Category: openberg

Over the past year, I have coordinated a Faculty Learning Community on Open Scholarship. In this post, I briefly discuss the progress on the project associated with my participation and some of the lessons that I have learned through organizing and participating in this FLC.

First, my project has morphed significantly over the year. What began as a project to test a particular method for sharing geospatial data openly (see description here) has changed into a particular publication strategy. The essential problem is that I was hoping to solve what I now consider two separate and distinct issues;  a means for collaborating openly and a means for publishing openly. Fundamentally, these two components of research should not be separated. That is, even after publication, collaboration should continue to be possible- this would be a model such as Wikipedia, where, at least theoretically, pages continue to get edited and refined to represent the best research.  That does not jive well with peer-review, which is essential both for the purposes of ensuring high quality research and for punctuating a research project. Publication should occur at significant points along the process of a collaborative project (even if it is open-ended). The key, of course, is knowing what those significant points are. Ideally, these points would be part of an original research strategy. However, my project, which involves looking at the historical landscape of charcoal production in the 19th century, began organically more from pedagogical considerations than from research. The focus was on  coordinating hands-on learning experiences for my students in courses such as Field Archaeology and Historical Ecology. It has become increasingly apparent, however, that I have reached an important milestone (and indeed probably reached this a year ago) and the work needs to be published. But, the key is to publish openly. Here’s my plan. I have completed an article for the journal, Historical Archaeology, as a part of it’s Technical Briefs series that discusses my work using open data and open source software to analyze LiDAR data to identify and map charcoal hearths. A description of the data will be published with the Journal of Open Archaeology Data and the actual data, I hope, will be published with Open Context. All three of these are peer-reviewed. The latter two are fully open access. The first is not, but it seemed to be the best location to publish the work.

This is the first FLC that I have lead. My biggest lesson may be that I tried to be too broad; open scholarship is a very wide net. This was intentional since I wanted to be sure to include everyone who was interested in “opening” their research (and associated scholarly practices) to a broader audience. Yet, that also meant that when it came down to choosing the readings, I tried to keep them as broad as possible. It is my impression that while each reading was broadly relevant to participants, they didn’t fit anyone particularly well. This broad net also means that everyone’s project was so very different that there was limited overlap. While it appears that participants were interested and excited about each others projects, it also means that there was limited interaction about these problems and I could provide little or no support. On the flip side, I’m not sure that I am personally interested in just one aspect of open scholarship, so I am not sure how I would reduce the scope of the FLC.

Lastly, I tried to keep communication as open as possible, but that meant that there were too many channels of communication and no one central “location” for participants to communicate.

I hope that participants in the FLC will provide additional feedback about the limitations of this FLC.

This morning I read the article by Gina Kolata in the New York Times entitled, Many Academics Are Eager to Publish in Worthless Journals. The article discusses predatory journals, which are “journals” (if we bend that term beyond recognition) that are willing to publish anyone, have little to no editorial staff and do not employ peer-review (even if they claim to do so). Authors usually pay a fee to publish in these journals. These journals, therefore, promote psuedoscience- there is literally NO mechanism to ensure that the scholarship is well supported.

In the environment of “publish or perish,” some academics, Kolata reports, are publishing in these journals simply to get another publication. Publication in these non-peer-reviewed, unedited, “pay-to-play” journals does not appear to hinder academics ability to secure tenure. Indeed, some of academics who have published in predatory journals have received awards that are, at least partially, based upon their  publications. Additionally, it’s not terribly surprising that academics who work at institutions with high teaching loads but with limited support for research (such as at community colleges or liberal arts colleges- like Muhlenberg College, where I teach), but who are also required to publish, are particularly susceptible to these journals.

So, what does this have to do with openness? Most of these journals are “open”- that is, they have minimal overhead and, since very few (none?) produce expensive print copies; the only place you can find these publications is online. Additionally, I presume that no reputable library would purchase a subscription. Therefore, the primary (sole?) source of income is from the authors.

Predatory journals are producing articles with “research” that has not been peer-reviewed or are in reputable journals, books or from reputable publishers but the articles are available to the public. There is no way to ensure their veracity or accuracy. Some are even indexed in Google Scholar, which does not vet the journals it indexes. Not only is this poor scholarship, but it is also MORE available to the public than most peer-reviewed scholarship, which is closed-up tightly behind pay walls. A side note here… I headed over to Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers and Journals to try to find some of these articles. It was actually quite opaque. Many websites were nearly non-functional and actually finding articles was difficult. The concern expressed above may be more about future concerns than about what is available at present.

This post, therefore, though quite brief, is a call for more openness in research and scholarship- the more reliable research available the better. But, it is also a recognition that availability is clearly not enough. Openness is not enough. We, both as researchers and teachers, need to think deeply about how we teach our students to recognize the difference between reliable scholarship and  research that is not supported. Also, because a limited portion of the “public” goes to college, we (perhaps as institutions, not as individuals) also need to figure out ways to communicate this information outside of our physical and scholarly spaces.