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

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

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

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

Interested in institutional open access policies? COAPI can help!

Open access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Institutional open access policies serve as a pledge by institutional authors to make their works open access in a repository to ensure that anyone can access and use their research—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives. Librarians that support policy implementation connect readers from far and wide to research—getting to the heart of what an academic library should be. Often trained in providing faculty guidance and familiar with scholarly publishing, librarians are well positioned to build the support needed to make open access initiatives successful.Creating, promoting, and implementing an institutional open access policy is no easy task, and a library should not face it alone. Fear not, be it looking at examples or best practices for forming an open access policy, successful strategies to engage faculty, workflows to streamline policy implementation, or answers to thorny questions, the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI) is here to help.COAPI is an informal, free organization of 121 members across North America which provides education, advocacy, and member-to-member assistance to support institutions in developing, promoting, implementing, and assessing open access policies. This poster presents an overview of COAPI, its range of members, and the resources it provides, including an internal platform exchange news and information about open access policies, a public toolkit built and informed by members, working groups, and community calls

Eartharxiv: Today and Tomorrow

EarthArXiv is a preprint service for the Earth sciences — a web-based system that enables open access publishing of non peer-reviewed scholarly manuscripts before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. In this presentation, we provide analytics on the usage of EarthArXiv across a number of sub-disciplines of Earth science. Data indicate that the service in general is growing, but with submission rates varying amongst discipline. The trend of the preprint-to-postprint ratio for each discipline also provides insight into how the various Earth science communities are using the service. We investigate were preprints are published after submission to EarthArXiv and examine how many of these publication venues are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Finally, we will discuss future opportunities we are exploring to make preprints more accepted and easier to use

Sound art and the making of public space

This paper draws on a collaborative sound art project that aimed to explore how sound art as a non-representational method might attract and produce new publics and re-signify iconic public spaces . We describe how the project, AGORA, proceeded and to what extent it transformed the spaces it was performed in and made new, if transient, publics in the moments of performance. This paper focuses on the British Museum and St George’s Church, Bloomsbury. In the Museum the contemplation and resignification provoked by the intervention enlivened the sacred character of the museum. We argue that this (re)sacralization can be experienced as a practice of decolonization, albeit perhaps limited to the space and time of the performance. The Church, already signified as a sacred space, provoked another kind of encounter with the sacred and the colonial. The extended period of reflection provoked by the performance made visible the etchings of colonialism in the fabric of the building. Our contribution is primarily to the geographic literature on non-representational theory in relation to sonic geographies and music geographies. This paper points to the potential of sound art to make us listen to spaces more attentively