A Comparative Study of Scientific Journal Databases in the Social Sciences and the Humanities
July 28, 2009
A Comparative Study of Scientific Journal Databases in the Social Sciences and the Humanities 
JournalBase *- *A Comparative International Study of Scientific Journal Databases in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH)
Michèle Dassa et Christine Kosmopoulos / Cybergeo, The Electronic European Journal of Geography / Dossier publié le 25 juin 2009 / Document published on 25 June 2009 / Last updated : 17 July 2009.
Presented here for the first time in a comparative table are the contents of the databases that inventory the journals in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH), of the Web of Science (published by Thomson Reuters) and of Scopus (published by Elsevier), as well as of the lists European Reference Index for Humanities (ERIH) (published by the European Science Foundation and of the French Agence pour l’Evaluation de la Recherche et de l’Enseignement Supérieur (AERES).
With some 20,000 entries, this is an almost exhaustive overview of the wealth of publications in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, at last made available in this table, adopting the same nomenclature for classing the journals according to their disciplines as the one used in 27 workstations of the European Science Foundation.
The multiple assignments reveal the multidisciplinarity of the journals, which is quite frequent in SSH, but also sometimes the incoherence of databases that have not been corrected.The research was carried out in 2008 with the financial support of the TGE Adonis of the CNRS.
An updated version will soon be presented online.The final objective of this project, which concerns the entire international community of the Social Sciences and the Humanities, is to put online, in a bilingual English/French version, the database of JournalBase in interactive mode on a collaborative platform, as well as the final report of the study, so that the decision-makers, the scientists, the experts in scientific information have access to up-to-date information, and so that they may contribute to forward movement in the reflection on these questions, through the exchange of experiences and of good working practices.
JournalBase has been updated on the 17 July 2009. It includes the information on open access journals indexed in the DOAJ.
Source
[http://www.cybergeo.eu/index22492.html]
Full Text
[http://www.cybergeo.eu/pdf/22492]
Leonardo: New Criteria for New Media
May 20, 2009
Leonardo: New Criteria for New Media
University of Maine’s criteria for New Media achievement serve as a model for faculty at other institutions.
Academia’s goal may be the free exchange of ideas, but up to now many universities have been wary–if not downright dismissive–of their professors using the Internet and other digital media to supercharge that exchange, especially in the arts and humanities.
Peer review committees are supposed to assess a researcher’s standing in the field, but to date most have ignored reputations established by blogging, publishing DVDs, or contributing to email lists.
In a signal that some universities are warming to digital scholarship, however, the winter 2009 issue of MIT’s Leonardo magazine–itself a traditional peer review journal, though known for experimenting with networked media–has published a feature on the changing criteria for excellence in the Internet age.
To make its point as concretely as possible, the feature includes the recently approved promotion and tenure guidelines of the University of Maine’s New Media Department, together with an argument for expanding recognition entitled “New Criteria for New Media.”
Rather than throw time-honored benchmarks for excellence out the window, “New Criteria for New Media” tries to extend them into the 21st century. To supplement the “closed” peer review process familiar from traditional journals, …. [University Of Maine's ] criteria recognize the value of the “open peer review” employed in recognition metrics such as ThoughtMesh and The Pool.
>>>The Pool < <<
[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2008/05/everyone-into-pool.html]
>>>ThoughMesh< <<
[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2008/05/thoughtmesh-innovative-scholarly.html]
As the name suggests, open peer review allows contributions from any community member rather than a group of experts, and all reviews are public; when combined with an appropriate recognition metric, the result is much faster evaluations than possible via the customary approach.
“New Criteria for New Media” also urges academic reviews to reward collaboration in new media research; valuable roles include conceptual architect, designer, engineer, or even matchmaker (e.g., introducing two other researchers whose collaboration results in a publication).
Because the University of Maine hopes other institutions will adopt these criteria and adapt them to their own needs, it is releasing them under a Creative Commons (CC-by) license. [snip]
The new criteria have already been sought after by individual tenure candidates and cited in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
[http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i38/38a01001.htm]
You can find them in Leonardo’s winter 2009 issue (vol. 42 no. 1)
[http://newmedia.umaine.edu/feature.php?id=927]
Leonardo: New Criteria for New Media
Abstract
This paper argues for redefining evaluation criteria for faculty working in new media research and makes specific recommendations for promotion and tenure committees in U.S. universities.
[http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/leon.2009.42.1.71]
PDF (Subscribers)
[http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon.2009.42.1.71]
PDF Plus (Subscibers)
[http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/leon.2009.42.1.71]
See Also
[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2009/04/university-of-maine-promotion-and_20.html]
[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2009/04/university-of-maine-promotion-and.html]
See Also Also The ThoughMesh Version(s)
[http://thoughtmesh.net/publish/275.php]
University of Maine | Promotion and Tenure Guidelines || Promotion and Tenure Guidelines | New Criteria for New Media |
New Media Department, University of Maine
Promotion and Tenure Guidelines Addendum: Rationale for Redefined Criteria
New Criteria for New Media
Version 2.2, January 2007
Authors: Joline Blais, Jon Ippolito, and Owen Smith in collaboration with Steve Evans and Nate Stormer.
ABSTRACT: An argument for redefining promotion and tenure criteria for faculty in new media departments of today’s universities.
Introduction
Recognition and achievement in the field of new media must be measured by standards as high as but different from those in established artistic or scientific disciplines. As the reports from the American Council of Learned Societies[1], the Modern Language Association[2], and the University of Maine[3] recommend, promotion and tenure guidelines must be revised to encourage the creative and innovative use of technology if universities are to remain competitive in the 21st century.
The following points summarize some of the key areas in which new media research departs from traditional academic scholarship, with the aim of providing a rationale for specific criteria for promotion and tenure detailed elsewhere.
New form and content
The differences between traditional and new media excellence lie in both form and content. The hard-copy format of traditional review documentation, such as photocopies or slides, is insufficient for evaluating new media work; screenshots do little justice to electronic projects based on innovative interactive or participatory design. As the MLA puts it, “evaluative bodies should review faculty members’ work in the medium in which it was produced. For example, Web-based projects should be viewed online, not in printed form.”[4]
Further complicating the evaluation of new media achievements is the fact that they are often interdisciplinary, as reflected by the current University of Maine New Media faculty, whose backgrounds range from engineering to computer science to fine art to photojournalism to literature.
For example, while art professors typically divide clearly into critical (Art History) and creative (Studio Art) faculties, new media’s brief history often requires its practitioners to develop a critical context for their own creative work. This is why the majority of pre-eminent new media critics are also artists.[5] It is also why new media research spans numerous genres, from critical essays to political activism to community-building to software design.
Limitations of academic journals
These differences may require evaluators of new media artist-researchers to look beyond the usual standards applicable in other disciplines. As noted by a 2003 National Academies report:
Because the field of [Information Technology and Creative Practices] is young and dynamic, ITCP production is hard to evaluate. Traditional review panels…may be hampered by their members’ ties to single disciplines and the absence of a time-tested consensus about what constitutes good work in ITCP and why. [6]
Ironically, the National Academies study found that the highest benchmark for success in traditional academic departments, publication in peer-reviewed journals, is less relevant to success in new media–and empirically less an accurate measure of stature in the field–than more supple or timely forms of intellectual exposition:
The gold standard for academia–and the criterion most easily understood by parties outside a given subdiscipline–is the so-called archival journal (often published by scholarly or professional societies) that involves considerable editorial selection plus prepublication review and revision, which function as a screening system for quality. But the long lead time for such publications poses problems for subdisciplines in which timeliness–quickly getting an idea into the field–matters.[7]
Leonardo magazine (MIT Press) is currently the only print magazine universally recognized as a peer-reviewed journal about new media. There are currently a handful of networked peer-reviewed journals devoted to new media, such as Leonardo’s Electronic Almanac (Cambridge), Fibreculture (Sydney), and First Monday (Chicago).
Yet the field’s most prominent print publishers and research archivists[8] have acknowledged a 15-25 year lag and limited exposure that makes print publications far less relevant for new media research. Although promising new paradigms for distributed publication are on the horizon, at the time of writing these systems are only in the planning stage.[9] Finally, as the MLA warns, participation in electronic scholarship should not place extra demands on a researcher[10]; an accomplishment in new media research should substitute for a print article or monograph, not merely supplement them.
Alternative Recognition Measures
Given the accessibility and timeliness required for new media research, the following measures of recognition should be prioritized in the evaluation of new media research candidates:
1. Invited / edited publications
Invitations to publish in edited electronic journals or printed magazines and books should be recognized as the kind of peer influence that in other fields would be signaled by acceptance in peer-reviewed journals.
