The Elephant Roundup (January 2023)

A monthly newsletter from Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications.

Scholarly Communications

Jill O’Neill, Books Are For Use and What That Means, Scholarly Kitchen (blog), December 6, 2022.

• How has the relationship between scholars and print publishing changed? Jill O’Neill looks at Bibles, cover images, and more.

Christian Pizarro Winting and Bethany Wasik, Building Professional Support Networks across Publishing Career, AUPresses Digital Digest, January 9, 2023

• An overview of a collaboration lab that invited members of the Association of University Presses to discuss challenges, strategies, and opportunities in building professional networks.

Phill Jones, Unnecessary Research Bureaucracy is Killing Academic Productivity, But it IS Fixable, Scholarly Kitchen (blog), December 5, 2022.

• MoreBrains “estimated that researchers and administrators waste around 55,000 person days a year just on rekeying information about publications, grants, and projects into university systems.” Could reducing administrative bloat and using persistent identifiers help address the issue?

Mike Rossner, Guest Post — Publishers Should Be Transparent About the Capabilities and Limitations of Software They Use to Detect Image Manipulation or Duplication, Scholarly Kitchen (blog), January 10, 2023.

• STM Integrity Hub is testing its software, which includes algorithmic screening. Here’s the argument for why the data gathered while testing should be made transparent.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Simon Holt, Erin Osborne-Martin, Miguel Ramos, Matthew Salter, Karen Stoll Farrell, Guest Post — 10 Quick Wins to Make Your Organization More Disability Inclusive, Scholarly Kitchen (blog), December 12, 2022.

• “[M]any of the activities that make the most impactful difference are small-scale and low-cost, involve behaviors rather than huge infrastructure shifts, and are changes that organizations of any size can implement,” the authors state about increasing disability inclusiveness.

Jonathan Zimmerman, Affirmative Action and Anti–Asian American Bias, Inside Higher Ed, December 12, 2022.

• Supporters of affirmative action must grapple with the anti-Asian American bias that results, writes Zimmerman, himself a proponent of affirmative action.

Oyin Adedoyin, Penn State’s Diversity Dilemma, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 22, 2022.

• After months of a “listening tour,” Neeli Bendapudi, the new president of Penn State, determined the stop her predecessor’s plans for a Center for Racial Justice, arguing that the $3.5M allotted toward it did not meet the university’s most urgent needs.

Women in the Academy

Reproduction History Syllabus, Nursing Clio.

• Following the Dobbs decision, the team at Nursing Clio published this syllabus to encourage more inclusive and comprehensive syllabi. They are still accepting suggestions for works that should be added.

Tia Sherèe Gaynor, A Love Letter to Black Women in the Academy, Inside Higher Ed, December 16, 2022.

• “Know that while you may be the only one in your program or school, or on your campus, you are not alone.”

Sylvia Goodman, How Gender Bias Worsened the Peer Review Crisis, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 15, 2022.

• “At a time when journal editors across fields and publishing houses say finding peer reviewers is harder than ever, why aren’t more tapping into the pool of female professors and researchers?” Goodman takes a look.

Sylvia Goodman, Are Women Held to a Higher Standard in Publishing? Chronicle of Higher Education, December 30, 2022.

• Papers by women take, on average, months longer to work their way through the peer review process. 

Liam Knox, Reviving the College Dreams of Afghan Women, Inside Higher Ed, January 24, 2023.

• Following the Taliban’s move to ban women from entering higher education, institutions in the U.S. are consider what they can do to bring women into the academy.

Johanna Alonso, Abortions on Campus, Inside Higher Ed, January 24, 2023.

• As red states roll back abortion access, UC schools are required to provide medication abortions. Other blue states may follow.

Open Access

Roy Kaufman, Some Observations from Charleston (Open Access Edition), Scholarly Kitchen (blog), December 8, 2022.

• Kaufman provides a recap of how discussions at the Charleston Hub addressed aspects of the U.S. federal government’s Nelson memo.

