Managing Editor Sierra Williams presents a round-up of popular stories from around the web on higher education, academic impact, and trends in scholarly communication.
In gratitude to Stuart Hall, a socialist intellectual who taught us to confront the political with a smile by Ben Carrington at Africa is a Country:
Hall is also the figure that most makes apparent the critical distinction between being a professional academic committed to career advancement and an engaged intellectual who tries to make a difference through political work. For Hall, the university was always a location but not the destination for the production of ideas. Yet despite this, and the ever-present temptation for self-aggrandizement and inflated self-importance, conditions that afflict contemporary academia, Hall was incredibly generous…His impact should not just be measured (and remembered) in relation to his own writings but in terms of what he has made possible in the work of countless others. [read more]
With sessions on digital publishing, peer review, altmetrics and scholarly assessment, the tweets from the Publish or perish? The future of scholarly publishing and careers event are certainly worth a browse. All the tweets from the two-day conference have been compiled in a GoogleDoc here. Here are a few of our favourites:
Linda Katehi @lindakatehi at #PublishPerish14 – blogs and open publishing are far more interesting and important than normal publishing
— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) February 14, 2014
“Get used to sharing data, because your workflows are next” – @carlystrasser at #PublishPerish14, via @hollybik, #openscience cc @ONScience
— Open Science (@openscience) February 14, 2014
Those at #PublishPerish14 hearing abt #GoogleScholar, check out Chrome extension Lazy Scholar http://t.co/ilsa3zJc2D, helps find full-text
— Elizabeth Seiver (@tweetotaler) February 14, 2014
Gender equality mutilation, or how Elsevier went cringeworthy by Curt Rice:
Elsevier does do work to promote women in STEM. What we learned today, though, is that promoting gender equality requires constant attention and awareness. Even those who work to promote it, when they forget, revert into “unintended” actions that are exactly the root of the problem. [read more]
Digital Dualism and the Fallacy of Web Objectivity by Nathan Jurgenson at Cyborgology:
Our augmented reality is one where the politics, structures and inequalities of the physical world are part of the very essence of the digital domain; a domain built by human beings with histories, standpoints, interests, morals and biases. [read more]
Twitter Opens Its Enormous Archives to Data-Hungry Academics by Klint Finley at WIRED:
The social networking outfit has long sold access to its enormous collection of tweets — a record of what the people of the world are doing and saying…But now, through a new grant program, it wants to make it easier for social scientists and other academics to explore its tweet archive, which stretches back to 2006. [read more]