2. Live conferences
The 2003 National Academies study concludes that conferences on new media, both face-to-face and virtual, offer a more useful and in some cases more prestigious venue for exposition than academic journals:
[The sluggishness of journal publications] is offset somewhat by a flourishing array of conferences and other forums, in both virtual and real space, that provide a sense of community and an outlet as well as feedback[11]….The prestige associated with presentations at major conferences actually makes some of them more selective than journals.[12]
New forms of conference archiving–such as archived Webcasts–add value and exposure to the research presented at conferences.
3. Citations
Citations are a valuable and versatile measure of peer influence because they may come from or point to a variety of genres, from Web sites to databases to books in print. Examples include citations in:
a. Electronic archives and recognition networks, such as the publicly accessible databases maintained by the Daniel Langlois Foundation (Montreal), the V2 organization (Rotterdam), the Database of Virtual Art (Berlin), and the Media Art Net database (Karlsruhe).
b. Books, printed journals, and newspapers. These are easier to find now, thanks to Google Scholar, Google Print, and Amazon’s “look inside the book” feature.
c. Syllabi and other pedagogical contexts. Google searches on .edu domains and citations of the author’s work in syllabi from outside universities can measure the academic currency of an individual researcher or her ideas. In the sciences, readings or projects cited on a syllabus are likely to be popular textbooks, but in an emerging field like new media, such recognition is a more valid marker of relevance.
4. Download / visitor counts
Downloads and other traffic-related statistics represent a measure of influence that has gained importance in the online community recently. As a 2005 open access study[13] concludes:
Whereas the significance of citation impact is well established, access of research literature via the Web provides a new metric for measuring the impact of articles – Web download impact.
Download impact is useful for at least two reasons:
(1) The portion of download variance that is correlated with citation counts provides an early-days estimate of probable citation impact that can begin to be tracked from the instant an article is made Open Access and that already attains its maximum predictive power after 6 months.
(2) The portion of download variance that is uncorrelated with citation counts provides a second, partly independent estimate of the impact of an article, sensitive to another form of research usage that is not reflected in citations (Kurtz 2004).
5. Impact in online discussions
Email discussion lists are the proving grounds of new media discourse. They vary greatly in tone and substance, but even the least moderated of such lists can subject their authors to rigorous–and at times withering–scrutiny.[14] Measures such as the number of list subscribers, geographic scope, the presence or absence of moderation, and the number of replies triggered by a given contribution can give a sense of the importance of each discussion list.[15]
6. Impact in the real world
While magazine columns and newspaper editorials may have little standing in traditional academic subjects, one of the strengths of new media are their relevance to a daily life that is increasingly inflected by the relentless proliferation of technologies. Even counting Google search returns on the author’s name or statistically improbable phrases can be a measure of real-world impact[16].
By privileging new media research with direct effect on local or global communities, the university can remain relevant in an age where much research takes place outside the ivory tower.
8. Net-native recognition metrics
Peer-evaluated online communities may invent their own measures of member evaluation, in which case they may be relevant to a researcher who participates in those communities. Examples of such self-policing communities include Slashdot, The Pool, Open Theory, and the Distributed Learning Project.
The MLA pins the responsibility for learning these new metrics on reviewers rather than the reviewed.[17] Given the mutability of such metrics, however, promotion and tenure candidates may be called upon to explain and give context to these metrics for their reviewers. Again, efforts to educate a scholar’s colleagues about new media should be considered part of that scholar’s research, not supplemental to it.
9. Reference letters
Letters of recommendation from outside referees are an important compensation for the irrelevance of traditional recognition venues. Nevertheless, it is insufficient merely to solicit such letters from professors tenured in new media at other universities, since so few exist.
More valuable is to use the measures outlined in this document to identify pre-eminent figures in new media, or to require new media promotion and tenure candidates to identify such figures and supply evidence that they qualify according to the criteria above.
[1] The ACLS recommends “policies for tenure and promotion that recognize and reward digital scholarship and scholarly communication; recognition should be given not only to scholarship that uses the humanities and social science cyberinfrastructure but also to scholarship that contributes to its design, construction, and growth….
We might expect younger colleagues to use new technologies with greater fluency and ease, but with tenure at stake, they will also be more risk-averse….
Senior scholars now have both the opportunity and the responsibility to take certain risks, first among which is to condone risk taking in their junior colleagues and their graduate students, making sure that such endeavors are appropriately rewarded.”
“Our Cultural Commonwealth,” report by the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 29 July 2006,
[http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber.htm[, accessed January 2, 2007.
[2] “Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship.” December 2006 report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion,
[http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion] accessed January 2, 2007.
[3] “The Commission encourages each department on campus, as well as the University as a whole, to examine promotion and tenure criteria to recognize and reward innovative uses of technology in teaching, research and service….the University needs to consider the criteria and standards used in the promotion and tenure process.
The Commission encourages each department and the University as a whole to consider whether faculty efforts in this area are recognized, valued, and/or encouraged.” November 2003 report of the University of Maine Commission on Information Technologies, accessed at
[http://www.umaine.edu/documents/CIT.pdf] on May 2, 2004.
[4] MLA Committee on Information Technology. “Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages.” 20 May 2000. ADE Bulletin 132 (2002): 94–95. 82, mirrored at
[http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital], accessed 2 January, 2007.
[5] A brief sampling of new media theorist-practitioners includes Simon Biggs (Cambridge University), Matthew Fuller (Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam), Mary Flanagan (Hunter), Alexander Galloway (NYU), Kenneth Goldberg (Berkeley), Eduardo Kac (Art Institute of Chicago), Natalie Jeremijenko (UCSD), Raphael Lozano-Hemmer (Karlstad University, Sweden), Lev Manovich (UCSD), Randall Packer (American University), Richard Rinehart (Berkeley), and Jeffrey Shaw (ZKM).
[6] National Research Council, Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2003), pp. 8-9.
[7] National Research Council, op. cit., p. 188.
[8] These estimates are from MIT’s Roger Malina (Director of Leonardo magazine) and the Daniel Langlois Foundation’s Alain Depocas (Director of the Centre for Documentation + Research), and are mirrored at
[http://cordova.asap.um.maine.edu/wiki/index.php/Standards_of_Recognition]
[9] The Interarchive project is a possible model for distributed publication; see
[http://newmedia.umaine.edu/interarchive]
[10] “Change in favor of a more capacious conception of scholarship, which we strongly endorse, should not mean ever-wider demands on faculty members, most especially those coming up for tenure and promotion.” MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, op. cit., p. 21.
[11] National Research Council, op. cit., pp. 8-9.
[12] National Research Council, op. cit., p. 188.
[13] Tim Brody and Stevan Harnad, “Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact”,
[http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10647/], accessed 5 March 2005.
[14] This recent
[http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0504/msg00051.html]
rejoinder by Morlock Elloi on the
> If you have any past publications that might help me understand your point of view, I would gladly read them.
While I understand that in paidspeakerworld the weight of the argument is computed as (volume of publications) x (number of speeches), on nettime and elsewhere closer to reality arguments stand for themselves.
[15] Electronic and email texts also have a currency acknowledged by leading institutions in the field. As of December 21, 2005, one of the premiere bibliographic indices in new media, the Langlois Foundation’s CR+D database, included the following indexation for “Jon Ippolito”:
* Author of 10 documents
* Subject of 48 documents
* Participant to 21 events
* Organizer of 2 events
Of the 10 documents by the author indexed, 1 is from an email list and 2 are parts of Web sites. In the case of artist and critic Alexander Galloway, the relevance of his online texts is even more striking: although by 2005 he was the author of several journal articles and an important book from MIT Press, the two documents that represented his writing in the CR+D database were both from email lists.
[16] A statistically significant number of Google returns, eg > 30, may be a necessary but insufficient condition for confirming global impact.
[17] “In evaluating scholarship for tenure and promotion, committees and administrators must take responsibility for becoming fully aware both of the mechanisms of oversight and assessment that already govern the production of a great deal of digital scholarship and of the well-established role of new media in humanities research.
It is of course convenient when electronic scholarly editing and writing are clearly analogous to their print counterparts. But when new media make new forms of scholarship possible, those forms can be assessed with the same rigor used to judge scholarly quality in print media. We must have the flexibility to ensure that as new sources and instruments for knowing develop, the meaning of scholarship can expand and remain relevant to our changing times.” MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, op. cit., p. 46.
[http://newmedia.umaine.edu/interarchive/new_criteria_for_new_media.html]
University of Maine | Promotion and Tenure Guidelines || Promotion and Tenure Guidelines | New Criteria for New Media |
April 30, 2009
University of Maine | Promotion and Tenure Guidelines || Promotion and Tenure Guidelines | New Criteria for New Media |
New Media Department, University of Maine
Promotion and Tenure Guidelines Addendum: Rationale for Redefined Criteria
New Criteria for New Media
Version 2.2, January 2007
Authors: Joline Blais, Jon Ippolito, and Owen Smith in collaboration with Steve Evans and Nate Stormer.
