"More Creative Thinking about Education, please"

It is no accident that the core subjects for the English baccalaureate ('Exam reform will destroy UK's creative economy' Guardian, 3.11.12) coincide with the 'facilitating' subjects recommended by the Russell Group (Making your post-16 subject choices). The narrowing band of approved subjects for post-16 and 'elite' university study not only omits creative practices, but their history and theory, for example, art and design history, as well as any broader analyses of culture and society (media studies; sociology). The problem for the present government, and for conservative bodies like the Russell Group, is that those so-called soft subjects have the potential to construct convincing critiques of their educational and social values.

My letter published in The Guardian Tuesday 6 November 2012.

Publish with SAGE Open - at a cost!

SAGE is instituting a system of so-called open publishing that will exclude anyone without university or other funding - and why should academic authors pay to be published?? They should be PAID for publishing.

"Submit your manuscript to SAGE Open—an open-access publication
Publish in SAGE Open, SAGE's groundbreaking, open-access publication of peer-reviewed, original research and review articles, spanning the full spectrum of the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities. More than 1,000 manuscripts have been submitted in the last year.
Submit your manuscript through SAGE track, SAGE's web-based peer review and submission system, powered by ScholarOne Manuscripts™. Submitting your manuscript is free. Only if your manuscript is accepted will you pay the author acceptance fee of $395 (discounted from the regular price of $695)."

Open access publishing: don't throw out the baby with the bathwater

 

There is a warning about opportunistic practices in open access publishing targeted at vulnerable scholars at http://the-scientist.com/2012/08/01/predatory-publishing. However, although the article has some relevant warnings it appears to join in with a reactionary response to the important recent arguments that traditional publishers are too dominant and too exclusive, especially with regard to independent scholars.

Without the institutional support paid for by universities' large fees to publishers, independent scholars have been denied online access to these traditional journals by their publishers (let's forget the riciculous fees publishers would charge them of £23 per academic article).

Guardian Letters: 
Open access plan is no academic spring


Government plans to change the funding system for scientific publication have recently been aired which suggest that the cost of publication should be borne by authors and that the cost per published article (already smartly acronymed as APC=Article Processing Charge) would be about £2,000.
The Guardian published five letters on this issue today, including mine mentioned in the previous post:

Free access to British scientific research may be a laudable goal, but surely the APC to be paid by authors of £2,000 per article is a misprint – you mean £20, don't you, which I as an academic author could afford? But why should academic authors pay anything at all? They should bepaid for their articles. Furthermore, if the plan is for universities to foot the bill for authors, this will leave an important group of researchers, in sciences and humanities, out in the cold – those who do not have (or no longer have) any university affiliation. This is not the academic spring. 

Dr Tricia Cusack

Free Access but authors pay: this is not the Academic Spring

According to today's Guardian (16.7.12) the British government is about to 'unveil' plans to make science research free to access, but by tranferring costs to authors who apparently will have to pay an 'article processing charge' to publishers of about £2000 per article. This so beggars belief that I have written to The Guardian to check whether it is a misprint for £20 - and why should authors pay anything - they should be PAID to publish. If universities henceforward pay authors' fees, who will pay those of independent researchers, including those who have retired from teaching?

Blog description

Academics - astonishingly - have to write and review journal articles for free, or more accurately, at a cost to themselves (for example, fees for illustrations). So long as they belong to a university they can access articles online, but on leaving, most are cut off from such resources without ceremony, and are then required by publishers to pay £23 for sight of a single article. So publishers and universities benefit from free academic labour, then charge non-affiliated academics for seeing the results. This blog highlights this iniquitous situation and discusses solutions.

Re Comments

Apologies to those who have been trying to comment and failed - the settings were restricted to blogspotters. They have now been broadened, so please do leave a comment if you like.

How a Russell Group University terminates a member of staff

I have worked for a large university (member of the much-vaunted Russell Group etc.) since 1999, full-time then the last several years part-time. There is no longer money for part-timers, so my contract runs out this year. I knew that this would mean the end of the easy access to online research resources on which I have depended for so many years, but the impersonal and uncaring way in which this has been notified to me still comes as a revelation.

And why can't long-serving staff (most of whom do not become Emeritus Professors) look forward to continued links with their former employer by being given research access? They could even give the university some publicity through their publications. 

"IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR UNIVERSITY ACCOUNT

IT Services has been informed by Human Resources that your Associate
registration is ending on Tuesday, 24 Jul 2012.

