eScholarship Introduces New Submission Management System

eScholarship Launches New Submission Management System

The eScholarship team is excited to announce the official launch of our new submission management system.  

This milestone marks the completion of a two-phased project, begun in 2009, to transition eScholarship (UC’s Open Access scholarly publishing and institutional repository service) onto a new platform designed to better serve the publishing and dissemination needs of our users.  The first phase of the project focused on creating a customized access interface for eScholarship content, emphasizing local branding and robust tools for interaction with the publications.

This most recent transition to a new submission management system has enabled increased flexibility and agile technical infrastructure, freeing us to adapt our services as user needs evolve and new research practices give rise to new forms of scholarship.

eScholarship's new submission management system provides users with targeted workflows for managing a range of publication types. Scholars working with any of eScholarship's 40+ original academic journals now have access to the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform, favored by over 8,000 Open Access journals worldwide.  OJS provides a robust, multi-lingual platform for managing the submission, peer review and editing processes associated with journal publishing. Scholars submitting other types of publications to eScholarship (including working papers, monographs and postprints) now benefit from an intuitive, streamlined submission management workflow built in-house by CDL.

In conjunction with the launch of this new system, the eScholarship team has developed a new help center for eScholarship administrators, editors, authors and reviewers.  This help center features a series of short tutorial videos that offer step-by-step instructions for completing specific tasks within the new submission management system, as well as detailed PDF manuals that provide more in-depth workflow description and instruction for users.

Learn more about the advantages of publishing with eScholarship:

http://escholarship.org/publish_overview.html

View the eScholarship Help Center: 

http://submit.escholarship.org/help    

To inquire about publishing with eScholarship, contact us:

help@eScholarship.org

Dissing the Dissertation
January 9, 2012 - 3:00am
By Scott Jaschik
Inside Higher Ed


Discussion at MLA 2012 (Seattle, 3-6 January 2012) about the evolution of the Ph.D. Dissertation, the length of time spent creating the document, and the role for digital publication, alternate forms of content, and the push to shorten the time to complete the Ph.D.

"The average humanities doctoral student takes nine years to earn a Ph.D. That fact was cited frequently here (and not with pride) at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Richard E. Miller, an English professor at Rutgers University's main campus in New Brunswick, said that the nine-year period means that those finishing dissertations today started them before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Kindles, iPads or streaming video had been invented."

"The MLA's discussion of the dissertation is in some ways an outgrowth of a much-discussed report issued by the association in 2006 about tenure and promotion practices. That report questioned the idea that producing monographs should be the determining factor in tenure decisions. When the report was released, many MLA leaders said that the ideas the association was endorsing also called for reconsideration of graduate education, and especially of the dissertation.
As part of the process of encouraging change, the MLA recently conducted a survey of its doctoral-granting departments. Among the findings:

• 62 percent of departments reported that their graduate schools have guidelines for dissertations, but most of those guidelines are general, dealing with issues such as timelines, composition of committees and so forth, and not dictating the form of a dissertation.
• 33 percent of departments have written descriptions of what kind of dissertation is expected of graduate students.
• Minorities of departments have specific rules authorizing nontraditional formats for dissertations, and even smaller minorities of departments have approved a dissertation using one of those formats.
• Of those with traditional dissertation length requirements, the range of minimums was 150 to 400 pages. Most maximums were 400 to 500 pages."

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/09/mla-considers-radical-changes-dissertation#ixzz1jAryoOix
Inside Higher Ed

UC Library Reprints Service Launches

Do you need holiday gift ideas?  The UC Library Reprints service has been launched just in time!  In partnership with Hewlett-Packard, many public domain volumes digitized from the UC libraries by Internet Archive and Google are now available for purchase on Amazon.com.

Currently, approximately 30,000 books are directly linked from HathiTrust via a "Buy a copy" link to a UC-branded portal (http://uc.bookprep.com) where users can view the HP-prepared version of the text and follow a link to purchase it on Amazon.  Additional books are being ingested into the service continuously. 