ABSTRACT: An argument for redefining promotion and tenure criteria for faculty in new media departments of today’s universities.
Introduction
Recognition and achievement in the field of new media must be measured by standards as high as but different from those in established artistic or scientific disciplines. As the reports from the American Council of Learned Societies[1], the Modern Language Association[2], and the University of Maine[3] recommend, promotion and tenure guidelines must be revised to encourage the creative and innovative use of technology if universities are to remain competitive in the 21st century.
The following points summarize some of the key areas in which new media research departs from traditional academic scholarship, with the aim of providing a rationale for specific criteria for promotion and tenure detailed elsewhere.
New form and content
The differences between traditional and new media excellence lie in both form and content. The hard-copy format of traditional review documentation, such as photocopies or slides, is insufficient for evaluating new media work; screenshots do little justice to electronic projects based on innovative interactive or participatory design. As the MLA puts it, “evaluative bodies should review faculty members’ work in the medium in which it was produced. For example, Web-based projects should be viewed online, not in printed form.”[4]
Further complicating the evaluation of new media achievements is the fact that they are often interdisciplinary, as reflected by the current University of Maine New Media faculty, whose backgrounds range from engineering to computer science to fine art to photojournalism to literature.
For example, while art professors typically divide clearly into critical (Art History) and creative (Studio Art) faculties, new media’s brief history often requires its practitioners to develop a critical context for their own creative work. This is why the majority of pre-eminent new media critics are also artists.[5] It is also why new media research spans numerous genres, from critical essays to political activism to community-building to software design.
Limitations of academic journals
These differences may require evaluators of new media artist-researchers to look beyond the usual standards applicable in other disciplines. As noted by a 2003 National Academies report:
Because the field of [Information Technology and Creative Practices] is young and dynamic, ITCP production is hard to evaluate. Traditional review panels…may be hampered by their members’ ties to single disciplines and the absence of a time-tested consensus about what constitutes good work in ITCP and why. [6]
Ironically, the National Academies study found that the highest benchmark for success in traditional academic departments, publication in peer-reviewed journals, is less relevant to success in new media–and empirically less an accurate measure of stature in the field–than more supple or timely forms of intellectual exposition:
The gold standard for academia–and the criterion most easily understood by parties outside a given subdiscipline–is the so-called archival journal (often published by scholarly or professional societies) that involves considerable editorial selection plus prepublication review and revision, which function as a screening system for quality. But the long lead time for such publications poses problems for subdisciplines in which timeliness–quickly getting an idea into the field–matters.[7]
Leonardo magazine (MIT Press) is currently the only print magazine universally recognized as a peer-reviewed journal about new media. There are currently a handful of networked peer-reviewed journals devoted to new media, such as Leonardo’s Electronic Almanac (Cambridge), Fibreculture (Sydney), and First Monday (Chicago).
Yet the field’s most prominent print publishers and research archivists[8] have acknowledged a 15-25 year lag and limited exposure that makes print publications far less relevant for new media research. Although promising new paradigms for distributed publication are on the horizon, at the time of writing these systems are only in the planning stage.[9] Finally, as the MLA warns, participation in electronic scholarship should not place extra demands on a researcher[10]; an accomplishment in new media research should substitute for a print article or monograph, not merely supplement them.
Alternative Recognition Measures
Given the accessibility and timeliness required for new media research, the following measures of recognition should be prioritized in the evaluation of new media research candidates:
1. Invited / edited publications
Invitations to publish in edited electronic journals or printed magazines and books should be recognized as the kind of peer influence that in other fields would be signaled by acceptance in peer-reviewed journals.
2. Live conferences
The 2003 National Academies study concludes that conferences on new media, both face-to-face and virtual, offer a more useful and in some cases more prestigious venue for exposition than academic journals:
[The sluggishness of journal publications] is offset somewhat by a flourishing array of conferences and other forums, in both virtual and real space, that provide a sense of community and an outlet as well as feedback[11]….The prestige associated with presentations at major conferences actually makes some of them more selective than journals.[12]
New forms of conference archiving–such as archived Webcasts–add value and exposure to the research presented at conferences.
3. Citations
Citations are a valuable and versatile measure of peer influence because they may come from or point to a variety of genres, from Web sites to databases to books in print. Examples include citations in:
a. Electronic archives and recognition networks, such as the publicly accessible databases maintained by the Daniel Langlois Foundation (Montreal), the V2 organization (Rotterdam), the Database of Virtual Art (Berlin), and the Media Art Net database (Karlsruhe).
b. Books, printed journals, and newspapers. These are easier to find now, thanks to Google Scholar, Google Print, and Amazon’s “look inside the book” feature.
c. Syllabi and other pedagogical contexts. Google searches on .edu domains and citations of the author’s work in syllabi from outside universities can measure the academic currency of an individual researcher or her ideas. In the sciences, readings or projects cited on a syllabus are likely to be popular textbooks, but in an emerging field like new media, such recognition is a more valid marker of relevance.
4. Download / visitor counts
Downloads and other traffic-related statistics represent a measure of influence that has gained importance in the online community recently. As a 2005 open access study[13] concludes:
Whereas the significance of citation impact is well established, access of research literature via the Web provides a new metric for measuring the impact of articles – Web download impact.
Download impact is useful for at least two reasons:
(1) The portion of download variance that is correlated with citation counts provides an early-days estimate of probable citation impact that can begin to be tracked from the instant an article is made Open Access and that already attains its maximum predictive power after 6 months.
(2) The portion of download variance that is uncorrelated with citation counts provides a second, partly independent estimate of the impact of an article, sensitive to another form of research usage that is not reflected in citations (Kurtz 2004).
5. Impact in online discussions
Email discussion lists are the proving grounds of new media discourse. They vary greatly in tone and substance, but even the least moderated of such lists can subject their authors to rigorous–and at times withering–scrutiny.[14] Measures such as the number of list subscribers, geographic scope, the presence or absence of moderation, and the number of replies triggered by a given contribution can give a sense of the importance of each discussion list.[15]
6. Impact in the real world
While magazine columns and newspaper editorials may have little standing in traditional academic subjects, one of the strengths of new media are their relevance to a daily life that is increasingly inflected by the relentless proliferation of technologies. Even counting Google search returns on the author’s name or statistically improbable phrases can be a measure of real-world impact[16].
By privileging new media research with direct effect on local or global communities, the university can remain relevant in an age where much research takes place outside the ivory tower.
8. Net-native recognition metrics
Peer-evaluated online communities may invent their own measures of member evaluation, in which case they may be relevant to a researcher who participates in those communities. Examples of such self-policing communities include Slashdot, The Pool, Open Theory, and the Distributed Learning Project.
The MLA pins the responsibility for learning these new metrics on reviewers rather than the reviewed.[17] Given the mutability of such metrics, however, promotion and tenure candidates may be called upon to explain and give context to these metrics for their reviewers. Again, efforts to educate a scholar’s colleagues about new media should be considered part of that scholar’s research, not supplemental to it.
9. Reference letters
Letters of recommendation from outside referees are an important compensation for the irrelevance of traditional recognition venues. Nevertheless, it is insufficient merely to solicit such letters from professors tenured in new media at other universities, since so few exist.
More valuable is to use the measures outlined in this document to identify pre-eminent figures in new media, or to require new media promotion and tenure candidates to identify such figures and supply evidence that they qualify according to the criteria above.
[1] The ACLS recommends “policies for tenure and promotion that recognize and reward digital scholarship and scholarly communication; recognition should be given not only to scholarship that uses the humanities and social science cyberinfrastructure but also to scholarship that contributes to its design, construction, and growth….
We might expect younger colleagues to use new technologies with greater fluency and ease, but with tenure at stake, they will also be more risk-averse….
Senior scholars now have both the opportunity and the responsibility to take certain risks, first among which is to condone risk taking in their junior colleagues and their graduate students, making sure that such endeavors are appropriately rewarded.”
“Our Cultural Commonwealth,” report by the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 29 July 2006,
[http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber.htm[, accessed January 2, 2007.
[2] “Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship.” December 2006 report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion,
[http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion] accessed January 2, 2007.
[3] “The Commission encourages each department on campus, as well as the University as a whole, to examine promotion and tenure criteria to recognize and reward innovative uses of technology in teaching, research and service….the University needs to consider the criteria and standards used in the promotion and tenure process.
The Commission encourages each department and the University as a whole to consider whether faculty efforts in this area are recognized, valued, and/or encouraged.” November 2003 report of the University of Maine Commission on Information Technologies, accessed at
[http://www.umaine.edu/documents/CIT.pdf] on May 2, 2004.
[4] MLA Committee on Information Technology. “Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages.” 20 May 2000. ADE Bulletin 132 (2002): 94–95. 82, mirrored at
[http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital], accessed 2 January, 2007.
