Interim Report: Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication

The Center for Studies in Higher Education, with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is conducting research to understand the needs and desires of faculty for inprogress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. In the interest of developing a deeper understanding of how and why scholars do what they do to advance their fields, as well as their careers, our approach focuses in fine-grained analyses of faculty values and behaviors throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle, including sharing, collaborating, publishing, and engaging with the public. Well into our second year, we have posted a draft interim report describing some of our early results and impressions ased on the responses of more than 150 interviewees in the fields of astrophysics, archaeology, biology, economics, history, music, and political science.Our work to date has confirmed the important impact of disciplinary culture and tradition on many scholarly communication habits. These traditions may override the perceived "opportunities" afforded by new technologies, including those falling into the Web 2.0 category. As we have listened to our diverse informants, as well as followed closely the prognostications about the likely future of scholarly communication, we note that it is absolutely imperative to be precise about terms. That includes being clear about what is meant by "open access" publishing (i.e., using preprint or postprint servers for scholarship published in prestigious outlets versus publishing in new, untested open access journals, or the more casual individual posting of working papers, blogs, and other non-peer-reviewed work). Our research suggests that enthusiasm for technology development and adoption should not be conflated with the hard reality of tenure and promotion requirements (including the needs and goals of final archival publication) in highly competitive professional environments

The Non-homogeneous Poisson Process for Fast Radio Burst Rates

This paper presents the non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) for modeling the rate of fast radio bursts (FRBs) and other infrequently observed astronomical events. The NHPP, well-known in statistics, can model changes in the rate as a function of both astronomical features and the details of an observing campaign. This is particularly helpful for rare events like FRBs because the NHPP can combine information across surveys, making the most of all available information. The goal of the paper is two-fold. First, it is intended to be a tutorial on the use of the NHPP. Second, we build an NHPP model that incorporates beam patterns and a power law flux distribution for the rate of FRBs. Using information from 12 surveys including 15 detections, we find an all-sky FRB rate of 586.88 events per sky per day above a flux of 1 Jy (95\% CI: 271.86, 923.72) and a flux power-law index of 0.91 (95\% CI: 0.57, 1.25). Our rate is lower than other published rates, but consistent with the rate given in Champion et al. 2016.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figure

Boardman Lake Trail

Today in the United States, a significant portion of energy use is devoted to transportation needs. To address sustainable energy use in transportation, Team Wicked Awesome formed in the class LIB 322: “Wicked Problems in Sustainability” at Grand Valley State University in the winter of 2015. Looking to wicked problem solving methods, we examined Traverse City’s need for alternative options for transportation (other than single occupant vehicles). As an alternative mode of transportation, we looked into a number of ways to promote bicycle ridership and came to discover there was a tentative plan to complete a portion of the Traverse Area Recreation and Transportation Trail (T.A.R.T) that would give an entire side of the Boardman Lake more access to downtown and other neighborhoods via bicycle. We discovered that there was a lack of communication between local cycle groups, other community stakeholders and city officials in addressing the completion of the Boardman Lake Trail. We will hold a summit in order to open a dialogue with the community members and other stakeholders to discuss the state of the trail by integrating stakeholders and experts in a discussion panel. As part of the Wicked Problems model of problem solving we hope to bridge gaps that currently exist between these interested parties. We do not intend to create a new effort, but instead we will increase community involvement in the current effort and encourage city officials to place higher priority on the project. This summit will provide the public with information that will educate them not only on the prospects of the trail\u27s completion, but what obstacles exist, and what the community at large can do to help complete the trail. We hope this event will encourage citizens of the community to engage in collaborative effort and to take ownership and responsibility for the future of their city

