Feral Librarian » publishing

What academic librarians need to know about academia

Chris — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:23:47 +0000

The world of academia is a strange and complex place, and I have found that understanding certain key aspects of its culture and norms has served me well in my current work and in contributing to conversations about the future of academic libraries.
Here are a few things that I find helpful to know/understand:

A faculty members’ peers are NOT necessarily the other faculty in their own department or their own institution. A scholar’s peers are other scholars who do similar work. This is literally true for activities such as peer review, and tenure & promotion reviews. It is also true in terms of social identity and social networks. Knowing this, I might realize I can helpfully point out similar research happening on a scholar’s own campus; since they may reasonably not know about it. I also need to know this because when scholars talk about doing collaborative work, their collaborators are likely to be located all across the globe — and that has implications for how libraries support that work.
Publications serve many purposes for faculty, but the primary purpose for most is to support tenure and promotion cases. Given that, faculty will publish their research in whatever venue has the highest prestige value in their field and their department. Understanding whether books or journal articles are more highly valued for a given department is helpful. It is also good to further understand which publishers and which journals are most important for a given department. Note that there will be variation within disciplines–what makes a good publication record for a tenure-track Sociologist at one university might not be so impressive at another school.
For tenure-track faculty, virtually everything they do & every choice they make will be based on how it contributes to their chances of getting tenure. For example, if teaching plays an insignificant role in tenure decisions at my school, then I can’t expect tenure-track faculty to devote much time to innovative teaching. If I want to support tenure-track faculty, I need to offer services that help them do things that increase their chances of getting tenure. If I want to offer library support for their classes, I need to be willing to do so in a way that requires little to no extra effort on their part, and perhaps even provides them some free time.

I’m sure there are plenty of other norms from the world of academia that academic librarians ought to understand. What am I leaving out?

Support for Research: An Academic Library Manifesto

Chris — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:33:25 +0000

Support for the Research Process: An Academic Library Manifesto has just been published. This brief call to action document represents the collaborative work of the RLG Research Information Management Roadmap Working Group.
The goal of the document is to set forth a “top 10″ list of action items for Academic Libraries to focus on in the face of a rapidly changing scholarly research landscape.
Much of what is currently written about the future of libraries focuses on how to save libraries, or on whether we even still need libraries. In this document, we tried instead to focus on what academic libraries can and should do to ensure that “current and future researchers will have the support they need to navigate and exploit the full potential of evolving digital scholarship.”
One potential follow-up to this document would be for members of the academic library community to take each of the action items and develop examples, use cases, and best practices:

1. Commit to continual study of the ever-changing work patterns and needs of researchers; with particular attention to disciplinary and generational differences in adoption of new modes of research and publication.
2. Design flexible new services around those parts of the research process that cause researchers the most frustration and difficulty.
3. Embed library content, services, and staff within researchers’ regular workflows; integrating with services others provide (whether on campus, at other universities, or by commercial entities) where such integration serves the needs of the researcher.
4. Embrace the role of expert information navigators and redefine reference as research consultation instead of fact-finding.
5. Reassess all library job descriptions and qualifications to ensure that training and hiring encompass the skills, education, and experience needed to support new modes of research.
6. Recognize that discovery of content will happen outside of libraries—but that libraries are uniquely suited to providing the organization and metadata that make content discoverable.
7. Embrace opportunities to focus on unique, core services and resources; while seeking collaborative partnerships to streamline common services and resources.
8. Find ways to demonstrate to senior university administrators, accreditors, and auditors the value of library services and resources to scholarship; while providing services that may seem invisible and seamless to researchers.
9. Engage researchers in the identification of primary research data sets that merit long-term preservation and access.
10. Offer alternative scholarly publishing and dissemination platforms that are integrated with appropriate repositories and preservation services.

As Ricky Erway at hangingtogether says:

You don’t need to nail it to your library’s door, but you might want to think about how many of these things you currently do, how many you could do, and what you could stop doing (or streamline) so that you can better support your institution’s research mission.

Tagged: digital libraries, future of libraries, information literacy, library services, publishing, research, scholarship

Moving Beyond Libraries as big photo albums

Chris — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:26:00 +0000

In Moving beyond the photo album, Kevin Smith describes the journal article as “a “snapshot” of research… increasingly far-removed from the actual research process and have less and less relevance to it.”

Smith summarizes a talk by G. Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs at Johns Hopkins University, in which:

Choudhury called on libraries to move past a vision of themselves as merely a collection of these snapshots and become more active participants in the research process. He recounted a conversation he had with one researcher who, in focusing on the real need he felt in his own work, told Sayeed that he did not care if the library ever licensed another e-journal again, but he did need their expertise to help preserve and curate his research data. The challenge for libraries is to radically rethink how we spend our money and allocate the expertise of our staffs in ways that actually address felt needs on our campuses and do not leave us merely pasting more snapshots into a giant photo album that fewer people every day will look at.

Of course, as Smith notes, promotion and tenure systems still rely on the “outmoded system of scholarly communications that is represented by the scientific journal”, even as actual scholarly communication is happening outside of, and in spite of, published journal articles.

What are libraries to do? Dwindling budgets are forcing many of us to cancel journal subscriptions anyway; but as long as tenure and promotion rely on traditional citation and publication counts, we can’t very well stop collecting the snapshots that are traditional scholarship. But, we can play a role in promoting new modes of scholarly communication, and we ought to be participating in conversations about establishing better, more efficient, more relevant ways of evaluating scholarship.

Edited 8/27/09: Thanks to @ericrumsey for the better, more accurate title suggestion.

Tagged: citations, future of libraries, publishing, research, scholarship

What do citations really mean?

Chris — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 03:15:20 +0000

Several recent papers and/or blog posts have highlighted the social nature of citation practices, challenging the assumption that citation counts stand as impartial measures of the quality and impact of a piece of scholarly work:

In Position matters Philip Davis summarizes Positional Effects on Citation and Readership in arXiv , in which the authors find that articles listed at the top of arXiv’s daily publication announcements were cited more frequently than articles listed lower. The authors go on to note:

we’ve documented here that accidental forms of visibility can drive early readership, with consequent early citation potentially initiating a feedback loop to more readership and citation, ultimately leaving measurable and significant traces in the citation record.
Although Henry at Crooked Timber rather convincingly argues that Charles Rowley’s article (behind paywall), ‘The curious citation practices of Avner Greif: Janet Landa comes to grief’; is “one of the sorriest hack-jobs that I’ve ever had the misfortune to read in an academic journal”; the Rowley article does highlight the general issue of the very real influence that individual citation choices can have. Scholarly careers can be made or broken by citation (or lack thereof) in a subsequently influential piece of scholarship. Once cited in one influential paper, one’s work is more likely to become part of the regularly cited literature on a topic, as subsequent scholars cite the same works.
Finally, Steven Greenberg’s How citation distortions create unfounded authority: analysis of a citation network highlights the social side of citations by demonstrating how “the persuasive use of citation–bias, amplification, and invention–can be used to establish unfounded scientific claims as fact.”

Clearly lots of factors affect when, where, why, by whom and how often a given scholarly work is cited. It seems like it would be good for us all to remember not to place undue weight on either individual citations or citation patterns; and not to blindly rely on citation count as an unbiased, objective measure of quality.

Tagged: citations, publishing, research, scholarship