[5] A brief sampling of new media theorist-practitioners includes Simon Biggs (Cambridge University), Matthew Fuller (Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam), Mary Flanagan (Hunter), Alexander Galloway (NYU), Kenneth Goldberg (Berkeley), Eduardo Kac (Art Institute of Chicago), Natalie Jeremijenko (UCSD), Raphael Lozano-Hemmer (Karlstad University, Sweden), Lev Manovich (UCSD), Randall Packer (American University), Richard Rinehart (Berkeley), and Jeffrey Shaw (ZKM).
[6] National Research Council, Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2003), pp. 8-9.
[7] National Research Council, op. cit., p. 188.
[8] These estimates are from MIT’s Roger Malina (Director of Leonardo magazine) and the Daniel Langlois Foundation’s Alain Depocas (Director of the Centre for Documentation + Research), and are mirrored at
[http://cordova.asap.um.maine.edu/wiki/index.php/Standards_of_Recognition]
[9] The Interarchive project is a possible model for distributed publication; see
[http://newmedia.umaine.edu/interarchive]
[10] “Change in favor of a more capacious conception of scholarship, which we strongly endorse, should not mean ever-wider demands on faculty members, most especially those coming up for tenure and promotion.” MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, op. cit., p. 21.
[11] National Research Council, op. cit., pp. 8-9.
[12] National Research Council, op. cit., p. 188.
[13] Tim Brody and Stevan Harnad, “Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact”,
[http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10647/], accessed 5 March 2005.
[14] This recent
[http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0504/msg00051.html]
rejoinder by Morlock Elloi on the
> If you have any past publications that might help me understand your point of view, I would gladly read them.
While I understand that in paidspeakerworld the weight of the argument is computed as (volume of publications) x (number of speeches), on nettime and elsewhere closer to reality arguments stand for themselves.
[15] Electronic and email texts also have a currency acknowledged by leading institutions in the field. As of December 21, 2005, one of the premiere bibliographic indices in new media, the Langlois Foundation’s CR+D database, included the following indexation for “Jon Ippolito”:
* Author of 10 documents
* Subject of 48 documents
* Participant to 21 events
* Organizer of 2 events
Of the 10 documents by the author indexed, 1 is from an email list and 2 are parts of Web sites. In the case of artist and critic Alexander Galloway, the relevance of his online texts is even more striking: although by 2005 he was the author of several journal articles and an important book from MIT Press, the two documents that represented his writing in the CR+D database were both from email lists.
[16] A statistically significant number of Google returns, eg > 30, may be a necessary but insufficient condition for confirming global impact.
[17] “In evaluating scholarship for tenure and promotion, committees and administrators must take responsibility for becoming fully aware both of the mechanisms of oversight and assessment that already govern the production of a great deal of digital scholarship and of the well-established role of new media in humanities research.
It is of course convenient when electronic scholarly editing and writing are clearly analogous to their print counterparts. But when new media make new forms of scholarship possible, those forms can be assessed with the same rigor used to judge scholarly quality in print media. We must have the flexibility to ensure that as new sources and instruments for knowing develop, the meaning of scholarship can expand and remain relevant to our changing times.” MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, op. cit., p. 46.
[http://newmedia.umaine.edu/interarchive/new_criteria_for_new_media.html]
Twitter Science / Publication / Conferences ?
April 27, 2009
Twitter Science / Publication / Conferences ?
The Question Of The Day Is …
To What Extent Has Mobile-Originated Content Been Formally And / Or InFormally Incorporated Into Conventional Scientific / Technological / Medical (STM) Activities / Practices / Venues.
Please Post Any / All Items Or Comments
As Comments On This Blog Entry.
Thanks For Your Assistance.
/Gerry
New Book: Digital Scholarship / Edited by Marta Mestrovic Deyrup
Digital Scholarship / Edited by Marta Mestrovic Deyrup
ISBN 978-0-7890-3688-9 / Hardback / Routledge / 12-12-2008 / 166 pp. / $ 95
Routledge Studies in Library and Information Science
About the Book
Collecting important original essays by librarians and archivists – all of whom are actively engaged in building digital collections – Digital Scholarship details both challenges and proven solutions in establishing, maintaining, and servicing digital scholarship in the humanities. This volume further explores the ways in which the humanities have benefited from the ability to digitize text and page images of historic documents, mine large corpuses of texts and other forms of records, and assemble widely dispersed cultural objects into common repositories for comparison and analysis–making new research questions and methods possible for the first time.
The ten notable scholars included in Digital Scholarship offer a balanced view of the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to digitization, reporting both progress and problems, examining new business models, new forms of partnerships, and the new technologies and resources that make many more library and archival services available. Librarians and library staff everywhere will find Digital Scholarship an essential text for the modern library and an illuminating resource for anyone looking to understand the changing face of research in the electronic age.
Table of Contents
Preface / Christine Borgman
1. A Universal Humanities Digital Library: Pipe Dream or Prospective Future? / Shawn Martin
2. The Russian Doll Effect: Making the Most of Your Digital Assets / James Bradley 3. The Lives of Others: Editing Electronic Editions of Correspondence / Susan Schreibman
4. The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Online / Margaret E. Hale, Richard Lessage and Bradley L. Schaffner
5. The Hemeroteca Digital of the National Library of Spain / Elena Garcia-Puentes and Lola Rodriguez
6. GIS Technology as an Alternative Way of Access to Historical Knowledge / Albina Moscicka
7. Toward Enduring Global Access to Catholic Research Resources / Ruth Bogan, Diane Maher, Edward D. Starkey and Jennifer A. Younger
8. Digital Partners: Collaborating to Build Digital Resources / John B. Straw
9. Illuminating the Manuscript Leaves: Digitization Promotes Scholarship and Outreach / Delinda Stephens Buie, Rachel I. Howard and Amy Hanaford Purcell
10. I Can See the Light: Using Web-based Exhibits to Enhance Interactive Archival Scholarship / Suzan Alteri and Daniel Golodner
Contributors
Editor Marta Mestrovic Deyrup is Associate Professor/Catalog Coordinator at Seton Hall University Libraries. She has written and lectured extensively on scholarly communication and digital library projects. Marta received her PhD from Columbia University and MLS from Rutgers University. ‘View Inside Option’ Available Source [http://www.routledge.com/books/Digital-Scholarship-isbn9780789036889
Postdoc/PhD positions, algorithmic game theory, NTU, Singapore
April 14, 2009
Postdoc/PhD positions, algorithmic game theory, NTU, Singapore
The Algorithmic Game Theory group at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), generously supported by the NRF Research Fellowship Scheme (Prof. Elkind) and the Nanyang Assistant Professorship Scheme (Prof. Chen), has openings for several research fellows (post-docs) and PhD students, to start from August 1st 2009 or shortly thereafter. The successful applicants will work with Prof. Ning Chen
(http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/ningc/) and Prof. Edith Elkind
(http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~elkind/)
For a research fellow, a strong background in theoretical computer science, game theory, optimization, or multiagent systems is expected; an existing track record in algorithmic game theory/computationa l social choice will be a plus. The positions are
for 1-3 years.
Salaries are competitive and are determined according to the successful applicants’ accomplishments, experience and qualifications.
Travel funding is available. The positions are open till they are filled. Interested applicants should send their detailed CVs, a research statement, and contact details of at least three referees to Prof. Elkind (eelkind@ntu. edu.sg).
For a PhD student, a good first and/or second degree (B.Sc./M.Sc. ) in computer science, mathematics, economics or a related subject, as well as some evidence of ability to do research is expected.
The successful applicants will receive a stipend, as well as a tuition fee waiver.
For more information about our PhD program, please visit our admissions website:
http://www.spms.ntu.edu.sg/mas/Graduates/GradProgramOverview.html The website also contains instructions on how to apply. In addition to submitting a formal application, please send an e-mail to Prof. Elkind (eelkind@ntu.edu.sg), indicating your intention to apply. Please attach a brief CV.
Nanyang Technological University is a major research university in Singapore, with a strong emphasis on science and technology. The positions are based in the Division of Mathematical Sciences (http://www.spms.ntu.edu.sg/mas/).
PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience-RWTH Aachen
PhD in cognitive neuroscience (Research Assistant)
Our profile:
HumTec is an interdisciplinary “project house” at RWTH Aachen University funded as part of the excellence initiative by the federal government and the state government of North-Rhine Westphalia. HumTec aims at fostering high level interdisciplinary research between the humanities/social sciences and the engineering/ natural sciences. Research at HumTec will focus on two research areas: “Values, Norms, Governance” and “Behaviour, Communication, Acceptance”. The first area has a normative orientation comprising programs focusing on ethical, legal, and political aspects of technological innovations. The second area comprises programs with a strong empirical orientation focusing on cognitive, social, linguistic, and cultural aspects of new technologies.
