Popcast: A music podcast with unexpected scholarly angles: A review and highlighted episode selection.

Short review with episode highlights of the New York Times Music Popcast podcast. Written specifically for librarians with an interest in the similarities/disparities between popular digital media content models and scholarly digital media. This includes a short overview of the podcast, its general relation to scholarly communication, a highlight of seven episodes that relate to copyright, archiving, peer-review, vertical integration, metrics, open repositories, and piracy. (1574 words

Read & Let Read: An Alternative to the Transformative Agreement

In March 2021, the University of California and Elsevier announced a new transformative deal which included slightly-discounted article processing fees as UC\u27s route to open access in Elsevier journals. Librarians and researchers expressed immediate concern that this deal upheld inequities in the research system. The UC/Elsevier transformative deal, however, is just one of many that include expensive pay-to-publish structures. This commentary proposes an alternative contract between libraries and publishers that would enable wider reading and lower costs, called Read & Let Read. The three main points of a Read & Let Read deal include a half-dollar valuation of individual journal articles, prepayment on a university’s estimated usage, and an equal payment made for usage outside of the university. If a Read & Let Read deal were implemented at UC, UC would pay a slightly higher amount of money to Elsevier than they are expected to at present, and would not flip any articles to open access. Instead, they would contribute toward a more equitably-distributed system of scholarly readership

Popcast: A music podcast with unexpected scholarly angles. A review and highlighted episode selection

Short review with episode highlights of the New York Times Music Popcast podcast. Written specifically for librarians with an interest in the similarities/disparities between popular digital media content models and scholarly digital media. This includes a short overview of the podcast, its general relation to scholarly communication, a highlight of seven episodes that relate to copyright, archiving, peer-review, vertical integration, metrics, open repositories, and piracy

Adding equity to transformative agreements and journal subscriptions –The Read & Let Read model

The transition towards open access to research articles has become a question of how, rather than why and the rise of transformative agreements has enabled publishers to strike agreements with large institutions and national research organisations to provide open access and authorship to their members. In this post, Arthur J. Boston puts forward an alternative Read & Let Read model, which could extend access beyond these limited groups and create a framework for more collaborative funding for access to open access research

The Values of Library Publishing and Open Infrastructure: Recapping #LPForum21

Who leads, participates in, and is served by global knowledge infrastructure? Check out these takeaways from the recent Library Publishing Forum Conference from the perspective of a member of the planning committee

Yeezy Taught Me: What can academics learn from the music industry?

In a talk given during London Open Research Week 2021, Arthur J. Boston, the Scholarly Communication Librarian at Murray State University, described parallels between the music industry and academic publishing, especially as it relates to open science and early career researchers. Below, you can find both the recorded video and the transcription in-line with the slide images

Thinking politically about scholarly infrastructure: Commit the publishers to 2.5%

Maybe it’s unsurprising that I think about scholarly communication in terms similar to U.S. politics. I originally drafted this article for the Library Publishing Coalition blog before the 2020 election and revised it for C&RL News during the weirdly long interregnum period before the actual inauguration. The 2016 Republican National Committee was the backdrop to my becoming a scholarly communication librarian in February of that year. That’s also when I joined Twitter, to better follow politics and librarianship, and maybe that’s to blame

Letter from the Faculty Mentor

Letter from Mr. AJ Boston, the faculty mentor for Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal, penned April 11, 2019

If not a transformative agreement, then what? Nine questions and answers about an alternative

Librarians are increasingly coming to agree that the scholarly record should be open and available to anyone who seeks it without financial barriers. But the topic gets murkier when we ask the question: how. How do we open the full scholarly record? One of the swiftest ways to get a mass amount of scholarly articles opened up in a short period of time is through Transformative Agreements (TA). TAs can be attractive offerings to institutions with a need or a desire to make their scholarly output open. It is likely someone in your library has been asked by a commercial publisher if they are interested in signing a TA (sometimes called read-and-publish, publish-and-read, or pure publish deals). In these deals, a library pays a publisher to make some agreed upon number of works open access if the corresponding author is affiliated with the institution. Your library leadership holds probably one of three attitudes on this proposition: pragmatically in favor, ideologically opposed, or simply sort of confused about the whole thing

Open Access and the Direction Moving Forward

Scholarly Communication Librarian for Murray State University A.J. Boston offers recommendations for how funding agencies and research institutions can better lead the change toward open access in this blog post from the Scholarly Kitchen