1. Will the impact framework fix the problems the research audit found?
The results from the latest university research audit indicate that research in Australia is improving. Under the government's latest reform of research funding, academics will be assessed not only on their quality of research through the ERA, but also on the economic, social and environmental impacts of their research through a new impact framework. In their post in The Conversation Blog, Claire Smith and Dawn Bennett discuss about the working of Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) exercise.
The blog post says (quote): There is a contradiction between a new impact measure that encourages a culture of risk-taking and ERA, which promotes risk-avoidance behaviours and impacts upon academic freedom by directing research behaviour. This is particularly problematic for new researchers, blue-sky research and research with benefits that emerge only in the long term. Both systems place professional service outside academic workloads. This raises new questions. Who will edit the journals, convene the conferences, become officers of professional associations, or write the handbooks and textbooks?..........(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. Whatever happened to innovation in the publishing industry?
Remember the excitement surrounding the launch of Amazon's Kindle eight years ago? It was a clunky device, even by 2007 standards, but it was revolutionary. One of the original Kindle's breakthrough features was the ability to download books via cellular network. That was eight years ago and it's hard to name even two or three other innovations that have had as significant an impact as the first-gen Kindle, notes Joe Wikert, in his post in the Digital Content Strategies Blog.
The blog post says (quote): Most of the publishers are relying too much on the industry leader, Amazon, to also serve as innovation leader. Given that books (print and e) represent less than 10 percent of Amazon's overall revenue I'm not convinced they're motivated to innovate. Amazon is more focused on building other areas of the business and not so much on the book industry they currently dominate. They want to protect and grow their book market share, of course, but I doubt they want to pour a lot of money into reinvention breakthroughs. Amazon didn't invent the all-you-can-read model, for example; they simply launched a service in reaction to Oyster and Scribd.........(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. Open Access and Academic Freedom
As they have gained momentum over the past decade, the open access (OA) movement and its cousin, the Creative Commons licensing platform, have together done a tremendous amount of good in the world of scholarship and education, by making high-quality, peer-reviewed publications widely available both for reading and for reuse. But they have also raised some uncomfortable issues, most notably related to academic freedom, particularly when OA is made a requirement rather than an option and when the Creative Commons attribution license (CC BY) is treated as an essential component of OA, notes Rick Anderson, in the Inside Higher ED post.
The blog post says (quote): The issue here that has a bearing on academic freedom is the issue of coercion. CC licenses that are freely chosen by authors are one thing, but when those licenses are imposed on authors by those who have power over their careers, we begin talking about a different set of issues. Such coercion exists on a spectrum, of course: when a powerful publisher says "We won't accept your work, regardless of its quality, unless you adopt CC BY," that represents one kind of coercion; when a funder says "We won't fund your research unless you promise to make the published results available under a CC BY license," that's a somewhat different kind. Both have emerged relatively recently.........(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. Who's afraid of Open Data: Scientists' objections to data sharing don't stand up to scrutiny.
Many scientists are still resisting calls to openly share underlying data. While their concerns should be taken seriously, Dorothy Bishop, in her post in the The Impact Blog, doesn't think the objections withstand scrutiny. Concerns about being scooped are frequently cited, but are seldom justified.
The blog post says (quote): The 'fear of errors' argument is, of course understandable but not defensible. The way to respond is to say of course there will be errors - there always are. We have to change our culture so that we do not regard it as a source of shame to publish data in which there are errors, but rather as an inevitability that is best dealt with by making the data public so the errors can be tracked down. Ethical concerns about confidentiality of personal data are a different matter. In some cases, participants in a study have been given explicit reassurances that their data will not be shared: this was standard practice for many years before it was recognised that such blanket restrictions were unhelpful and typically went way beyond what most participants wanted – which was that their identifiable data would not be shared.........(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
5. What If Elsevier and Researchers Quit Playing Hide-and-Seek?
Institutional subscriptions to academic databases don't cover every article someone would ever need. When scholars and professors find a reference to an article that they don't have access to, they'll often turn to less orthodox approaches: asking for the paper on Twitter or Facebook, emailing a friend at another institution, or even asking the author directly. For a lot of people, research amounts to a patchwork of sources culled together through authorized and unauthorised methods, notes Elliot Harmon in the Electronic Frontier Foundation Blog.
The blog post says (quote): Sci-Hub got the attention of the academic publishing world. In June, Elsevier filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against both Sci-Hub and LibGen (Library Genesis), another repository for unauthorised sharing of research papers. On October 30, a New York judge granted an injunction against several web domains owned by Sci-Hub and LibGen. Sci-Hub and LibGen have now moved to new domains, and Sci-Hub has set up a .onion address; this allows users to access the service anonymously through Tor. How quickly the sites have gotten back on their feet after the injunction underscores that these services can't really be stopped. Elsevier can't kill unauthorised sharing of its papers; at best, it can only make sharing incrementally less convenient.........(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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