The HumTec program “Brain, Concept, Writing” wants to study the genesis of complex literary concepts in an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the fields of literature, neuroscience and computer science.
Your profile:
Candidates for this position should have a degree in Neuroscience, Biophysics, Psychology, Medicine or another related degree.
Experience in cognitive neuroscience, functional imaging methods and statistics would be of advantage. The position is available immediately for initially 2 years and search will continue until a candidate has been selected.
Your duties and responsibilities:
The PhD position is dedicated to studying the neurofunctional production and comprehension processes of literary texts in the human brain in close cooperation with researchers of the Central Service Facility “Functional Imaging” (www.izkf.rwth- aachen.de) .
Our offer:
- The candidate will be employed as a regular employee.
- The position is to be filled as soon as possible and is for a fixed term of 2 years.
- This is a part-time vacancy (50 % of the standard weekly hours for full time employees).
- The option of undertaking a PhD is provided.
- The pay scale classification complies with the labor agreement TV-L.
In cases of equal qualification, aptitude and expertise of the applicants, female applicants will be given preferential treatment for those salary groups and careers in which females are underrepresented, unless there are preponderant reasons to give preference to another applicant.
Please refer to § 8 Article 6 of the North Rhine-Westphalian Equal Opportunities Act(Landesgleichstellu ngsgesetz NW).
RWTH Aachen University has been rewarded with the title “disability-friendly” (“Prädikat behindertenfreundli ch” ) for its efforts with respect to training and employment of severely disabled people. Applications from severely disabled people with appropriate suitability are explicitly welcome. This also applies to people with equal opportunities in accordance with § 2 SGB IX (Social Code).
Your contact person
For further information, please contact
Dr. Ralph Schnitker
Tel.: +49 (0) 241 80 88890
Fax: +49 (0) 0241 80 82605
Email: rschnitker@izkf. rwth-aachen. de
You can also obtain further information from our websites: http://humtec@ rwth-aachen. de
Please send your application via mail to
Dr. Ralph Schnitker
mail: rschnitker@izkf. rwth-aachen. de
PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience-RWTH Aachen
April 1, 2009
PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience-RWTH Aachen
PhD in cognitive neuroscience (Research Assistant)
Our profile:
HumTec is an interdisciplinary “project house” at RWTH Aachen University funded as part of the excellence initiative by the federal government and the state government of North-Rhine Westphalia. HumTec aims at fostering high level interdisciplinary research between the humanities/social sciences and the engineering/ natural sciences. Research at HumTec will focus on two research areas: “Values, Norms, Governance” and “Behaviour, Communication, Acceptance”. The first area has a normative orientation comprising programs focusing on ethical, legal, and political aspects of technological innovations. The second area comprises programs with a strong empirical orientation focusing on cognitive, social, linguistic, and cultural aspects of new technologies.
The HumTec program “Brain, Concept, Writing” wants to study the genesis of complex literary concepts in an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the fields of literature, neuroscience and computer science.
Your profile:
Candidates for this position should have a degree in Neuroscience, Biophysics, Psychology, Medicine or another related degree.
Experience in cognitive neuroscience, functional imaging methods and statistics would be of advantage. The position is available immediately for initially 2 years and search will continue until a candidate has been selected.
Your duties and responsibilities:
The PhD position is dedicated to studying the neurofunctional production and comprehension processes of literary texts in the human brain in close cooperation with researchers of the Central Service Facility “Functional Imaging” (www.izkf.rwth- aachen.de) .
Our offer:
- The candidate will be employed as a regular employee.
- The position is to be filled as soon as possible and is for a fixed term of 2 years.
- This is a part-time vacancy (50 % of the standard weekly hours for full time employees).
- The option of undertaking a PhD is provided.
- The pay scale classification complies with the labor agreement TV-L.
In cases of equal qualification, aptitude and expertise of the applicants, female applicants will be given preferential treatment for those salary groups and careers in which females are underrepresented, unless there are preponderant reasons to give preference to another applicant.
Please refer to § 8 Article 6 of the North Rhine-Westphalian Equal Opportunities Act(Landesgleichstellu ngsgesetz NW).
RWTH Aachen University has been rewarded with the title “disability-friendly” (“Prädikat behindertenfreundli ch” ) for its efforts with respect to training and employment of severely disabled people. Applications from severely disabled people with appropriate suitability are explicitly welcome. This also applies to people with equal opportunities in accordance with § 2 SGB IX (Social Code).
Your contact person
For further information, please contact
Dr. Ralph Schnitker
Tel.: +49 (0) 241 80 88890
Fax: +49 (0) 0241 80 82605
Email: rschnitker@izkf. rwth-aachen. de
You can also obtain further information from our websites: http://humtec@ rwth-aachen. de
Please send your application via mail to
Dr. Ralph Schnitker
mail: rschnitker@izkf. rwth-aachen. de
M. Sc. Optics and Photonics-Germany
M. Sc. Optics and Photonics
KSOP Masters Education. We believe that a Ph.D.graduate school is unlikely to be successful without the background / infrastructure and the “funneling / filtering” through a corresponding associated, interdisciplinary coordinated masters program, aiming at attracting excellent students from abroad.
36 students per year can be admitted to our masters program. The best students of the masters program are supported by the KSOP Scholarship Program. Access to the KSOP masters education is granted via an application procedure.
A study plan is developed for each individual masters student (corresponding to his/her educational background) when entering the KSOP.
The M.Sc. course is divided into four stages providing the students with the necessary prerequisites (Stage I: Introduction) , to give them a solid background on the most important topics within the wide and diverse field of Optics and Photonics (Stage II: Core Subjects) and let them acquire specialized knowledge (Stage III: Specialization) to be able to competently perform a six-month research project on a current topic of research (masters thesis). In addition, an 8-weeks industrial internship is scheduled between stages 2 and 3.
Scholarship
The KSOP scholarship amounts to 800 Euro/month for international students and 400 Euro/month for German students. Part of the scholarship is a research assistantship. Within the scope of this assistantship, you will have the opportunity to work on a research project in one of the KSOP institutes.
The scholarship is first admitted for 12 months. At the end you have to proof your successful participation in the KSOP M.Sc. Program through very good study results in order to extend the scholarship for another 12 months.
Guideline for Scholarship Application
Step 1 – Fill out the KSOP scholarship application form
You can apply for a scholarship at the KSOP Office after having applied for the program M.Sc. in Optics & Photonics. Please fill out the KSOP Scholarship application form. The application deadline for the upcoming winter semester is July 15 each year.
Please note that you have to send your scholarship documents seperately from your application to the student office, the KSOP Office or the international student office respectively.
You will receive feedback from the KSOP Office on your scholarship application after July 15.
Step 2 – Submit your application
You are required to include the following documents in your application:
- KSOP scholarship application form
- a certified copy of your qualification for university entrance (e.g. Abitur, High School Diploma, Bac.)
- a certified copy of your Bachelor degree (if the Bachelor degree is not yet available at the closing date for applications but will be completed before the registration, candidates can apply with a preliminary transcript of records)
- your CV
- proof of English language profiency: TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) with a minimum of 570 pb, 260 points cb and 88 points ibt or IELTS (International English Languag Testing System) band with a minium of 6.5
- proof of extra-curricular activities
- one or better two recommendations
- Statement of purpose
Please send the complete application preferrably via e-mail or alternatively via postal mail to:
Karlsruhe School of Optics & Photonics (KSOP),
Universität Karlsruhe (TH)
Schlossplatz 19
76131 Karlsruhe
http://www.ksop. de/fileadmin/ KSOP/download/ 03_programs/ Application_ Form_MSc_ Scholarship. pdf
Taking the LEED in eco-friendly construction
March 8, 2009
Taking the LEED in eco-friendly construction
LEED-A-Palooza led the way in environmental design education last Thursday in the Administrative Building.
Eco-friendly construction techniques and the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification process were the focus of the conference which was co-sponsored by Clayco Corporation, the company building the new residence hall on Oak Street, and the United States Green Building Council (USGBC).
The Student as Scholar: Undergraduate Research and Creative Practice
Association of American Colleges and Universities
The Student as Scholar: Undergraduate Research and Creative Practice
Conference Description, Program, and Resources
300 faculty and administrators gathered in Long Beach, California on April 19-21, 2007 for a conference focused on integrating research and scholarship into the undergraduate experience with the goal of expanding and deepening learning for all students. Conference sessions explored developmental models, research and assessment of student learning, and examples of campus practice.
