Feeding the Elephant

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

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us all to change the way we work and what we hoped to achieve in this very long year. In this post, history graduate student John Vsetecka talks about the short- and potential long-term impact of COVID-19 on early-career scholars. We'll follow up next week with a similar piece from an early-career librarian.

A guest post by Erin Benay, Associate Professor of Early Modern Art and Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies, Case Western Reserve University

An occasional newsletter from the editors of Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications.

A post from Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications. This is the first of a series on how scholarly societies, publishers, and attendees are coping with the challenges of the virtual conference.

A guest post by Hajni G. Selby, Director of Programming and Conferences, Organization of American Historians

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

A guest post by Siobhan McMenemy, senior editor, Wilfrid Laurier University Press

As we wrap-up Peer Review Week 2020, we wanted to share some practical advice with early career scholars being asked to review for the first time. I spoke with three scholars, including a journal editor, about how to approach this potentially daunting task—and why it's important to do so.

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

Check out two new resources from the Association of University Presses:

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

As Peer Review Week approaches, I wanted to share answers to some of the questions I get asked most often. The theme of #PeerReviewWk20 is trust. I hope these answers contribute to trust in peer review by fostering candid conversations about publishing in general and helping to demystify the peer review process specifically.

OK. The librarian response came from a Really Big University. Now I'd like to see responses from librarians and faculty from schools where the majority of students study: community colleges and regional, public, 4-year institutions (NCAA D2 or D3 schools, for those who think mainly in terms of college sports) -- where the relationships with state legislatures are often adversarial and where the curriculum is under threat from administrators in thrall to neo-liberalism and who whole-heartedly embrace the gospel of austerity.

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

Guest post by Sara R. Benson, Interim Head of the Scholarly Commons and Copyright Librarian, University of Illinois Library

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

Getting permission to reproduce copyrighted material in your own work can be intimidating and frustrating, and most scholars don’t get much, if any, training in how to do it. You won’t be surprised to learn there is no one simple trick, but the following tips aim to demystify the process and make it easier to manage.

Guest Post by Johanna Schuster-Craig, Assistant Professor of German and Global Studies, Michigan State University

Guest Post by Laura Portwood-Stacer, Manuscript Works

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

On June 11, 2020, Inside Higher Ed ran a short piece reporting that the Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries just launched VCU Publishing, an initiative to publish scholarship by the university’s faculty and students in digital form.

A post from Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications

A belated follow up on our post about the AUPresses 2020 conference plenary on June 15. In her presentation, Cutcha Risling-Baldy offered publishers five rules for working with Indigenous authors and publishing on Indigenous topics. You can read them—and her other suggestions—at her blog. The post is titled “Give It Back: Publishing and Native Sovereignty at the Association of University Presses Conference OR In Which I Remind Everyone That Andrew Jackson Can Go F Himself” and contains the full video of her planary.

A Twitter thread with some additional thoughts on how publishers can build bridges with indie booksellers from panelist Andrew Berzanskis of the University of Washington Press:

University presses and indie bookstores need each other to accomplish our respective missions: boosting overlooked voices; elevating what's best and unique about a region; helping drive conversations that lead to social change.

The Mellon University Press Diversity Fellowship Program, the result of a four-year, $1,205,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to diversify the university press acquisitions pipeline by offering highly competitive fourteen-month apprenticeships in the acquisitions departments of six university presses.

Dear All, 

Also of note is the recent statement from the German Studies Association's Initiative for Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion, which references H-Black-Europe among several other groups doing anti-racist work: 

https://t.e2ma.net/message/b8o9fd/vne3at

Best wishes, 

Dave Prior

In light of the ongoing protests following the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, Feeding the Elephant has compiled a list of resources (many freely accessible) from libraries, university presses, and scholars on the subjects of racism, racial justice, police brutality, and protest.

A post from Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications

In the fall of 2019, Disney launched its new streaming service, Disney+. Disney opened its famed Vault to lovers of classic Disney, fans of newer Disney-affiliated producers, and stans for Baby Yoda. All at once, several decades’ worth of content became available—for a price. And, all at once, Disney earned massive revenue for content that it already owned.

A post from Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications

For scholarly communication librarians, a good resource is the ACRL website devoted to it, especially the Scholarly Communication Toolkit. While it is designed for librarians, it contains useful information for anyone interested in the topic and related careers.

Hello everyone,

The Open Access Resource List has been updated with additional resources. Please check it out and if you have anything else add, reply to this post to let us know! 

Thank you!

--Feeding the Elephant team

The theme of the 2019 Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute was equity in scholarly communications. In addition to the summary on the website, check out #TriangleSCI on Twitter.

By Tony Sanfilippo

University presses were established to publish scholarly books—that’s our chief mission. But it’s not all we do. In this guest post, Ohio State University Press director Tony Sanfilippo talks about when and why university presses publish trade books—those intended for a general, non-specialist readership. --Catherine Cocks

Continuing our coverage of University Press Week, readers may be interested in a recent conversation between Kathryn Conrad, president of the Association of University Presses and founder and editor of the New Books Network, Marshall Poe, about (what else?) university presses.

A post from Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications

A post from Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications

Recently, four pieces of news about publishing came to my attention. The conjuncture struck me as illuminating some of the key problems besetting the current scholarly publishing ecosystem.

Thank you very much for your reply, David! I've added the Political Science Rumors website to the Peer Review Resources page as a reference tool and a resource that we can draw further conversation from.

Thanks, David! I like your idea of enlisting H-Net (and maybe other professional organizations) to collect or host data on peer review processes. I encourage anyone interested in this issue to check out the report of the Peer Review Transparency project. The Committee on Publication Ethics (https://publicationethics.org/) also offers guidance for journal editors on making their journal's peer review policies and practices more transparent.

Thank you for this excellent post. Who hasn't been frustrated at times by the opaque nature of most peer review processes! I've often wondered whether there wasn't some space for H-Net networks to play a role in improving the transparency of the review process within their respective fields, perhaps by soliciting data on time to publication, time to rejection, etc., from journal editors and storing this info on a dedicated webpage.

This is all very well and good, but as someone who has been a department chair, served on many tenure and promotions committees both at my own and other institutions, evaluated grant and fellowship applications, reviewed manuscripts journal and book publishers, etc.. I hope we all remember that there is no substitute for reading submissions ourselves rather than relying on the fact that something has been peer reviewed in a highly rated journal. Lots of excellent pieces never make it through and often get rejected for other-than-quality reasons.

A Conversation with Amy Brand (Director of MIT Press) and Jessica Polka (Executive Director of ASAPBio) by Catherine Cocks (Editor-in-Chief at Michigan State University Press)

Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications

Welcome to the inaugural posts of Feeding the Elephant, a forum for conversations about scholarly communications in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. We begin by looking at one of the elements that makes academic publishing distinctive: peer review. Scholars who want to have their research taken seriously by their discipline have to publish it in a peer-reviewed form, whether that’s a journal article or a monograph or something else. 

Feeding the Elephant readers will be interested in this public conversation about "quality" in peer review, taking place this Thursday, September 19, at 4 p.m., EDT. Announcement and details below.

Quality in Peer Review: An AUPresses Conversation