Full Report: Scholarly Communication: Academic Values and Sustainable Models

This report presents five thickly-described interdisciplinary case studies that explore academic value systems as they influence publishing behavior and attitudes of University of California, Berkeley faculty. The case studies are based on direct interviews with relevant stakeholders -- faculty, advancement reviewers, librarians, and editors -- in five fields: chemical engineering, anthropology, law and economics, English-language literature, and biostatistics. The results of the study strongly confirm the vital role of peer review in faculty attitudes and actual publishing behavior. There is much more experimentation, however, with regard to means of in-progress communication, where single means of publication and communication are not fixed so deeply in values and tradition as they are for final, archival publication. We conclude that approaches that try to "move" faculty and deeply embedded value systems directly toward new forms of archival, "final" publication are destined largely to failure in the short-term. From our perspective, a more promising route is to (1) examine the needs of scholarly researchers for both final and in-progress communications, and (2) determine how those needs are likely to influence future scenarios in a range of disciplinary areas

A Millisecond Interferometric Search for Fast Radio Bursts with the Very Large Array

We report on the first millisecond timescale radio interferometric search for the new class of transient known as fast radio bursts (FRBs). We used the Very Large Array (VLA) for a 166-hour, millisecond imaging campaign to detect and precisely localize an FRB. We observed at 1.4 GHz and produced visibilities with 5 ms time resolution over 256 MHz of bandwidth. Dedispersed images were searched for transients with dispersion measures from 0 to 3000 pc/cm3. No transients were detected in observations of high Galactic latitude fields taken from September 2013 though October 2014. Observations of a known pulsar show that images typically had a thermal-noise limited sensitivity of 120 mJy/beam (8 sigma; Stokes I) in 5 ms and could detect and localize transients over a wide field of view. Our nondetection limits the FRB rate to less than 7e4/sky/day (95% confidence) above a fluence limit of 1.2 Jy-ms. Assuming a Euclidean flux distribution, the VLA rate limit is inconsistent with the published rate of Thornton et al. We recalculate previously published rates with a homogeneous consideration of the effects of primary beam attenuation, dispersion, pulse width, and sky brightness. This revises the FRB rate downward and shows that the VLA observations had a roughly 60% chance of detecting a typical FRB and that a 95% confidence constraint would require roughly 500 hours of similar VLA observing. Our survey also limits the repetition rate of an FRB to 2 times less than any known repeating millisecond radio transient.Comment: Submitted to ApJ. 13 pages, 9 figure

Orientación para el cambio : uso del Mapeo de Alcances para guiar el cambio institucional en un Banco Regional de Desarrollo

Versión en inglés disponible en la Biblioteca Digital del IDRC: Positioning for change : using Outcome Mapping to guide institutional change within a Regional Development BankVersión francés en la biblioteca: Positionnement pour le changement : utilisation de la cartographie des incidences pour orienter le changement institutionnel au sein d’une banque régionale de développemen

Positioning for change : using Outcome Mapping to guide institutional change within a Regional Development Bank

French version available in IDRC Digital Library: Positionnement pour le changement : utilisation de la cartographie des incidences pour orienter le changement institutionnel au sein d’une banque régionale de développementSpanish version available in IDRC Digital Library: Orientación para el cambio : uso del Mapeo de Alcances para guiar el cambio institucional en un Banco Regional de DesarrolloUsing the recommendations drawn from an operations audit and identifying the transition of the organization towards new behaviours necessary for sustaining strategic objectives, Outcome Mapping was able to articulate a human dimension of change. The process of using Outcome Mapping to construct the change management framework (CMF) involved mobilization of planning and assessment teams (Project Steering Committee and Change Management Taskforce). The process was guided and facilitated by an external consultant. The study reports on this process

Positionnement pour le changement : utilisation de la cartographie des incidences pour orienter le changement institutionnel au sein d’une banque régionale de développement

Version anglaise disponible dans la Bibliothèque numérique du CRDI: Positioning for change : using Outcome Mapping to guide institutional change within a Regional Development BankVersion espagnole disponible dans la Bibliothèque numérique du CRDI: Orientación para el cambio : uso del Mapeo de Alcances para guiar el cambio institucional en un Banco Regional de Desarroll

Agriculture Water Use and Economic Value in the Great Salt Lake Basin

This fact sheet briefly describes human impacts on GSL water volume, human population growth, surface water withdrawals, and agricultural water use from 1985 and 2015 in the GSL Basin. Finally, agriculture’s economic impact and food production in the GSL Basin are summarized