KEYNOTE: From Convocation to Capstone: Developing the Student as Scholar
David Hodge, Kira Pasquesi, Marissa Hirsh / Miami University ; Paul LePore / University of Washington
In order to integrate undergraduate research most effectively into the learning experience, undergraduate education should focus on the “student as scholar” from the first to final year. President Hodge will offer a vision of the student as scholar, where ‘scholar’ is defined in terms of an attitude, an intellectual posture, and a frame of mind derived from the best traditions of an engaged liberal education. Fulfilling this vision of the student as scholar will require a fundamental shift in how we imagine and structure the curriculum. In this new paradigm, the curriculum is learning-centered, providing intentional pathways that culminate in capstone experiences, peer-reviewed research papers, and creative presentations.
… [T]he undergraduate research experience is often viewed too narrowly as an isolated component of the student’s education, or as suitable for only some of the most advanced students. In this paper we argue that undergraduate research should, in fact, be at the center of the undergraduate experience, that undergraduate education should adopt the “Student as Scholar” Model throughout the curriculum, where scholar is conceived in terms of an attitude, an intellectual posture, and a frame of mind derived from the best traditions of an engaged liberal arts education. With this framework, not only each research project, but also each course, is viewed as an integrated, and integrating, part of the student experience.
Developing the Student as Scholar Model requires a fundamental shift in how we structure and imagine the whole undergraduate experience. It requires, as a minimum, the adoption of the Learning Paradigm in everything from the first introductory course through the final capstone experience. It requires a culture of inquiry-based learning infused throughout the entire liberal arts curriculum that starts with the very first day of college and is reinforced in every classroom and program. It transcends the boundaries of the classroom and takes advantage of the vast amounts of raw material now available to undergraduates. And it draws heavily from a developmentally-appropriate perspective of undergraduate education, where students move from a more passive, externally motivated experience to the active, internally-motivated posture of a scholar.
[Much More]
[http://www.aacu.org/meetings/undergraduate_research/documents/Keynote.pdf]
Presentation (ppt) / Address (pdf) / Podcast Recording (mpg)
A Related Presentation Was Deleivered By David C. Hodge At Learning Through Enquiry Alliance (LTEA) Conference 2008:
Inquiry In A Networked World Held At The University of Sheffield In Late-June 2008
[http://networked-inquiry.pbwiki.com/About+the+LTEA2008+keynote]
WORKSHOPS
Sustainable Models of Student–Faculty Collaboration
Research and Creative Scholarship: An Integral Part of the Undergraduate Experience
Assessing the Impact of Undergraduate Research on Student Learning and Campus Culture
POSTERS
Providing Undergraduates with a Research Training Roadmap
Undergraduate Research: Theirs, Mine, and Ours
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSIONS
Collaborative Undergraduate Research Seminars: Providing a “Research I” Experience
Institutionalizing Student Research Opportunities: Creating Visibility and Promoting Collaboration for Engaged Learning
Implementing an Integrative Research Sequence: The “Scientific Core”
Interdisciplinary Research: Building a Bridge to Scientific Inquiry in the 21st Century
Integrating Theory and Practice: An Action Research Case Study
Supporting Undergraduate Research: Centralized and Decentralized Institutional Models and the Role of Statewide Programs
Students’ Expectations of the Analytic and Communications Skills Needed for Research
Co-Creating Pathways to Student Scholarship: A Developmental Trajectory of Experience, Reflection, Research, and Scholarship
CASE STUDIES
A Comprehensive Approach to Student Scholarship
A Developmental Approach to Undergraduate Research in the Sciences
Building a Learner-Centered Environment through Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity
Moving Undergraduate Research Beyond a Few Disciplines and a Few Student
Developing Student Scholars from Convocation through Commencement: An Institution-Wide Model
What Does the Research Tell Us about Undergraduate Research?
The Role of Undergraduate Research in Student Retention and Academic Success
Multiple Models for Incorporating Undergraduate Research into the Curriculum
Assessing Science Enrichment Programs: Measuring Students’ Development as Scholars
Collaborative Research and Creative Inquiry
Thinking Like a Scientist: Building Skills on the Way to a Culminating Research Experience
Integrating Undergraduate Research and Service-learning in Self-Designed Capstone Projects
Using an ePortfolio as a Personal Knowledge Management System
Educating Undergraduate Research Mentors
The Sociology of Everyday Life: Student Scholars in the Introductory Classroom
Adapting the UIW McNair Model to Engage Faculty and Students in Undergraduate Research
Designing and Implementing an Undergraduate Research Program
EUREKA! Building an Integrated University-Wide Model for Engaging Students in Undergraduate Research
Organizing and Implementing a Statewide Undergraduate Research Conference
The Importance of Institutional, Disciplinary, and Interdisciplinary Definitions of Scholarship
Fostering Undergraduate Research in the Arts and Humanities
Integrating Undergraduate Research and Engagement Programs across Departmental, Disciplinary, and Developmental Boundaries
Equal Partners: Participatory Research Involving Faculty, Students, and Community Members
Improving the Quality of Student Research through Information Fluency
Creating and Publishing Undergraduate Research Journals
PLENARIES
Enhancing Academic Excellence through Inquiry, Research, and Creative Practice
Toward a Collaborative, Learning-Centered Culture: Phases of Institutional Development
Key Elements to Building a Sustainable Undergraduate Research Program
SOURCE
[http://www.aacu.org/meetings/undergraduate_research/]
PODCASTS
[http://www.aacu.org/Podcast/UG07_podcasts.cfm]
Forsee speaks at UMKC
February 25, 2009
Forsee speaks at UMKC
University of Missouri President Gary Forsee visited the UMKC campus last Thursday for two town hall meetings that were open to faculty, staff and students.
During the hour-long meetings held on the Volker and Hospital Hill campuses, Forsee addressed a number of topics.
LiveScience: Era of Scientific Secrecy Near End
Era of Scientific Secrecy Near End / By Robin Lloyd, LiveScience Senior Editor / posted: 02 September 2008 11:30 am ET
Secrecy and competition to achieve breakthroughs have been part of scientific culture for centuries, but the latest Internet advances are forcing a tortured openness throughout the halls of science and raising questions about how research will be done in the future.
The openness at the technological and cultural heart of the Internet is fast becoming an irreplaceable tool for many scientists, especially biologists, chemists and physicists — allowing them to forgo the long wait to publish in a print journal and instead to blog about early findings and even post their data and lab notes online. The result: Science is moving way faster and more people are part of the dialogue.
[snip]
Open Science
The open science approach forces researchers to grapple with the question of whether they can still get sufficient credit for their ideas, said physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, co-organizer of a conference on the topic set to begin Sept. 8 at the Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada.
[BTW: I Will Be Attending This Unique Conference Science in the 21st Century: Science, Society, and Information Technology [http://tinyurl.com/6ll8fb] / Look For Conference-Related Postings on the _Scholarship 2.0_ Blog [http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/] within the next two weeks]
[snip]
Open science is a shorthand for technological tools, many of which are Web-based, that help scientists communicate about their findings. At its most radical, the ethos could be described as “no insider information.” Information available to researchers, as far as possible, is made available to absolutely everyone.
Beyond email, teleconferencing and search engines, there are many examples: blogs where scientists can correspond casually about their work long before it is published in a journal; social networks that are scientist friendly such as Laboratree and Ologeez; GoogleDocs and wikis which make it easy for people to collaborate via the Web on single documents; a site called Connotea that allows scientists to share bookmarks for research papers; sites like Arxiv, where physicists post their “pre-print” research papers before they are published in a print journal; OpenWetWare which allows scientists to post and share new innovations in lab techniques; the Journal of Visualized Experiments, an open-access site where you can see videos of how research teams do their work; GenBank, an online searchable database for DNA sequences; Science Commons, a non-profit project at MIT to make research more efficient via the Web, such as enabling easy online ordering of lab materials referenced in journal articles; virtual conferences; online open-access (and free) journals like Public Library of Science (PLoS); and open-source software that can often be downloaded free off Web sites.
[BTW: Several Of These Innovations Have Been Profiled In My SciTechNet(sm) Blog [http://scitechnet.blogspot.com/] and/or The Scholarship 2.0 Blog [http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/]
The upshot: Science is no longer under lock and key, trickling out as it used to at the discretion of laconic professors and tense PR offices. For some scientists, secrets no longer serve them. But not everyone agrees.
Networked Cyborgs
Just a few decades ago, as a scientist, here is how you did your work: You toiled in obscurity and relative solitude.
[snip]
However, today, more and more scientists, as well as researchers in the humanities, operate like transparent, networked cyborgs. Background research is mostly done online, not in the library. Some data and preliminary research might be posted online via a blog or open notebook. Early write-ups of the work might be announced to the public, or at least discussed online with peers. And these early write-ups might also be posted to an online publication that is not peer-reviewed in the strict sense.
[snip]
“In areas like my own subfields of theoretical physics,” said MIT physicist David Kaiser, “the only constraint [on how rapidly one generates research papers] is, ‘Did you have more coffee that day?’ We aren’t usually held up trying to get an instrument to work, or slogging through complicated data analysis.”Most people think faster is better, but there are other issues.
