions editors are the bespectacled people hanging around the book exhibit areas of conferences. We have specific list areas for which we’re responsible, and we attend conferences that are related to those areas. Having specific list areas allows us to focus our energies on certain kinds of projects (reading particular journals and attending particular conferences). We’re not experts in our acquisitions areas, but we have a strong sense of who’s who in them and what kinds of work is being done.

In terms of comparisons to other jobs, I think of our job as part talent scout, part project manager, part midwife.

We search for exciting new projects—we read journal articles and conference programs, we attend conferences, visit campuses, make lots of phone calls and send lots of email—and court the authors working on them.

We manage the peer review process—looking for readers and sending manuscripts out to them—and work with authors to develop revision plans based on the readers’ reports. We also make sure that projects arrive [relatively] on time, and then we help move them through our production and marketing processes.

Perhaps the most satisfying part of our job is supporting authors while their books are being written, helping them bring a good book into the world. This part of the job requires a fair amount of emotional labor, particularly in the maintenance of strong author/editor relationships.

As with any relationship, the author/editor relationship works best when it’s based on mutual trust and open communication. I expect my authors to be open with me about any questions they have or any challenges they’re facing; my authors expect me to be open with them about where their manuscript is in the review and production processes. My authors also expect me to give honest, constructive criticism—and I expect them to take it gracefully. My favorite authors are those who take their work seriously, but who don’t take themselves too seriously.

Basically, as I recently told my two-year-old son, my job is to help people write their books, and I feel incredibly lucky to have such a fun and intellectually challenging job.