As an academic, I need to regularly have empirical research publications in top-tier, peer-reviewed journals. Nothing else matters. Many senior colleagues bemoan the fact that I need to play double duty…yet the system still exists.

Having found my voice in the academic community and a means to engage in the meaningful deployment of my abilities across institutional and national boundaries thanks to the open internet, I have made yet another career "modification" - one where I can pass on a new perspective to students considering teaching languages.

On the users’ side, a number of indicators are examined: share of firms and investment financed by bank credit, share of the population with account at a formal financial institution by gender and by income groups, share of firms citing finance as a major obstacle, share of adults using accounts to receive transfers and wages, share of bank borrowers in the population, and, finally, the extent of the use of insurance products.

ccording to this blog,

t is possible to identify a wide variety of actors who have contributed to ashift towards, and/or reproduced, academic capitalism:

Finding out what has been published. Determining where a copy of that item may be located. Obtaining a copy of that item. Interpreting the meaning of that item (i.e. it may be written in very technical language).

"' First, humanists must be aware that they are engaging primarily in social, not technical, end

Our students are required to develop a professional digital identity, and their blogs are central to this.

I spoke, I was in tears at all the frustration I had felt, the people in the room were touched.

Willkommen in diesem B1 Sprach- und Kulturkurs Deutsch!  Dieser Kurs ist für alle diejenigen offen, die sich für die deutsche Sprache und Kultur interessieren (kann in Kanada oder anderswo in der Welt sein). Teilnehmende werden notwendige Einsichten in das (Uni-)Leben in Deutschland und anderen deutschsprachigen Ländern bekommen. Sie müssen also gar nicht nach Deutscland fahren, um zu erleben, wie sich Deutschland anfühlt.Vision: Dieser Kurs möchte Lernern mit beschränktem Zugang eine kostengünstige Alternative zum Deutschlernen auf B1-Niveau anbieten.Für Wen: Interessenten jeder Art, die einen Studienaufenthalt in Deutschland planen oder sich generell für das Leben in Deutschland heute interessieren. Übergreifendes Ziel des Kurses: Eine aktive Gemeinschaft von Deutschlernenden bilden, deren Mitglieder sich mithilfe nützlicher Webtools auch über Länder- und Zeitgrenzen hinweg selbstständig dem Deutschlernen widmen können.Kursdauer: 10-12 WochenWöchentlicher Arbeitsaufwand: 3-5 StundenKurskommunikation zwischen Kursleitung und KursteilnehmendenRegelmäßige Umfragen an Studenten, um Bedürfnisse der Teilnehmenden zu erfassenLernstandsmessung: Eine Kombination aus automatisiertem Feedback und persönlichen Kommentaren der Kursleitung Kursmaterialien: alle verwendeten Materialien sind kostenfrei im Internet zugänglich und von jederman nutzbar (OER)Kursbuch: Deutsch im Blick. Online German Course Components including textbook/ audio/ video/ etc. CC-BY-NC-ND: UT Austin. Available: http://coerll.utexas.edu/dib/ 

Corin Throsby human terms as a 'companion' who 'converses' with her, and in this way blurs the distinction between author and text:

One challenge is whether – or how – this conversation becomes generative of traditional scholarship, such as a more linear, peer-reviewed article.

explicate

Facebook Twitter LinkedIn GooglePlus jQuery(document).ready(function() { "use strict"; $ = jQuery; var decal = $('.c-socialbar-cta:not(.horizontal)').parent().width(); $('.c-socialbar-cta:not(.horizontal)').css({'margin-left':decal+5}); $('.c-socialbar-cta:not(.horizontal)').fadeIn(); $(window).scroll(function() { socialbar.scroll(); }); }); var socialbar = (function(jQuery) { var timeOutId = 0; var jitterBuffer = 20; return { scroll:function() { var offset = $('.c-socialbar-cta:not(.horizontal)').parent().offset(); var top = offset.top -150; //alert(offset.top); if ($(window).scrollTop() > top) { $('.c-socialbar-cta:not(.horizontal)').addClass('fixed'); } else { $('.c-socialbar-cta:not(.horizontal)').removeClass('fixed'); } } }; })(); Message from the president: 'This is a victory for academic freedom'

"The university is thankful that the tireless efforts of governments, diplomats and colleagues across Canada and internationally were successful. The Concordia community — in particular faculty and staff members and unions — played a critical role in securing her release. This is a victory for academic freedom."

Application Modern higher education institutions have unprecedentedly large and detailed collections of data about their students, and are growing increasingly sophisticated in their ability to merge datasets from diverse sources. As a result, institutions have great opportunities to analyze and intervene on student performance and student learning. While there are many potential applications of student data analysis in the institutional context, we focus here on four approaches that cover a broad range of the most common activities: data-based enrollment management, admissions, and financial aid decisions; analytics to inform broad-based program or policy changes related to retention; early-alert systems focused on successful degree completion; and adaptive courseware.

We commonly look at Ivy League institutions as the standard of higher education in America, but the truth is that the majority of the nation's workforce, innovation identity and manufacturing futures are tied to those institutions which graduate outside of the realm of high achievers from wealthy families. 

ironically while continuing to employ adjunct faculty

uthorship (and therecognition that flows therefrom) is the undisputed coin ofthe realm in academia: it embodies the enterprise of schol-arship (Bourdieu, 1991; Cronin, 1984, 2000; Franck, 1999

o state the obvious, public affirmation of au-thorship is absolutely central to the operation of the aca-demic reward system, whether one is a classicist,sociologist, or experimental physicist.

