Scholarly Publishing Unbound
Panelists include:
Clifford Lynch, Executive Director for the Coalition for Networked Information
Michael Tanner, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, UIC
Robert Bruegmann, Professor, Art History, UIC
Barbara Risman, Professor, Sociology, UIC
Moderator: Mary Case, University Librarian, UIC
When : Thursday October 22, 2009 at 11:00 a.m.
Where: 713 SCE

For decades, scholars have advanced in their fields by publishing in print — whether in peer-reviewed books or articles in refereed journals — or by exhibiting and performing in prestigious venues. Today, the possibilities of online “publication” in open access journals, unbundled articles, vast data sets, Web-based exhibits, and other forms of electronic dissemination challenge the well-established, bounded system. The rate of change varies among different disciplines. Young faculty who seek promotion and tenure face choices their predecessors did not have to consider. Senior scholars, committed to quality and traditions in their fields, may find themselves forced to rethink publishing and standards of achievement.

This panel will explore the current state of scholarly publishing and the prospects for the future.

Lunch will follow the panel discussion.

Students for Open Access present Award Winning Sparky Videos
When: Thursday October 22, 2009 at 2:00 p.m.
Where: 713 SCE

Fame and fortune! In 2008, five UIC students won the $1,000 Grand Prize in the Sparky Awards, a video contest to promote the value of sharing information. The award-winning students will talk about the idea behind their video and how their views on information access shaped the video. Professor Nancy John will discuss how students can enter this year’s contest and describe how the Sparky Awards can be made part of a course syllabus.

To see a picture of the winning UIC team and link to their video, see the Sparky Awards Web site.

So you want to start a journal…Launching and sustaining a scholarly journal
When: Friday October 23, 2009 at 11:00 a.m.
Where: Reserve Reading Room, Daley Library

The possibility of publishing on the Web has allowed new models for scholarly journals, even as traditional journals remain central to the academic enterprise. Five academics with extensive experience in journal publishing provide a range of perspectives on launching and sustaining scholarly journals.

Panel includes:
Judith Gardiner, Professor, English and Gender & Women’s Studies, UIC; member of the editorial collective of Feminist Studies
Mark Mattaini; Associate Professor, Jane Adams College of Social Work, UIC; editor of Behavior and Social Issues
Brooke Shipley; Professor, Math Statistics and Computer Science, UIC; editorial board member for Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society; Homology, Homotopy, and Applications; Theory and Applications of Categories; Topology and its Applications
Neil Smalheiser; Associate Professor, Psychiatry, UIC; editor of Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration
Ed Valauskas, Lecturer, endowed Follett Chair (2005-7), Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Dominican University; chief editor and founder of First Monday

Light refreshments will be offered.

A recording of So you want to start a journal…Launching and sustaining a scholarly journal is available via eRooms.

UIC Honors College students Danaya Panya, Jaymeni Patel, Sebastian
Rivera, Uriel Rotstein and Hemanth Sirandas produced “To Infinity and Beyond,” a one-minute video that can be viewed online.

The students produced the video for Communication in the Digital Age, a course taught by Nancy John, former interim university librarian, that explores issues in the movement to digitize information.

“We all learned about the importance of open access to information and have become open access supporters ourselves,” Rotstein said.

The Sparky Awards competition is organized by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an international alliance of academic and research libraries established 11 years ago with assistance from Mary Case, head of the UIC Library.

“The coalition advocates for cost-effective publishing systems and open access to publicly funded research,” Case said. “If authors can retain some of their copyrights and deposit their work in digital repositories, researchers will have open access to knowledge.”

Judges for the awards include university librarians, academics in cinema and cultural anthropology, a documentary filmmaker, and leadersof several national student associations. The winners will receive $1,000. Links to all of the award-winning videos are available on the SPARC Web site.

In the first of five episodes, Chief Podcast editors AJ Hannah and Joy Austria examine The State of Openness and the meaning of openness in scholarly publishing politics, society, and culture. The editors interview Sandra Braman, Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Mary Case, University Librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago; and Steve Jones, Professor of Communication and Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Open access is freely available public access to scientific, scholarly, and government information on the Internet without financial, legal or technical barriers. The importance of open access often becomes a personal issue when, for example, a lay person is prevented from learning more about a disease or medical treatments because publishers require prohibitively expensive licensing agreements in order for the public to read reliable, scientifically vetted articles. Open access is a pivotal international issue for countries that cannot afford subscriptions to commercial electronic resources.