In accordance with current University policy, access to any of the
University's computing resources managed by IT Services, will be
withdrawn on this date. The result of this will be that your University
username and password will no longer work and you will no longer have
access to your email account."

Academics don't publish for free - they pay to publish

I have an article being published in a great online academic journal in the autumn. I need to use an illustration for it which although out of copyright is held by a national art gallery. Because I don't have any funding, the gallery has very generously waived the 50 euro fee for reproducing this picture, but I must still pay for the image to be scanned and sent, together with VAT. This is a typical situation. When publishing my book Riverscapes and National Identities the costs to me personally were considerable - and some picture owners charged unreasonable rates, given that the book is not the kind that will ever make a profit.
If you have similar experiences why not comment below?

Durham University offers online research facilities to alumni and retired staff

"Durham University Library is delighted to offer University alumni and retired staff access to JSTOR, working in partnership with the University's Alumni Relations Office. If you’re graduating this summer, sign up to the Dunelm online community to gain access to a wealth of information through one of the world's most trusted and well used electronic collections of academic journals. Covering over 50 academic disciplines, JSTOR offers nearly 1500 journals and often includes the full text of each article."

Alumni and retired staff can register for a Dunelm account at: http://www.dunelm.org.uk/jstor

"Time for academics to withdraw free labour"

at: http://deevybee.blogspot.ca/2012/01/time-for-academics-to-withdraw-free.html

University of Edinburgh joining JSTOR's alumni scheme

JSTOR responds

I recently contacted JSTOR on the vexed issue of access to research resources for independent scholars. I have had the following most helpful response from JSTOR's Education & Outreach section, although this does not yet solve the problem.

"JSTOR is working to expand options for researchers who have partial or no access to the content on JSTOR through a participating institution. The Register & Read beta program is the most recent development. We are hoping that the data from the program can help us better understand the needs of these researchers and how we can implement a broader subscription-type option for individuals. This will continue to take us some time to figure out. In the meantime, later this year we will be expanding Register & Read to include hundreds of journals beyond the 75 that were included in the initial launch of the program ... Another option that is quickly expanding is our Alumni Access pilot, more information at http://about.jstor.org/."

The Alumni scheme seems a good move and the list of those participating is interesting - it includes the especially prestigious Universities of Oxford and London.
There seems to be a lot of variation in the access offered by individual universities though and whether there is a fee or not for alumni. (It seems fair enough to have a reasonable fee applied, taking account of those not in full-time employment?)

JSTOR's 'register and read' is inadequate for researchers

JSTOR writes:

"we're hoping that the expanded Register & Read program will be useful for researchers while also providing us with information that can help inform a better model." 

Partial schemes - such as JSTOR's 'Register and Read' - cannot really serve as a serious research tool. This is because for an individual researcher, a small range of journals is very unlikely to include those needed among the hundreds used across different disciplines, or in cross-disciplinary work. For example, none of the journals that I might use is there (in areas of art history, cultural geography, nationalism studies, and tourism history). The JSTOR Outreach team has been very responsive to this view and is seeking alternatives such as the Alumni pilot.

JSTOR packages and the alumni program/me

From JSTOR's really helpful Education & Outreach section:

"Libraries are able to pick and choose packages of content for their institutions. JSTOR offers two types of journal collections, archive collections and current collections. Archive collections include the bulk of the backfiles of journals, from volume 1 up until about 3-5 years from the present. Librarians can also choose the current collections, which include a few past years of content through the most current issue. The current collections are relatively new to JSTOR - we began offering them in December 2010. The full archive collection includes about 1,600 titles, and we have current content for about 175 titles. In the alumni program, alumni have access to all of the archive content licensed by their alma mater.At this time, the alumni program does not included the current collections."

Who writes and reviews academic articles for free and then has to pay journals £23 per article to read them online?

(unless they are affiliated to a university and the university pays).

Clue: could be the same people.

Wikimedia and open access for research

Excellent web-post at: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/05/25/wikimedia-foundation-endorses-mandates-for-free-access-to-publicly-funded-research/

Stirrings of an academic spring

See The Guardian online 9 April 2012: 'Academic spring: how an angry maths blog sparked a scientific revolution' by Alok Jha
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-blogpost-boycott-scientific-journals

Open University refuses online research access for alumni

From Alumni@open.ac.uk: "We currently do not offer access to the online library to the alumni community. We have been having ongoing talks with the library but do not see the situation changing in the near future".

I am astonished to see the Open University of all bodies give up so easily.