The Elephant Roundup (April 2021)

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

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

• Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors (2021). Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic 

  • “This document offers explicit guidance on anti-racist professional practices in the form of a heuristic for editors, reviewers, and authors involved in academic reviewing. [...] This is a living document; we invite active feedback, revision, and work to keep it up-to-date to account for additional scenarios and perspectives. ”

• Lindsay McKenzie, “Library Leaders Lack Confidence in Diversity Strategies,” Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/04/14/academic-library-leaders-concerned-about-diversity-equity-inclusion.

  • “More academic library leaders are affirming their desire to implement antiracist policies in the wake of national racial justice movements, the survey [of academic library leaders from the nonprofit research and strategy group Ithaka S+R] found. But most are still concerned their personnel and collections strategies may not adequately support these objectives. Many library leaders also failed to recognize how COVID-19 budget cuts likely disproportionately impacted employees of color. The survey was conducted in the fall of 2020 and includes responses from 638 library directors at four-year institutions.”

Labor

• Duke University Press Workers Union, “Staff of Duke University Press Organizes to Form a Union,” March 29, 2021, https://www.dupworkersunion.org/news/staff-of-duke-university-press-organizes-to-form-a-union

  • “By uniting together, they want to ensure that they gain an equitable working environment that mirrors the themes of equity, justice, and inclusion that are central to the books and journals the press publishes.”

    • Full press release: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/605911c8bf842f65ffc97724/t/6061b933f691fa630825ace2/1617017139964/DUPWU-PressRelease-20210329.pdf)

• Hamilton Nolan, “At a Major Education Company, Freelancers Must Now Pay a Fee In Order to Get Paid,” In These Times, March 24, 2021, https://inthesetimes.com/article/mcgraw-hill-freelance-fee-wage-theft?fbclid=IwAR0tmb3jBhDqB4PrTxxeT0wf_BdPTXuzQ4Joh8fnIOE0Q66pz9SJPZER1gQ

  • “McGraw Hill (MH) is a multibillion-dollar educational publishing company, with thousands of employees and offices around the world. Beginning in October of last year, the company instituted a new policy for all of its freelancers and independent contractors — they are now required to pay a fee of 2.2% every time they file an invoice through the company’s invoicing system, called Fieldglass. (There is no other system, meaning the fee is mandatory.) … In effect, the company has imposed an across-the-board wage cut on all of its freelancers and contractors, without having to come right out and say it.”

Digital Humanities

• "Interrupted and Restricted: Digital Humanities and Ethics in a Time of Crisis" (Online Panel Discussion), Aga Khan Library, May 14, 2021, 16:30-18:30 London Time, reposted on H-Histbibl, https://networks.h-net.org/node/14775/discussions/7587542/panel-discussion-interrupted-and-restricted-digital-humanities.

  • “Interrupted and restricted, research and resulting scholarship has taken a decided turn to the digital to provide materials in the age of COVID-19. In academia, we have seen requests for digital materials at an unprecedented rate. In turn, we have seen an overwhelming response from libraries, museums, publishers, and more to fill the gap, but at what cost? Even in this time, we must stop to consider the ethical implications of digitised data/information, freely open to any and all vis-à-vis sensitivity and safety for those involved. Is the new model good enough to ensure an understanding of ethics and data stewardship in this swiftly shifting digital landscape?”

• Rick Prelinger, Twitter thread, April 19, 2021, 10:30 PM, https://twitter.com/footage/status/1384333603253878786.

  • “I kind of let this go by, but 2021 is the 20th anniv of our online film archive. This was new (6 years pre-YouTube) & pretty scary to start but thanks to @brewster_kahle and @internetarchive there are now 8500+ films online that have been seen & used 100s of millions of times.”

    • Prelinger Archives: https://archive.org/details/prelinger

Funding Open Access

• Rick Anderson, “Six Questions (with Answers!) about UC’s and Elsevier’s New Transformative Deal,” The Scholarly Kitchen, March 25, 2021, https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/03/25/six-questions-with-answers-about-ucs-and-elseviers-new-transformative-deal/?informz=1

  • “As is so often the case with transformative deals, this one is complex; it’s also somewhat controversial, and the scholarly communication discussion space has been buzzing with questions. The good news is that the UC-Elsevier MOU is publicly available and it answers quite a few of them — while also fully illustrating the complexity of the deal.”

• Rick Anderson, “Feasibility, Sustainability, and the Subscribe-to-Open Model,” The Scholarly Kitchen, April 20, 2021, https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/04/20/feasibility-sustainability-and-the-subscribe-to-open-model/.

  • “S2O is a model whereby a journal shifts from subscription access to OA, but the libraries who were subscribers under the old model continue paying in order to keep the journal financially viable....As is the case with any publishing business model, there are pros and cons to this one...”

Podcasts

• Nan Enstad and Lisa Levenstein, “Episode 7: Why University Presses Matter,” Collegeland podcast, https://www.collegelandpod.com/episodes/why-university-presses-matter

  • The new podcast Collegeland aims to share stories from campuses around the United States. In this episode, hosts Nan Enstad (UW Madison) and Lisa Levenstein (UNC Greensboro), both members of university press editorial boards, interview John Sherer, director of University of North Carolina Press.

Higher Education

• Colleen Flaherty, “Hiring Booms: Defying trends away from tenure, Ohio State and Syracuse will add more than 400 new tenure-track faculty members in the coming years,” Inside Higher Ed, March 24, 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/03/24/defying-trends-ohio-state-and-syracuse-will-hire-many-new-tenure-track-faculty

  • “Such investments in the faculty demonstrate something about each institution’s -- and each institutional leader’s -- values. But certain conditions at both Syracuse and Ohio State make these investments viable, especially at this time. In each case, hiring plans are linked to the university’s research aspirations and diversity goals. Both Syracuse and Ohio State were also relatively well positioned financially going into the pandemic.”

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