Tag Archives: scholarly publishing

Homo Naledi’s other revolution

When the Homo Naledi discovery was announced I was excited to see that the initial publication was in an open access journal, eLife. In fact to me this was a huge relief for, now that my adjunct teaching days are done and I am gainfully employed in the museum sector, I no longer have access to journals through a university library. (But, then again, I won’t have to rewrite my human evolution lecture. So there’s that.)

One day at work I decided to abstain from my usual time wasting behaviors of Facebook and reading the comments section of the Washington Post, and instead invest my downtime in reading the Naledi piece. Look at me! I’m reading an article for fun! Truly this is one of the most liberating experiences of being outside the academy: now I read scholarship for pleasure.

I was proud of myself for making it all the way to the end, feeling like I got it. Okay, so I skimmed over some of the anatomy stuff, but not all of it. Nothing I can’t handle with a dictionary nearby. With no one to impress with my studiousness except my fellow librarians (who are all, of course, very studious), I looked forward to sharing a bottle of wine with my wife (a biologist and “real” scientist) and telling her all about the findings. We frequently have animated discussions about human evolution, so it came as a surprise when she didn’t want to talk about Homo Naledi rather what grabbed her attention first was that the authors had chosen to go OA.

Jessica has established herself an open access skeptic in our previous kitchen conversations, which unfolded something like…

Her: So where did they publish? Didn’t you say it was the cover of Nature?

Me: No. Cover of National Geographic. Lee Berger had a NGS Explorer grant.

Her: Where then? Science?

Me: No, they went open access. Something called eLife.

Her: Really?! Wow. But why? *gives side eye*
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The Ethnographic Book Trailer?

Movie trailers have been around for decades, and part of the fun of going to the cinema was always the sneak peaks of upcoming movies. With the proliferation of digital software like iMovie, and the ease of uploading just about anything to YouTube, the trailer has migrated from the world of movies over to the book industry. Trade presses regularly create book trailers to promote their new releases even while some authors bemoan the fact that they must now push their written texts using visual media. In her 2013 New Yorker article, “The Awkward Art of Book Trailers,” Rachel Arons recognizes that although book trailers “are often dismal,” there exist instances of genuine creativity.

Should "academic" be added to the standard templates for trailers in iMovie?
Should “academic” be added to the standard templates for trailers in iMovie?

University presses seem to be jumping on the bandwagon, and some now produce trailers for their “cross-over” books. For Ruth Behar’s latest book, Traveling Heavy: A Memoir Between Journeys, Duke University Press released a short trailer featuring the author as she prepares for a trip. For her monograph, We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program, author Bernadette Atuahene gives a passionate two-minute overview of her argument. Princeton University Press produced a dramatic one-minute trailer for Adrienne Mayor’s book, The Amazons, and a thoughtful two-minute synopsis featuring sociologist Amin Ghaziani discussing his book, There Goes the Gayborhood?.

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A continuum of peer review

Open Access venues need a business model and long term planning if they are to achieve sustainability. The perennial question of “Who pays for OA?” can be answered in a variety of ways. Each method of financing OA has its pros and cons, and not every path is equally feasible for every discipline. PLoS was able to grow to world-wide prominence fairly rapidly because it was funded with generous grants at infancy and now it sustains itself with high author-fees (n.b. these can be reduced or waived in some cases).

What worked for PLoS isn’t necessarily going to work for cultural anthropology, generous funding is less abundant in the humanities and social sciences. One option that should be given more thought is library supported publishing as a variety of green OA. I will describe some publishing models from China and Japan that produce publications through a different kind of peer review process. This will be a challenge for some readers who hold that peer review as we know it is the defining quality of serious knowledge production, if something is not peer reviewed than it must be of less value or no value at all. In fact there are shades of peer review, if we see peer review as existing on a continuum new possibilities for OA publication present themselves. Continue reading →

I think Princeton University Press kinda jumped the shark on this one

I’m suspicious of for-profit journal publishers, but I like university presses. They are often value-driven, down on their heels, and plucky. When the death of publishing at the hands of The Digital was first announced, they were pretty depressed. But since then they’ve moved into ebooks, developed new ways to market their books, and have done a good job embracing the new.

Princeton is a good example of a large, (relatively) wealthy press with a lot of cultural capital that is looking for new ways to engage audiences. I think this ‘trailer’ (yes, you read that right) for their new book 1177 B.C. just stepped over the line. My favorite part is when the words “NO MORE MYCENEANS” start drifting towards you while the soundtrack from Lord of the Rings plays in the background.