Three different possible access points exist for reprints: the "Buy a copy" link in HathiTrust described above, the BookPrep portal site, and Amazon.com.  The Hathi links are intended to facilitate serendipitous discovery, while users specifically searching for titles available as reprints should be directed to the BookPrep site.  Amazon's catalog will help to bring the reprints to a larger audience.

Here are a few examples:
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822013514203
http://uc.bookprep.com/book/uc2.ark:/13960/t6tx36d5m
http://uc.bookprep.com/book/uc2.ark:/13960/t9g44ms65

http://www.amazon.com/Biographical-dictionary-followers-imitators-important/dp/1125241810/

Further information about the Reprints service is available on CDL's website: http://www.cdlib.org/services/collections/massdig/pod.html

CWRU Colloquium on Building a Culture for Digital Scholarship

Videos Now Available: Case Western Reserve University Colloquium on Building a Culture for Digital Scholarship

On November 7-8, 2011, Case Western Reserve University held the Freedman Center Colloquium on Building a Culture for Digital Scholarship.  The colloquium addressed the nature and state of digital scholarship, the support and infrastructure necessary to ensure faculty and student success, the changes in the academic culture that are essential for digital scholarship to thrive, and new forms of scholarly communication that are underway or essential to exploit the advantages of digital scholarship.

The Colloquium was organized under the aegis of the Freedman Center of the Kelvin Smith Library, in collaboration with the College of Arts and Sciences, and University Information Technology Services. 

A playlist listing all of the sessions is available at:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL01C4BA2386A6553A

Below is a listing of the individual presentations, the names and affiliations of the speakers, and the URLs for each of the separate videos:

1.       “Introduction to the Program.”  Arnold Hirshon, Associate Provost and University Librarian, Case Western Reserve University

“Scholars and the Mind.”  Dr. Laura Mandell, Professor of English and Associate Director of NINES, co-director of 18thConnect, and the director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture, Texas A & M University.

http://youtu.be/bnDLPuab91g

 

2.       “Advancing Digital Scholarship.”  Speaker: Stephen Chapman, Project Manager, Harvard Law School Library, Digital Lab.   http://youtu.be/x19ojMr5k2E

3.       “Cultural Change in Higher Education and Advanced Research: What We Are Learning.” Dr. Amy Friedlander, Senior Advisor in the Office of the Assistant Director of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences at the US National Science Foundation.  http://youtu.be/281ytedJ7h4

4.       “New Forms of Scholarly Communication.”  Speaker: Dr. Neni Panourgia, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, and affiliated faculty at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Culture, and the Harriman Institute.   http://youtu.be/ttSouSIc0is

5.       “Moving Forward: A Panel Discussion.”  Panelists: Dr. Laura Mandell; Stephen Chapman; Neni Panourgia; Dean Cyrus Taylor (CWRU Arts and Sciences); Lev Gonick (CWRU Vice President for Information Technology Services).   Moderator: Arnold Hirshon (CWRU Associate Provost and University Librarian)   http://youtu.be/WXgrgP6E4Fk

For further information, please contact: Arnold Hirshon, Associate Provost and University Librarian, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University arnold.hirshon@case.edu  216-368-0688

The Occupy Wall Street Library Regrows in Manhattan | American Libraries Magazine

The Occupy Wall Street Library Regrows in Manhattan | American Libraries Magazine
Christina Zabriske
American Libraries, Wed, 11/16/2011 - 12:05

"The People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street was destroyed in the early morning hours of November 15. Without warning or provocation hundreds of militarized New York police officers cleared the park starting at 1 a.m. The library was torn down in the dark of night and its books, laptops, archives, and support materials were thrown into dumpsters by armed police and city sanitation workers. Numerous library staff were arrested, and, in one case, a librarian strapped the notebooks of original poetry from the library’s poetry readings to her body before lending aid to comrades who had been pepper-sprayed."

