Publisher Lives
Angela Davis and Hilton Als, Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast, 48:00, February 2, 2022.
“The activist and author Angela Davis and the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and curator Hilton Als in conversation about one of their favorite subjects and dearest friends: Toni Morrison. Early on in her career, Morrison worked as a kind of activist editor at Random House, where she helped change the landscape of publishing—including her effort to bring Davis’s landmark political autobiography to the public in 1974.”
Avi Staiman, Catherine Cocks of "Feeding the Elephant" on Scholarly Communications, New Books Network Podcast, 46:47, February 10, 2022.
“Hear from Catherine Cocks, assistant director and editor-in-chief at Michigan State University Press talk about her attempt to replicate the success of the Scholarly Kitchen blog in the humanities with the 'Feeding the Elephant' forum, her work to make university publishers more accessible to authors through ASK UP and publishing on the Great Lakes at Michigan State!”
Libraries
Infopeople Library Learning, We Are NOT Okay: Library Worker Trauma Before and During COVID-19 and What Happens Next, February 8, 2022: Youtube livestream recording; List of resources from the webinar.
“The emotional investment that many library workers have in the profession and the community expectations regarding the library’s pandemic response have left many library workers experiencing trauma with very few places to turn for support. This perfect storm of circumstances has made it clear: library staff are at a crisis point. This webinar for ALL library workers — frontline staff, managers, and library directors — will serve as a convening to discuss the impact trauma has on library staff, work toward addressing the necessary systemic change and need for a cultural shift, and explore potential individual, organizational, and industry response strategies.”
Online Conferences
Rebeca Trager, When scientific conferences went online, diversity and inclusion soared, Chemistry World, January 27, 2022.
“New data show that female attendance at virtual science and engineering meetings grew by as much as 253%, and gender queer scientist attendance jumped 700%”
Reporting on the State of Scholarly Communications
European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Future of scholarly publishing and scholarly communication: Report of the Expert Group to the European Commission, Publications Office, 2019. (h/t H-HistBibl)
“Current developments, enabled primarily by technology, have resulted into a broadening of types of actors involved in scholarly communication and in some cases the disaggregation of the traditional roles in the system. The report views research evaluation as a keystone for scholarly communication, affecting all actors. Researchers, communities and all organisations, in particular funders, have the possibility of improving the current scholarly communication and publishing system: they should start by bringing changes to the research evaluation system.”
Digital Publishing
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, The State of the Version of Record, The Scholarly Kitchen, February 14, 2022.
“The ‘version of record’ is an organizing concept in scholarly publishing. It is by reference to that version that others are understood and it is the object of financial models, policies, and recognition and reward systems. At the same time, many of the core functions of academic publishing – in particular, registration and dissemination – are decoupling from the version of record. Scholarly publishers are also expanding their remit to encompass other article versions, as well as other research outputs, and efforts to systematically link together and track these into a ‘record of versions’ are growing. Today, I provide a landscape scan of the state of the ‘version of record.’”
John Sherer, Guest Post — Does Open Access Cannibalize Print Sales for Monographs?, The Scholarly Kitchen, January 27, 2022.
“The National Endowment for the Humanities has just funded a research project to empirically review whether the availability of OA editions of university press monographs has a quantifiable effect on the sales performance of print editions. I’ll be working with my co-PI, Erich van Rijn from the University of California Press (who helped draft this post), along with the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) and Roger Schonfeld (full disclosure, a regular contributor to this site) and Laura Brown from Ithaka S+R to collect sales data and try to draw some conclusions.”
Suzanne Smalley, Digital Books Hasten Decline of Campus Bookstores, Inside Higher Ed, February 8, 2022.
“As students have migrated online to buy books, the profits of campus bookstores have plummeted, prompting college administrators to shut down the stores and pursue deals with full-service online providers of textbooks and other course materials, such as Akademos.”
Nomenclature
Colleen Flaherty, The Case for Professors Emerit, Inside Higher Ed, February 2, 2022.
“Professors in Oregon push for gender-neutral titles for retired faculty members. The idea has traction, although there’s debate about just what to call these professors instead of ‘emeritus’ and ‘emerita.’”
ICYMI on the Elephant
Hanni Jalil, Book Review: Laura Portwood-Stacer's "The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors," February 9, 2022.
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