Is It A Good Thing?
There is “no question” that all efforts to make science more open are positive for the progress of science, says open science proponent and chemist Jean-Claude Bradley at Drexel University in Philadelphia, who posts his lab notebook online and started a blog in 2005 called UsefulChemistry where he and his colleagues regularly discuss chemistry problems as well as Web 2.0 tools and the technical and philosophical issues they raise.His online notebook and blog definitely make it easier to communicate with colleagues, he said. Such sharing also makes it easier for others to “replicate” scientists’ work — try it themselves and convince themselves that you are right. And this replication issue is one of the principles behind scientific research. Anyone who has written down a recipe for a friend knows that we all tend to spell things out more clearly when sharing them than we would if we were just taking notes for ourselves in our own shorthand.
Open science also has the potential to prevent discrimination in access to information. Arxiv, the site for posting pre-print physics papers, was started in 1991 by Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg, then at Los Alamos National Laboratory, to help provide equal access to prepublication information to graduate students, postdocs and researchers in developing countries.
[BTW: Paul Ginsparg will be one of several Major Players attending/presenting at The Conference [http://science21stcentury.org/abstracts.html]]
[snip]
And open science benefits the public, Bradley said. He tries to keep his posts fairly accessible (although this is not the case for all open notebooks and open science blogs).
[snip]
“It’s not clear to me that professional scientists or people in academic institutions have a monopoly on good ideas,” he said. “There are very smart people outside of academia, for example hobbyists or people in industry who could contribute, and having more contributors can only help. The same applies to interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches.”
[snip]
Drawbacks of Open Science
One of the biggest fears of nearly all researchers is that someone else hears what you’re doing and beats you to publication. That means you wasted a lot of time (and most researchers work extremely long hours, so loss of productivity is especially painful and can also harm one’s chances for getting a job or promotion or funding for the next research project). Once you publicly reveal your thoughts, data or experimental results, some say, you lose control over ownership of that information. This topic is covered by an area of law called intellectual property, as well as patent law, and there can be significant money to be fought over when it comes to patents.
Hossenfelder, the conference organizer, says she knows of several examples in which scientists have had an idea for something, talked about it openly and then somebody else has published the fleshed-out idea first without giving any credit beyond an acknowledgment to the original idea-holder. Acknowledgments don’t advance careers.
However there are solutions to this, she said. For instance, the prominent scientific journal Nature encourages authors to include brief summaries of which author contributed what to a project. Some say that online posts provide a time-stamped record of when an experiment was documented. Those stamps can easily be arbitrarily altered after the fact, but it might also be possible to “lock” posts at a certain date after which they could not be changed without some sign-off permission to break the lock, Hossenfelder said. [snip]
Fear of Losing Peer Review
Another drawback of open science can be that results go public before they should. In science, experimental results are frequently proven wrong by subsequent work. Yet even peer review cannot ensure against this, nor can it prevent outright fraud, as proven by a 2005 case involving a South Korean scientist who claimed to have achieved the first cloning of a human embryo. A later examination of his work showed he had fabricated his results.
[snip]
“The social system of science has become so complicated, unregulated and dispersed in terms of geography and disciplines, so peer review has been elevated to a principle that unifies a fragmented field,” Biagioli said.
[snip]
And today, Arxiv, one of the most frequently cited examples of open science, has no peer review for individual papers, but it has begun to add in some constraints on allowable authors. The site used to allow anyone with email addresses associated with academic institutions to post their papers. Now, authors of research papers who post in Arxiv are vetted before they can post for the first time. In some ways, things are tightening up when it comes to openness in physics, Kaiser said. In any case, the function of print journals, in physics at least, is changing.
“Ease of sharing everything prior to peer review is flourishing, and in my opinion very few physicists are reading journals for information these days,” Kaiser said. “Journals have largely lost their information function.”
[snip]
For The Good Of Truth, Humanity, Economies?
Another argument in favor of open science is sort of a big picture issue for humanity, scientific truth and economies, Neylon said.
“Making things more open leads to more innovation and more economic activity, and so the technology that underlies the Web makes it possible to share in a way that was never really possible before, while at same time it also means that kinds of models and results generated are much more rich,” he said.
This is the open source approach to software development, as opposed to commercial closed source approaches, Neylon said. The internals are protected by developers and lawyers, but the platform is available for the public to build on in very creative ways.
“Science was always about mashing up, taking one result and applying it to your [work] in a different way,” Neylon said. “The question is ‘Can we make that as effective as samples data and analysis as it does for a map and set of addresses for a coffee shop?’ That is the vision.”
[http://www.livescience.com/culture/080902-open-science.html]
Thanks to Sabine Hossenfelder For The HeadsUp !
[http://friendfeed.com/rooms/science21]
On the theory of natural celebration
February 20, 2009
On the theory of natural celebration
Although he’s quite dead, Charles Darwin was never as popular as he was a few days ago.
A public birthday party was held last Friday at the Linda Hall Library (LHL) in honor of Darwin’s 200th birthday.
A first edition copy of “On the Origin of Species” is now on display in the rare books section of LHL.
Erasmus Mundus Scholarships 2009/2010
http://ec.europa. eu/education/ programmes/ mundus/projects/ index_en. html
http://eacea. ec.europa. eu/static/ en/mundus/ index.htm
Erasmus Mundus
List of Masters Courses selected under Action 1
Interested students are invited to contact the coordinators of the
courses concerned for further information on admission conditions,
application forms and scholarships. Erasmus Mundus scholarships are
available for all courses published on this site.
Year of selection, Title, Website
2008 ASC – Master of Science: Advanced Spectroscopy in Chemistry
http://www.master- asc.org/
2008 CIMET – Color in Informatics and MEdia Technology
http://www.master- erasmusmundus- color.eu/
2008 CLE – Master/Laurea Specialistica en Cultures Littéraires
Européennes http://www.cle. unibo.it/
2008 EMAE – European Master in Applied Ecology http://www.master-
emae.org
2008 EMARO – European Master in Advanced Robotics
http://emaro. irccyn.ec- nantes.fr
2008 EMBC – Erasmus Mundus Master of Science in Marine Biodiversity
and Conservation http://embc. marbef.org
2008 EMDIREB – European Master in Diagnosis and Repair of Buildings
http://www.emdireb. eu/
2008 EMMEP – Erasmus Mundus Minerals and Environmental Programme
http://www.emmep. org/
2008 EMQAL – European Joint Master in Quality in Analytical
Laboratories http://cursos. ualg.pt/emqal
2008 EMSRHS – European Master in Sustainable Regional Health Systems
http://ErasmusMundu s.tprs.vu. lt
2008 EMTTLF – European Master’s in Transnational Trade Law Finance
http://www.transnat ional.deusto. es/EMTTL
2008 EU4M – European Union Master’s Course in Mechatronic and Micro-
mechatronic Systems http://www.eu4m. eu
2008 EUMAINE – European Master of Science in Nematology
http://www.eumaine. ugent.be/
2008 EURHEO: European Masters in Engineering Rheology
www.uminho.pt/ eurheo
2008 GIM – MSc in Global Innovation Management
http://www.globalin novationmanageme nt.org/
2008 IM in NLP & HLT – International Masters in Natural Language
Processing and Human Language Technology http://tesniere. univ-
fcomte.fr/a_ master_mundus. htm
2008 IMHS – International Master in Horticultural Sciences
http://www.imahs. unibo.it
2008 IMMSSET – International Master in Materials and Sensors Systems
for Environmental Technologies http://erasmusmimms set.webs. upv.es/
2008 MACLANDS: MAster of Cultural LANDScapes http://master-
erasmusmundus- maclands. univ-st-etienne. fr/
2008 MAIPR: Master of Arts in International Performance Research
http://www2. warwick.ac. uk/fac/arts/ theatre