Since the dawn of civilization, there have been a number of irrefutable ‘golden laws’ of business, including the following:

The new title and pricing trends in Table 1 and Table 2 were also evident in Table 3. University press totals for these three years was 1,908. Even if statistics were excluded from the final totals of commercial presses, the output of commercial presses in 2012 was higher than the university press totals for all three years; and their tally for 2012–14 reached 14,493 (which is 659.59% more than for university presses). The suggested retail price differences were again rather dramatic between university presses and commercial publishers in several marker fields, including sociology (+75.48%); political theory (+45.52%); political science [End Page 109] in North and South America (+113.26%); mathematics (+33.56%); physics (+66.55%); and natural science (+128.24%). The cost to buy one copy of the university press books in Table 3 in these seven fields was $1549.51, while commercially published books cost $2379.84 (+53.59% higher) (see Table 3 for the details).

At the University of Ottawa, Canada, the UO Press and the UO Library have developed a strategic partnership to publish and disseminate selected new monographs as gold open access (OA). Starting in 2013, the Library agreed to fund three books at C$10,000 per book (a total of C$30,000 per year) in order to remove barriers to accessing scholarship and to align with scholarly communication goals of the University.

“The monograph has been at risk for a long time,” Sisler notes. “Journals, in science in particular, have eaten up library budgets that were formerly spent on humanities and social-science monographs. As the number of units in print goes down, the price per book goes up, and you sell fewer; it becomes a vicious cycle.

And although this trend does decline eventually, the decline starts much later than is commonly asserted, starting only in 2000, and thus coinciding less with the serials crisis than with the succession of economic downturns that have squeezed university funding since the turn of the century.

Variable costs of academic journals are paid by the publisher and, as long as journals were printed and distributed physically, these costs were sizeable. In the print era, publishers had to typeset the manuscripts, print copies of journals, and send them to various subscribers. Hence, each time an issue was printed, sent and sold, another copy had to be printed to be sent and sold. However, with the advent of electronic publishing, these costs became marginal.

In that sense and contrary to any other business, academic journals are an atypical information good, because publishers neither pay the provider of the primary good—authors of scholarly papers—nor for the quality control—peer review. On the publisher’s side, average first-copy costs of journal papers are estimated to range between 20 and 40 US dollars per page, depending on rejection rates [37];

Data from the mid-1990s by Tenopir and King [12] suggests an increase of commercial publishers’ share of the output; by then, commercial publishers accounted for 40% of the journal output, while scientific/professional societies accounted for 25% and university presses and educational publishers for 16%.

Despite the fact that it is generally believed that the digitalization of knowledge diffusion has led to a higher concentration of scientific literature in the hands of a few major players, no study has analyzed the evolution over time of these major publishers’ share of the scientific output in the various disciplines. This paper aims at providing such analysis, based on all journals indexed in the Web of Science over the 1973–2013 period.

On the other hand, papers in arts and humanities are still largely dispersed amongst many smaller publishers, with the top five commercial publishers only accounting for 20% of humanities papers and 10% of arts papers in 2013, despite a small increase since the second half of the 1990s.

scientific societies such as the ACS or the APS publish many journals in the specialties of chemistry and physics respectively, for which they successfully managed the shift from print to electronic.

Profit margins decreased, however, between 1998 and 2003, although profits remained relatively stable. Absolute profits as well as the profit margin then rose again, with the exception of the 2008–2009 period of economic crisis, resulting in profits reaching an all-time high of more than 2 billion USD in 2012 and 2013. The profit margin of the company’s Scientific, Technical & Medical division is even higher (Fig 7B).

The few open access journals that managed to acquire substantial prestige such as some of Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals did so mostly because of the very high prestige of founding editors, including nobel laureates. It is also the reason why simply calling for researchers to switch to open access outlets won’t work. Since careers and funding depend on the proven ability to publish in established “top journals”, researchers in general and early-career researchers in particular have strong incentives to avoid newly founded open access outlets. But there are groups of people that could make a difference: journal editors and their editorial review boards. A huge part of a journal’s reputation is effectively derived from its editors. If the whole editorial board of a prestigious journal decided to collectivley leave this journal behind and open up a new one, it’s very likely that this new journal would outperform the journal they had left behind.

The American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL

How not to promote technology in teaching: An open letter

Technologies that live within closed systems create roadblocks in students’ learning pathways.

We find ourselves at a decisive moment. This is the time to recognize that the very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective civil disobedience. It is the time to emerge from hiding and put our names behind this act of resistance. You may feel isolated, but there are many of us. The anger, desperation and fear of losing our library infrastructures, voiced across the internet, tell us that. This is the time for us custodians, being dogs, humans or cyborgs, with our names, nicknames and pseudonyms, to raise our voices. Share this letter - read it in public - leave it in the printer. Share your writing - digitize a book - upload your files. Don't let our knowledge be crushed. Care for the libraries - care for the metadata - care for the backup. Water the flowers - clean the volcanoes.

In Elsevier's case against Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, the judge said: "simply making copyrighted content available for free via a foreign website, disserves the public interest"

With over 36 million visitors each month, the San Francisco-based platform-capitalist company Academia.edu is hugely popular with researchers. Its founder and CEO Richard Price maintains it is the ‘largest social-publishing network for scientists’, and ‘larger than all its competitors put together’. Yet posting on Academia.edu is far from being ethically and politically equivalent to using an institutional open access repository, which is how it is often understood by academics. Academia.edu’s financial rationale rests on the ability of the venture-capital-funded professional entrepreneurs who run it to monetize the data flows generated by researchers. Academia.edu can thus be seen to have a parasitical relationship to a public education system from which state funding is steadily being withdrawn.

In the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, for example, where universities are under effective control of neoliberal states, academic freedom has no legal standing

Is the only reason we persist with journals and their articles is because they provide a convenient means to weigh the pig?