Open Access Day will focus attention on the principle that publicly-funded research results should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication. Some organizations such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) are committed to free dissemination of scientific and medical literature as a public resource and as a tactic to increase the efficiency in science. SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries that works to stimulate the emergence of new scholarly communication models that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries.

SPARC, PLoS, and Students for Free Culture founded Open Access Day. The Open Access Day Web site lists activities in academic and research organizations worldwide.

All the research articles in BioMed Central journals go through a stringent peer-review process to ensure they are of a high standard.

Online submission, electronic peer review and production make the process of publishing fast and efficient. Articles are immediately and permanently available without charge for all to read and use, and the author(s) keep the copyright, so you are free to print out copies, email it to colleagues, and post it on the web.

All articles in journals published by BioMed Central are sent to PubMed Central as well as many other international archives for permanent archiving. BioMedCentral journals are indexed in PubMed and other bibliographic databases and many have been accepted by ISI for citation tracking and inclusion in Web of Science.

UIC is a strong supporter of open access publishing, as the decision to become a BioMed Central member demonstrates. In the last twelve months over two dozen UIC faculty members have published articles in BioMed Central journals. All faculty are encouraged to take advantage of this opportunity and play a role in supporting open access publishing.

For more information visit the BioMed Central website at www.biomedcentral.com

Broadening its efforts in electronic journal publishing, the UIC Library introduces Behavior and Social Issues (BSI) to its publication program. BSI joins First Monday and AIDS Book Review Journal, both also published by the Library. Sponsored by the Behaviorists for Social Responsibility, BSI is edited by Professor Mark A. Mattaini of the UIC Jane Addams College of Social Work.

BSI is the first journal published in UIC’s installation of the open access journal publishing software, Open Journal Systems (OJS), developed by Simon Fraser University.

Full-text of seven volumes of BSI is online, and tables of contents are available from the first issue in 1991. BSI is available now at its new URL: http://www.behaviorandsocialissues.org. BSI’s online issues are available for free; frequent users of the title are encouraged to support the journal by subscribing to the archival paper copy.

OJS not only publishes the issues, but will support electronic submission of articles, tracking and management of the refereeing process, and a variety of user tools, including alerts for new issues and robust searching of the contents. It also links BSI to the Open Archives Initiative, which means that BSI content will be much more widely available, and to the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) project, to assure long-term availability of the electronic content.

“Behaviorists for Social Responsibility and the international editorial board of Behavior and Social Issues are extremely pleased at this opportunity to expand the availability of open access journal publishing, which is critical to access in under-resourced nations and institutions,” noted Professor Mattaini. “Particularly for a journal with a central focus on contributions of behavioral and cultural sciences to social justice and human rights, open access is essential. Open Journal Systems and in particular the responsive support of the UIC Library and ACCC provide a scaffold of stability, access and efficiency for the journal. We truly appreciate this support, and encourage others to become involved in OJS and the open access movement.”

University Librarian Mary M. Case was very pleased that the Library is able to offer this new service, even in these tight budget times. “Partnering with the UIC faculty to promote open access to their scholarly endeavors is a strategic goal of the Library. OJS is the first in a series of tools that the Library and ACCC will be introducing to the campus in support of this goal. We are very excited about Behavior and Social Issues joining our program, and look forward to working with others at UIC.”

The UIC installation of OJS is a joint project of the University Library and the UIC Academic Computing and Communications Center (ACCC), and will be available in the near future to anyone in the UIC community who edits or manages a scholarly journal. The Library’s effort is being headed by Nancy John, Digital Publishing Librarian, Sandy De Groote, Assistant Health Sciences Librarian (Peoria) and Lisa Wallis, Assistant Information Services Librarian (LHS). Technical support in the Library is being provided by Nancy John, Francis Kayiwa, Library Systems Coordinator, and Ellen Starkman, Library Systems Coordinator. Ted Maas and Bob Goldstein are managing the project for the ACCC. For more information, contact nrj@uic.edu or sgroote@uic.edu.

The ISI JCR is an online quantitative database for comparing and evaluating the influence of journals in the areas of science, technology, and social sciences.

Unsworth co-founded Postmodern Culture, the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities, in 1990. In 2000, he established the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium. He was the first director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia.

He received the 2005 Richard W. Lyman Award from the National Humanities Center.

He has conducted research projects and publishes widely on the topic of electronic scholarship.

The lecture takes place on Friday, April 28, at 2:00 pm, in room 713 of UIC’s Student Center East (750 S. Halsted). A reception will follow the presentation.