2008 MATHMODS – Mathematical Modelling in Engineering: Theory,
Numerics, Applications http://www.mathmods .eu
2008 MCEMESV – Master Conjoint Erasmus Mundus en Etude du Spectacle
Vivant http://www.ulb. ac.be/philo/ artst-mundus
2008 MUNDUS URBANO – Interdisciplinary Erasmus Mundus Master Course
International Cooperation and Urban Development http://www.mundus-
urbano.eu/
2007 Comem Erasmus Mundus MSc – Coastal and Marine Engineering and
Management http://www.comem. tudelft.nl
2007 DILL – International Master in Digital Library Learning
http://dill. hio.no/
2007 EURMed (Etudes Urbaines en Régions Méditerranéennes)
http://erasmus- mundus-eurmed. univ-cezanne. fr/
2007 European Masters Course in Software Engineering
http://www.fi. upm.es/emse
2007 European Master in Animal Breeding and Genetics (EM-ABG)
http://www.emabg. wur.nl/
2007 FAME – Functionalised Advanced Materials and Engineering
http://www.fame- master.com
2007 GEMMA: Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies
http://www.ugr. es/~gemma/
2007 IMESS: International Masters in Economy, State and Society
http:/www.imess. eu/
2007 IMMIT: International Master in Management of Information
Technology http://www.immit. eu/default. htm
2007 JEMES – Joint European Master Programme in Environmental
Studies http://www.tuhh. de/eciu-gs/ pro_joint_ jemes.html
2007 LCT- European Masters Program in Language and Communication
Technologies http://lct-master. org
2007 MA Human Rights Practice (Erasmus Mundus)
http://www.roehampt on.ac.uk/ admissions/
2007 MaMaSELF – Master of Materials Science exploiting European
Large Scale Facilities http://mamaself. univ-rennes1. fr
2007 Master of Science in Computational Mechanics
http://www.cimne. com/cm-master/
2007 Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies http://geotech. uni-
muenster.de
2007 ME3 – European joint Masters in Management and Engineering of
Environment and Energy http://webi. emn.fr
2007 Mundusfor – Formation de professionnels de la formation
http://www.ugr. es/~mundusfor/
2007 MUNDUS MAPP – Erasmus Mundus Master’s in Public Policy
http://www.mundusma pp.org/
2007 OPSCITECH: Optics in Science and Technology http://www.master-
optics.eu/
2007 Philosophies allemande et française dans l’espace européen
http://www.europhil osophie.eu/
2007 SAMHC – Advanced Masters in Structural Analysis of Monuments
and Historical Constructions http://www.msc- sahc.org/
2007 SUFONAMA – Sustainable Forest and Nature Management
http://www.sufonama .net
2007 TPTI: Techniques, Patrimoines, Territoires de l’industrie:
Histoire, Valorisation, Didactique http://www.tpti. eu/
2006 AGRIS MUNDUS – Sustainable Development in Agriculture Masters
Course http://www.agrismun dus.eu/agris- mundus/
2006 ATOSIM : Atomic Scale Modelling of Physical, Chemical and Bio-
molecular Systems http://www.erasmusm undus-atosim. cecam.org/
2006 CoDe – Joint European Master in Comparative Local Development
http://www.unitn. it/mastercode/
2006 EMIN – Economics and Management of Network Industries
http://www.upcomill as.es/emin/
2006 Erasmus Mundus Master of Science in Photonics http://www.master-
photonics.org/
2006 EUROCULTURE http://www.eurocult uremaster. org
2006 Europubhealth – European Public Health Master
http://www.europubh ealth.org
2006 FUSION-EP European Master in Nuclear Fusion Science and
Engineering Physics http://www.em- master-fusion. org/
2006 IMIM : International Master in Industrial Management
http://www.imim. polimi.it/
2006 M.A. Degree in Economics of International Trade and European
Integration http://webhost. ua.ac.be/ eitei/
2006 MA LLL – European Master’s in Lifelong Learning: Policy and
Management www.dpu.dk/malll
2006 Master of Bioethics http://www.masterbi oethics.org/ index.html
2006 M.E.S.C.: Materials for Energy Storage and Conversion
http://www.u- picardie. fr/mundus_ MESC/
2006 MONABIPHOT – Molecular nano- and bio-photonics for
telecommunications and biotechnologies http://www.ens-
cachan.fr/monabipho t/
2006 MSPME, Masters in Strategic Project Management
http://www.mspme. org/
2006 NordSecMob – Masters programme in Security and Mobile Computing
http://www.tkk. fi/Units/ CSE/
2006 PHOENIX EM – Dynamics of Health and Welfare http://mundus-
healthwelfare. ehess.fr/
2006 QEM – Models and Methods of Quantitative Economics
http://www.univ- paris1.fr/ rubrique1297. html
2006 SUTROFOR – Sustainable Tropical Forestry Erasmus Mundus Masters
Course http://www.sutrofor .net/
2006 VIBOT – European Master in Vision and Robotics
http://www.vibot. org
2006 WOP-P – Master on Work, Organizational and Personnel Psychology
http://www.erasmusw op.org/
2005 AMASE: Joint European Masters Programme in Advanced Materials
Science and Engineering http://www.amase- master.net/
2005 Crossways in European Humanities http://www.munduscr ossways.eu
2005 EMMAPA: Erasmus Mundus Master in Adapted Physical Activity
http://www.erasmusm undus.be
2005 EMM-Nano – Erasmus Mundus Master of Nanoscience and
Nanotechnology http://www.emm- nano.org/
2005 Erasmus Mundus Masters – Journalism and Media within
Globalization: The European Perspective
http://www.MundusJo urnalism. com
2005 EuMAS – European Masters Course in Aeronautics and Space
Technology http://www.aerospac emasters. org/
2005 EUROMIME: European Master in Media Engineering for Education
http://www.euromime .org
2005 European Master in Global Studies http://www.uni-
leipzig.de/zhs/ erasmus_mundus
2005 GEM: Geo-information Science and Earth Observation for
Environmental Modelling and Management http://www.gem- msc.org/
2005 International Master “Vintage”, Vine, Wine and Terroir
Management http://www.vintagem aster.com
2005 MA SEN, Master’s in Special Education Needs
http://www.roehampt on.ac.uk/
2005 Master of Applied Ethics http://www.maeappli edethics. eu/
2005 Master of Industrial Mathematics http://www.esim. info
2005 MESPOM: Masters of Environmental Sciences, Policy and
Management http://www.mespom. org
2005 MSc in Network and e-Business Centred Computing
http://www.sse. reading.ac. uk/
2005 SEFOTECH.nut: European MSc in Food Science, Technology and
Nutrition http://www.sefotech nut.org/
2005 SpaceMaster – Joint European Master in Space Science and
Technology http://www.spacemas ter.eu
2004 ALGANT – Algebra, Geometry and Number Theory http://www.math. u-
bordeaux.fr/
2004 CoMundus – European Master of Arts in Media, Communication and
Cultural Studies http://www.comundus .net/
http://www.mediastu dieseurope. net/
2004 EMCL – European Master’s Clinical Linguistics http://www.emcl-
mundus.com
2004 EMMME – Erasmus Mundus Master of Mechanical Engineering
http://www.emmme. com
2004 EMMS – Joint European Masters Programme in Materials Science
http://www.tuhh. de/eciu-gs/
2004 EuMI – European Master in Informatics http://www.eumi-
school.org/
2004 EURO-AQUAE – Euro Hydro-Informatics and Water Management
http://www.euroaqua e.org
2004 European Joint Master in Water and Coastal Management
http://cursos. ualg.pt/eumscwcm /index.htm
2004 European Legal Practice – LL.M. Eur http://www.elpis. eu/
2004 European Master in Law and Economics http://www.emle. org
2004 European Masters Programme in Computational Logic
http://european. computational- logic.org
2004 HEEM – European Masters Degree in Higher Education
http://www.uv. uio.no/hedda/
2004 IMRD: International Master of Science in Rural Development
http://www.imrd. ugent.be/ home/index. html
2004 International Master’s in Quaternary and Prehistory
http://web.unife. it/progetti/
2004 MEEES – Master’s in Earthquake Engineering and Engineering
Seismology http://www.meees. org
2004 MERIT – European Master of Research on Information and
Communication Technologies http://www.meritmas ter.org
2004 MSc EF Master of Science in European Forestry
http://gis.joensuu. fi/mscef
2004 NOHA MUNDUS – European Master’s Degree in International
Humanitarian Aid http://www.nohanet. org/
2004 tropEd – European Master of Science Programme in International
Health http://erasmusmundu s.troped. org
Nelson-Atkins welcomes Chinese New Year in celebration
February 11, 2009
Nelson-Atkins welcomes Chinese New Year in celebration
Happy New Year, and welcome to the year 4707 on the Chinese lunar calendar.
While most Kansas City residents were celebrating over a month ago, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art ushered in the year of the Ox in proper Chinese fashion.
Nelson sold every seat to all events in the festival for yet another year of celebrations, with many different activities to fill the evening.
Science Dissemination Using Open Access: Table of Contents
Science Dissemination Using Open Access: A Compendium Of Selected Literature On Open Access / Editors E. Canessa and M. Zennaro (ICTP-SDU, Italy).
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. Science Dissemination Unit (SDU) / July 2008 / 207 pp. / ISBN 92-95003-40-3.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part I: Selected Literature – 1
OVERVIEW – 3
GETTINGS PROFESSIONAL – 37
Challenges for new journals ….. 38
Measuring your impact …… 39
Journal standards and identifiers …… 40
Building reliable and ongoing content …… 42
Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) ….. 42
LEGAL FRAMEWORK – 43
Open Access journals ….. 73
