Innovations between Libraries and Publishers

An overview of the activities of Columbia's Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, particularly those related to publishing

A Book Online? No, An Online Book!

A book online follows the basic principles of a book in print. An online book is something else entirely

World on a Platter?: Consuming Geographies and the Place of Food in Society

Review of "Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat," by David Bell and Gill Valentine

Altmetrics in Humanities and Social Sciences

The spread of open digital forms of scholarly communication, combined with increasing institutional pressure to track research “impact,” has encouraged scholars and administrators in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) to turn their attention to metrics that promise to help in the assessment of research outputs. As a result of the limitations of traditional bibliometrics, a number of alternative metrics systems for measuring research impact have recently gained popularity. These so-called “altmetrics” attempt to account not merely for citations of published scholarship in journal-based articles, but also mentions of the work in popular news outlets, inbound links to the work from social media, and capture of the work in social bookmarking and citation management systems, and seek to track other factors that collectively indicate the ways that a publication moves across the Internet. To assess the current state of altmetrics within HSS disciplines, this study proposed to develop a taxonomy of the altmetrics tools and measures most widely used by or familiar to researchers and scholars, with the goal of determining the current level of acceptance within the academic community of altmetrics, especially in relation to decisions concerning tenure and promotion. Our hope was that we might provide some guidance for department chairs and deans in HSS fields as they encounter requests for analytic data at the university level. We sought a more direct understanding of the state of altmetrics adoption and usage in the evaluation of research in HSS fields, as well an understanding of faculty and administrator perceptions of that usage. Where concerns about the uses of metrics in HSS remain, we also sought to begin an exploration of ways scholars and administrators in the fields we address might seek to provide better forms of articulation of the desired impact of research. This white paper details our investigation and conclusions

Introduction to the Open Access Network

Sharing, curating, and preserving scholarship is imperative for the advancement of research, just as openness is central to the development of new modes of teaching and learning. Deep structural changes to the scholarly communication system are needed not only to respond to the current funding crises in higher education and the emerging forms of scholarship in the digital age, but also to foster and deepen the connections between the academy and the wider public. Only a model that builds collaborative alliances across a wide variety of institutions and that engages a range of stakeholders can provide a fair and equitable path to truly open and sustainable forms of scholarship. (Learn more: http://openaccessnetwork.org/)

Whose Copy? Whose Rights?

Primary scientific and medical literature is written for academic communities and the public good -- so should be governed by copyright licenses that permit the full range of uses that could benefit stakeholders in research

The Central Mystery: Conversion Experiences in Selected Works of Flannery O’Connor

Although Flannery O’Connor’s fiction has been subjected to criticism of all types and although she is known for her interest in religious matters, no one prior to this has done an in-depth study on the presentation of conversion in her fiction. With William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience as a basis for both definition and structure, O’Connor’s works were examined in the light of the conversion experience as it is broken down into three stages: a sense of sin, a state of exhaustion combined with a realization of the individual’s inability to change, and conversion itself. Conversion can be either sudden or gradual. Francis Marion Tarwater, the protagonist of O’Connor’s novel The Violent Bear It Away, is the prototypical convert, going through all three stages and experiencing both types of conversion. O’Connor cements her plot with pervasive symbolism, and both plot and symbolism combine to demonstrate her thesis that conversion — or at least the possibility of conversion — is included in every good story

Clothes Make the (Wo)man: Marlene Dietrich and “Double Drag”

Dietrich, like Madonna, has been called gender‐bending and androgynous, but Dietrich’s on‐ and off‐screen fluidity of gender identity, as reflected in her adoption of the “double drag,” upsets the traditional dichotomy encoded more generally as that of male or female and more particularly as that of the butch or femme

Toward a scalable and sustainable approach to open access publishing and archiving for humanities and social sciences societies: a proposal

The proposal we offer here (and in the more extensive 'white paper' proposal on which this article is based) tackles head-on the open access (OA) business models that have proven particularly problematic for implementation of OA in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). Our proposal suggests all tertiary institutions contribute to systemic support of the research process itself, including its entire scholarly output. A bold rethinking of the economics of OA by way of partnerships among scholarly societies and academic libraries funded by an institutional fee structure based on a student-and-faculty per-capita sliding scale, our plan is nevertheless intentionally incremental. Our proposal focuses first on HSS and primarily in the United States, but just as research and scholarship are increasingly global and collaborative, our plan is not bound by discipline or national borders, but can be adopted by all those looking for a more equitable and sustainable OA model

Open Access and Scientific Societies

Societies are encouraged to consider their own open-access experiments within the context of the communities they serv