"Prior to its destruction, the library had reached new levels of growth with laptops, a Wi-Fi hub, and a tent donated by author and rock legend Patti Smith and dubbed “Fort Patti.” The library also had thousands of circulating volumes. Library staff rightfully prided themselves on their collection, the entirety of which was donated by private citizens and corporations for the general public good. The collection included the holy books of every faith, books reflecting the entire political spectrum, and works for all ages on a huge range of topics. These were thrown into dumpsters amidst tents, tables, blankets, and anything else on the Zuccotti Park site."

"Amidst it all, there was also a functioning library, a small one under fire, but a library just the same. While the future of the Wall Street occupation is unclear, these protesters still believe in what libraries offer everyone. For these activists “The library is open” has become a battle cry."

CHRISTIAN ZABRISKIE is the founder of Urban Librarians Unite and coauthor of Grassroots Library Advocacy: A Special Report (ALA Editions, 2012).

Ed. note: Late Wednesday morning, the Occupy movement launched Occupy Educated, explaining the action as “an emergency response to the destruction of the library at Occupy Wall Street, a clear attempt to destroy the education of passionate people who are tired of living in a deeply flawed system. Razing libraries and burning books has historically failed every time; this will be the most colossal failure to repress education in history, because the education will not be centralized.”

American Libraries, Wed, 11/16/2011 - 12:05

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science

The New Einsteins Will Be Scientists Who Share

From cancer to cosmology, researchers could race ahead by working together—online and in the open

By MICHAEL NIELSEN    Wall Street Journal      OCTOBER 29, 2011

In January 2009, a mathematician at Cambridge University named Tim Gowers decided to use his blog to run an unusual social experiment. He picked out a difficult mathematical problem and tried to solve it completely in the open, using his blog to post ideas and partial progress. He issued an open invitation for others to contribute their own ideas, hoping that many minds would be more powerful than one. He dubbed the experiment the Polymath Project.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204644504576653573191370088.html

The Rowland papers: UC Irvine Special Collections

The Rowland papers

UCI Libraries Special Collections & Archives unveil Nobel laureate's research archives

Deep in the dusty basement at Rowland Hall, more than 300 cartons filled with papers, photos, videos, transparencies, slides, cartoons, audio tapes, books and more lay in disarray that belied the meticulous scientific precision of their owner – F. Sherwood Rowland.

When the Nobel laureate in chemistry donated it all to UC Irvine Libraries’ Department of Special Collections & Archives in 2009, archivists began a kind of archaeological dig. They sorted, labeled, and cataloged scientific research and personal correspondence, and what has emerged is a portrait of a man internationally recognized not only for his work in the laboratory, but also for his efforts to inform other scientists, the public, and policymakers about threats posed by chemical pollutants to Earth’s atmosphere.

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 Mitchell Brown, exhibit curator and research librarian for Chemistry, Earth System Science and Russian Studies, says the collection is available to researchers who want to peruse the hand-written notes, lab cards and more. The only thing missing, he says, is the actual notebook in which the CFC discovery is noted. That notebook belongs to Molina.

Calling Rowland the "Galileo story of his time," Brown says much of the correspondence shows the atmospheric chemist as "calm, reasonable and thoughtful in the face of critics who weren't." Rowland saved editorial cartoons critical of his findings, and many of the originals hang in his home. He saved celebratory messages as well, including an answering machine message from "Al" (that would be Al Gore) congratulating him on his Nobel Prize.

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The Partners of the UCI Libraries Present
The Opening of our Fall Exhibit
  
Discovery of a Lifetime: F. Sherwood Rowland and the Ozone Layer

Featuring a talk by

Ralph J. Cicerone
President of the National Academy of Sciences and
Chancellor Emeritus, UC Irvine

A special evening with F. Sherwood Rowland
With remarks by UC Irvine Chancellor Michael V. Drake, M.D.

Friday, November 18, 2011
6:00 pm
Langson Library, UC Irvine