Little Reviews

On “The Transition to Open Access: The State of the Market, Offsetting Deals, and a Demonstrated Model for Fair Open Access with the Open Library of Humanities,” by Martin Paul Eve, Saskia C.J. de Vries, and Johan Rooryck

On “The Transition to Open Access: The State of the Market, Offsetting Deals, and a Demonstrated Model for Fair Open Access with the Open Library of Humanities,” by Martin Paul Eve, Saskia C.J. de Vries, and Johan Rooryck

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Martin Paul Eve, Saskia C.J. de Vries, and Johan Rooryck explore gold open access practices, especially in the Netherlands. They point out that, worldwide, commercial publishers are still guaranteeing their journal revenue in open access scenarios, either by subscriptions to hybrid journals, article processing charges (APCs), or some combination thereof. The authors then offer a case study alternative to such practices: LingOA, a group of linguistics journals that have agreed to fair open access practices. Eve et al. argue that…

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On “Claims About Benefits of Open Access to Society (Beyond Academia),” by ElHassan ElSabry

On “Claims About Benefits of Open Access to Society (Beyond Academia),” by ElHassan ElSabry

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ElHassan ElSabry studies the language used in open access declarations, policies, and editorials in order to ascertain which main reasons are given in open access advocacy. To do so, he studies a corpus of 164 of these sorts of documents. ElSabry concludes that journal editors are more prone to highlighting the benefits to authors (e.g. citation and professional impact), where governments and funding bodies tend to highlight broader and more abstract benefits to society. Work cited ElSabry, ElHassan. 2017. “Claims…

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On “Making Open Access Work: the “State-of-the-Art” in Providing Open Access to Scholarly Literature,” by Stephen Pinfield

On “Making Open Access Work: the “State-of-the-Art” in Providing Open Access to Scholarly Literature,” by Stephen Pinfield

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Stephen Pinfield offers an up to date review of the state of open access at the time of writing (2015). Using corpus analysis and text visualization, he locates the most frequently discussed topics in the literature on open access, taking a wide angle lens approach to include editorials and reviews alongside articles and monographs. Drawing on this literature review and analysis, Pinfield reinforces the centrality of a few key issues, including Green vs. Gold OA; the increasing prominence of OA…

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On “Institutional Repositories and Academic Social Networks: Competition or Complement?” by Julia A. Lovett et al.

On “Institutional Repositories and Academic Social Networks: Competition or Complement?” by Julia A. Lovett et al.

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Julia A. Lovett, Andrée J. Rathemacher, Diana Boukari, and Corey Lang set out to compare whether faculty members at their institution, the University of Rhode Island, deposit their work more with ResearchGate or with the institution’s own repository. To do so, the authors perform a population study and survey of over 500 faculty members. Lovett et al. found that scholars who are prone to depositing with one system will likely deposit with another. As such, Lovett et al. argue, “librarians…

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On “Final Report, Canadian Scholarly Publishing Working Group”

On “Final Report, Canadian Scholarly Publishing Working Group”

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The Final Report of the Canadian Scholarly Publishing Working Group outlines the current challenges to the Canadian academic publishing system, as well as suggests principles to guide a successful, sustainable system moving forward. These principles include accountability (to the academy), supporting openness and high-quality publishing practices, well-informed authors, dynamic Canadian publishing opportunities, building on strength, and flexibility and adaptability. The report applauds initiatives like the collaboration between Érudit and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network to bring more open access journals…

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On “Creating Digital Knowledge: Library as Open Access Digital Publisher,” by Russell Bailey

On “Creating Digital Knowledge: Library as Open Access Digital Publisher,” by Russell Bailey

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As more and more scholarship becomes digital, the role of libraries and librarians is changing. Russell Bailey comments on the possibilities for university libraries in the digital age. In particular, he argues that there are increasing opportunities for libraries to facilitate or even produce open access digital scholarship. Bailey walks his readers through three examples of digital scholarship projects led by Providence College: a multimedia monograph and two online journals. He concludes that open access digital publishing in higher education…

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On “On the Horizon: Open Education and Systemic Change,” by Stephen Marshall

On “On the Horizon: Open Education and Systemic Change,” by Stephen Marshall

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In “Open Education and Systemic Change,” Stephen Marshall suggests that universities in New Zealand need to undertake a substantial, system-wide change as the “degree education market is essentially in stasis and shows very little evidence of either innovation generating new options for students” (111). Although many people point to open education and Open Educational Resources (OER) as a potential cure for systemic issues, Marshall is not optimistic about this possibility. Namely, he argues that since New Zealand universities are largely…

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On “Imagining a University Press System to Support Scholarship in the Digital Age,” by Clifford Lynch

On “Imagining a University Press System to Support Scholarship in the Digital Age,” by Clifford Lynch

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In this brief article, Clifford Lynch proposes a vision for the future of scholarly communication. He envisions a world where all universities have a university press of their own, not least at all for reasons of publishing their faculty’s more esoteric work. Lynch is adamant that a coordinated system across university presses would be beneficial, as it would streamline processes and be more economically viable than a collection of boutique institutions with idiosyncratic needs. Lynch also makes some proposals for…

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On “Defining the ‘Open’ in Open Content,” by David Wiley

On “Defining the ‘Open’ in Open Content,” by David Wiley

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In this short document, David Wiley provides his opinion of what “open” means, especially in the context of open content and open educational resources (OER). For Wiley, open content must engage in what he calls the “5R activities” (n.p.): retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. He argues for the usage of less restrictive licenses, and notably contests the value of using Creative Commons licenses like Share Alike (SA) or Non-Commercial (NC). Further, Wiley promotes the ALMS Framework for making technical…

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On “Creating an Intellectual Commons through Open Access,” by Peter Suber

On “Creating an Intellectual Commons through Open Access,” by Peter Suber

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Peter Suber is a well-known open access advocate as well as the Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in the Harvard Library. In “Creating an Intellectual Commons through Open Access” Suber takes a measured approach at detailing the OA landscape, and of likening it to a commons. Suber details the difference between royalty-free and royalty-producing content, and suggests some options for convincing those who make royalties off of their academic work to consider switching to an open access…

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