open access

As a professional sociologist, I maintain membership in several listservs and social networking site groups centered around my areas of study. Every now and then, someone will post a request for a particular academic article to which they do not have access at their home university. Quickly, another member of the group provides the article, and we all go about our business.

Not having access to one article, for a connected professional, is no big deal. But imagine if that same professional never had access to academic articles unless they were willing to pay—exorbitantly—to get beyond publishers’ paywalls. Were that the case, it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for that professional to conduct research. more...

So, Elsevier pulled kind of a jerk move. And probably a move that’s not great for PR.

As it turns out, publishing giant Elsevier is taking down copyrighted papers from Academia.edu. Here’s a bit of background. For-profit publishing companies (like Elsevier, Sage, Taylor & Francis etc.) make authors sign a copyright agreement when they publish in the journals run by these companies. This gives distribution rights to the publisher, and takes them away from the author. However, many authors (like myself) sign said agreement, and then immediately post content on Academia.edu, ResearchGate, or other academic-based social networking sites.

Technically, posting our work on these sites is illegal. However, the publishers’ policies, which create false scarcity, exploit intellectual labor, and restrict knowledge sharing, are in a word, preposterous. Here’s why: more...

I’m in the midsts of one of those unavoidable grad student extended crises this month so I I thought writing something this week was going to be out of the question. But last Monday I had an interaction with a PDF that I really need to tell someone about. Trust me, its more interesting than it sounds.

Lately, I’ve been taking advantage of my institution’s (appropriately ancient-sounding) ILLiad Inter-Library Loan System. Usually, if I can’t find journal article I need, I just ask a fellow grad student friend over GChat or Facebook to get me the article from their library. If I can’t find anyone (or I’ve asked them too many times) I resort to ILLiad. Getting a book from ILLiad means waiting about 24 hours for an undergrad on work study to copy and paste a DOI and send me the article under another institution’s journal subscription. It is the ultimate exercise in artificial scarcity: A teenager in a library basement, fueled on Moe’s burritos and motivated by the threat of crushing student debt, orchestrates the transfer of a few ones and zeroes in such a way that my desire for the article can be monetized to the benefit of a publishing company’s CEO and a couple of computer system designers. The physical scarcity of a paper journal is transmuted into a new kind of scarcity: the scarcity of student labor and my own dedication to reading this article that I saw in someone else’s bibliography. more...

As someone working out of a Science and Technology Studies (STS) Department, I was proud to see that Dr. Chris Kelty (Author of Two Bits) had just won a major battle for open access. Kelty is an excellent example of the kind of scholar that reflexively applies the findings of his scholarship to the everyday concerns of his job. As an Associate Professor of Information Studies at UCLA, he studies open source communities and concepts of responsibility in scientific research. As the chair of the UC University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC), he just spearheaded one of the largest windfalls for open access publishing.

On July 24, 2013 the University of California Senate approved a state-wide Open Access Policy that will, according to the press release, make all “future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC… available to the public at no charge.”  This is a huge step forward for the Open Access movement because, as the press release goes on to say,  more...

In this post I attempt to tackle a complex but increasingly important question: Should writers cite blog posts in formal academic writing (i.e. journal articles and books)? Unfortunately, rather than actually tackle this question, I find myself running sporadically around it. At best, I bump into the question a few times, but never come close to pinning down an answer.

To begin with full disclosure: I cite blog posts in my own formal academic writing. But not just any blog posts. I am highly discriminate in what I cite, but my discriminations are not of the cleanly methodical type which can be written, shared, and handed out as even a suggested guide.  Mostly, I cite Cyborgology and a select few blogs that I know really really well. I have done so in my last three formally published works (two of which are Encyclopedia entries), and successfully suggested blog posts to others via peer-review. When pressed for a rationale (as I have been in conversations with colleagues), I less-than-confidently ramble something like Well I mean, I know these bloggers to be good theorists, and I find their work useful for my own. Some of their work is published only in blog form, and I need those ideas to build my argument. I also don’t want to ignore something good that I know is out there. But I mean, I know there are other good things out there that I don’t know about, or don’t know enough to trust. And I know I’ve written bad ideas on Cyborgology, or ideas that I further developed later, so I guess quality is not a sure thing, but reviewers and editors have accepted it so…[insert sheepish grin].   more...

This is part of a series of posts highlighting the Theorizing the Web conference, April 14th, 2012 at the University of Maryland (inside the D.C. beltway). See the conference website for information as well as event registration.

As Theorizing the Web 2012 approaches, I think it’s worthwhile to consider what the conference itself really means. I mean, yes, clearly it means awesome panels and a fabulous keynote and free pizza, as well as a chance for us to hang out with cool people who we really like. But I think TtW, in both its current incarnation and in the ideals that originally drove its creation, says some important things about conferences as spaces for the production and examination of knowledge.

PJ Rey and Nathan Jurgenson, our intrepid chairs, originally characterized Theorizing the Web as “the conference that we would all ideally want to attend”; clearly, then, there are some things about the conferences that we often find ourselves attending that we wanted to avoid. Last year David Banks highlighted some of these points in his piece on TtW2011’s reflexive nature;

Personally, I am tired of visiting a corporate hotel, adding another tote bag to my collection, and rushing from tablecloth-clad conference rooms to bad catered dinners, so I can make it to a plenary talk about the politics of the discipline. That needs to be over, or academia will stagnate in a pool of its own hypocrisy. Its time for the academic conference to take a reflexive turn. We need to practice what we preach.

What I see driving TtW is more than just putting together a conference that’s fun for all of us. It’s about opening up spaces for the production of knowledge. It’s about making all of this stuff more accessible by being more reflexive about both design and content.

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In a post titled “Why Journals are the Dinosaurs of Academia,” I recently considered whether traditional journals may, increasingly, be serving to hinder the communication of ideas, rather than optimally facilitating such exchanges.  I argued two main points:  1.)  We need to get beyond the notion that the mere fact that journals is printed makes it somehow more legitimate than digital-only journals.  2.) In the age of the Internet, conventional articles may no longer be the most efficient way to communicate some ideas (which was the original justification for making journals the centerpiece of disciplinary discourses).

Over the past few days, Twitter has been abuzz with academics discussing another, related issue: Whether disciplinary discourses are better facilitated by non-profit, open-access journals or proprietary, pay-walled journals.  I have archived that discussion below and will follow up with my own thoughts later in the week. more...