HathiTrust, December 2022 Newsletter, HathiTrust, December 16, 2022.

• What can scholars expect to see enter the open domain in 2023? Take a look!

John V. L. Nguyen and Maryam Tabrizian, It’s time for Canada to adopt open access for taxpayer-funded research too, University Affairs/Affaires universitaires, December 16, 2022.

• Looking to what’s happening below Canada’s southern border, two Canadian scholars argue for their government to issue a policy similar to the Nelson memo.

Rick Anderson, Return of the Big Deal: Developments in Texas and India, Scholarly Kitchen (blog), January 4, 2023.

• Although great strides have been made to expand OA offerings, Anderson discusses, “ several recent developments that are nudging the scholarly communication ecosystem in the opposite direction and therefore complicate that future outlook.”

Paula Clemente Vega, OLH features in a European Commission report on business models for sustainable non-for-profit OA publishing, Open Library of Humanities, November 18, 2022. H/T H-HistBibl

• The Open Library of Humanities was featured in a report by the European Commission on open access. Learn more about the report and library. 

Roy Kaufman, GitHub is Sued, and We May Learn Something About Creative Commons Licensing, Scholarly Kitchen (blog), January 5, 2023.

• Copilot, a commercial product made by GitHub and Open AI, used existing open access material that required attribution. Now GitHub is being sued. Kaufman lays out the issue.

Munyaradzi Makoni and Wagdy Sawahel, Open access publishing deal for low-, middle-income countries, University World News Africa Edition, January 19, 2022.

• Academics based in 70 low- and middle-income countries will be able to post in Gold Open Access journals by Nature. While the move has been praised, some have asked what this will mean for the development of scholarly publishing in those 70 countries.

Articial Intelligence and Scholarly Communications

Todd A. Carpenter, Thoughts on AI’s Impact on Scholarly Communications? An Interview with ChatGPT, Scholarly Kitchen (blog), January 11, 2023.

• Given the emerging anxieties surrounding ChatGPT, Carpenter engages the bot in a conversation and shares the transcript.

Phil Davis, Did ChatGPT Just Lie To Me? Scholarly Kitchen (blog), January 13, 2023.

• Davis poses controversial questions to the bot and fact checks the answers he receives.

Anita de Waard, Guest Post – AI and Scholarly Publishing: A View from Three Experts, Scholarly Kitchen (blog), January 18, 2023.

• What exactly is AI and how might it change (or not change) scholarly publishing?

Kalley Huang, Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach, New York Times, January 16, 2023.

• One instructor found an essay too good to be true, and the student confessed to using ChatGPT. The instructor is rethinking future courses, including how to integrate ChatGPT into the classroom.

Publishing and the Courts

Michael Cader, Manuscript Thief Bernardini Pleads Guilty to One Count of Wire Fraud, Publishers Weekly, January 8, 2023.

• After engaging in phishing schemes for manuscripts, Filippo Bernardini plead guilty and was ordered to pay $88,000 in restitutions.

Academic Labor

Katherine Mangan, After Three and a Half Weeks, New School Strike Ends With Tentative Agreement, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 11, 2022.

• After The New School announced that it would stop paying health care contributions for striking workers, a deal was reached, and union leadership encouraged members to vote in favor of the contract.

Laura J. Mitchell, After the Strike, Inside Higher Ed, January 3, 2022.

• While striking grad students made important gains, Mitchell points out the systemic issues that remain.

ICYMI on the Elephant

• Courtney Pierre Joseph, Matthew Miller, and Ryan Huey, How Do Historians and Journalists Write History? A Response to the NYT on Haiti. December 7, 2022.
• Sarah McKee and Allison Levy, Multimodal Digital Monographs: An Interview with Allison Levy and Sarah McKee, December 14, 2022.
• Feeding the Elephant Editorial Team, 2022: The Elephant in Review, December 21, 2022.
• Gaila Sims, Engaging the Past: Curating “A Monumental Weight” at the Fredericksburg Area Museum, January 18, 2022.

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