Links:

DOJ Announces Terms of Settlement With 3 Publishers in E-Book Lawsuit
The most expensive copyright insurance policy in Canadian history
Introducing Google Drive…yes, really
Google Drive: A step closer to no-fuss cloud storage?

Running time: 1:12:35
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Links:

DOJ Announces Terms of Settlement With 3 Publishers in E-Book Lawsuit
The most expensive copyright insurance policy in Canadian history
Introducing Google Drive…yes, really
Google Drive: A step closer to no-fuss cloud storage?

Running time: 1:12:35
Download the .mp3

You might be able to read [and download] the images more easily on my original Twitpics.

Part 1: <http://twitpic.com/9fqp5m>

Part 2: <http://twitpic.com/9fqzn2>

Late update: Since we recorded this episode on April 4, 2012, the DOJ showed its hand and officially filed suit against Apple and its partners in the publishing industry, announcing terms of a possible settlement with at least three publishers.

Other links mentioned on the podcast:
Bigger Than Agency, Bigger Than E-Books: The Case Against Apple and Publishers
Blackboard Buys 2 Leading Supporters of Open-Source Competitor Moodle
Fake Elsevier’s complaints about academic publishing leads to fake takedown notice
Big Day for Family History Hunters: 1940 U.S. Census Is Online

Running time: 45:38
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[Another post in my series on our need to focus more on the "demand side" of scholarly communication—how and why scholars engage with and contribute to publications—in addition to new models for the "supply side"—new production models for publications themselves. If you're new to this line of thought on my blog, you may wish to start here or here.]

As all parents discover when their children reach the “terrible twos” (a phase that evidently lasts until 18 years of age), it’s incredibly easy to catch your kids being bad, and to criticize them. Kids are constantly pushing boundaries and getting into trouble; it’s part of growing up, intellectually and emotionally. What’s harder for parents, but perhaps far more important, is “catching your child doing good,” to look over when your kid isn’t yelling or pulling the dog’s ear to say, “I like the way you’re doing that.”

Although I fear infantilizing scholars (wags would say that’s perfectly appropriate), whenever I talk about the publishing model at PressForward, I find myself referring back to this principle of “catching the good,” which of course goes by the fancier name of “positive reinforcement” in psychology. What appears in PressForward publications such as Digital Humanities Now isn’t submitted and threatened with criticism and rejection (negative reinforcement). Indeed, there is no submission process at all. Instead, we look to “catch the good” in whatever format, and wherever, it exists (positive reinforcement). Catching the good is not necessarily the final judgment upon a work, but an assessment that something is already quite worthy and might benefit from a wider audience.

It’s a useful exercise to consider the very different psychological modes of positive and negative reinforcement as they relate to scholarly (and non-scholarly) communication, and the kind of behavior these models encourage or suppress. Obviously PressForward has no monopoly on positive reinforcement; catching the good also happens when a sharp editor from a university press hears about a promising young scholar and cultivates her work for publication. And positive reinforcement is deeply imbedded in the open web, where a blog post can either be ignored or reach thousands as a link is propagated by impressed readers.

In modes where negative reinforcement predominates, such as at journals with high rejection rates, scholars are much more hesitant to distribute their work until it is perfect or near-perfect. An aversion to criticism spreads, with both constructive and destructive effects. Authors work harder on publications, but also spend significant energy to tailor their work to please the paren, er, editors and blind reviewers who wait in judgment. Authors internalize the preferences of the academic community they strive to join, and curb experimentation or the desire to reach interdisciplinary or general audiences.

Positive-reinforcement models, especially those that involve open access to content, allow for greater experimentation of form and content. Interdisciplinary and general audiences are more likely to be reached, since a work can be highlighted or linked to by multiple venues at the same time. Authors feel at greater liberty to disseminate more of their work, including material that is half-baked and work that is polished, but audiences may find even the half-baked to be helpful to their thought processes. In other publications that “partial” work might not ever see the light of day.

Finally, just as a kid who constantly strives to be a great baseball player might be unexpectedly told he has a great voice and should try out for the choir, positive reinforcement is more likely to push authors to contribute to fields in which they naturally excel. Positive reinforcement casts a wider net, doing a better job at catching scholars in all stations, or even outsiders, who might have ideas or approaches a discipline could use.

When mulling new outlets for their work, scholars implicitly model risk and reward, imagining the positive and negative reinforcement they will be subjected to. It would be worth talking about this psychology more explicitly. For instance, what if there were a low-risk, but potentially high-reward, outlet that focused more on positive reinforcement—published articles getting noticed and passed around based on merit after a relatively restricted phase of pre-publication criticism? If you want to know why PLoS ONE is the fastest-growing venue for scientific work, that’s the question they asked and successfully answered. And that’s what we’re trying to do with PressForward as well.

[My thanks to Joan Fragazsy Troyano and Mike O'Malley for reading an early version of this post.]

Like Digital Humanities Now, Global Perspectives on Digital History aggregates and selects material from our Compendium of the Global Perspectives, drawing from hundreds of venues where high-quality scholarship is likely to appear, including the personal websites of scholars, institutional sites, blogs, and other feeds. It also seeks to discover new material by monitoring Twitter (someone else is going to have to do that for me given my aversion to the whole Twitterverse) and other social media for stories discussed by the community, and by continuously scanning the broader web through generalized and specialized search engines.

Unlike Digital Humanities Now, Global Perspectives on Digital History is focused more on history, rather than on digital humanities in general. This is not to say we won’t be bringing in content from other digital humanities disciplines that seems relevant to our readers’ interests in digital history. But, as much as possible, we will remain more tightly focused on a single discipline. The other big difference in approach with the first of the PressForward publications is that Global Perspectives on Digital History is a multi-lingual publication. Our initial languages are English, German, and French, but we expect to expand soon into other languages. The only thing holding us back at present is a lack of editors to help with the scanning of content in those other languages.

At present we are using the GoogleTranslate plug in for translation. If you have any experience with this plug in you know it is wholly insufficient for what we are about. Over the coming year, we will be exploring other options for machine translation of our content and hope to learn some things worth knowing through that exploration.

Like Digital Humanities Now, we will also be moving toward some traditional publication of content that appears on our site. Whether we use the model currently in use at Digital Humanities Now or something else, still remains to be seen. We are going to watch the development of the open peer review process carefully before deciding on our approach.

At present, we are splitting our coverage of digital history from around the globe between longer “think pieces” that we are tagging as “editor’s choice” content, and briefer entries we are tagging as “short takes.” We suspect we will expand into reviews and other content from around the globe that examines digital history sometime in the near future.

For now, please visit the site and be sure to let us know what you think.

Editor’s Note 2/27/2012: Soon after we recorded the podcast on 2/24/2012, Elsevier withdrew its support for the Research Works Act, and news subsequently spread that indeed the entire Act would not go forward. See http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/newmessagerwa and https://plus.google.com/u/0/107980702132412632948/posts/a4DzVk9n7fG.

Links to stories mentioned on the podcast:

• Plans for new publishing platform “Anvil”: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/02/13/anvil-academic-aims-provide-platform-digital-scholarship
• Looking ahead to Mac OS X Mountain Lion: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-57378751-248/apple-mac-os-x-mountain-lion-takes-more-bites-out-of-ios/
• Why Mozilla is entering the smartphone war: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/why-mozilla-is-entering-the-smartphone-war/
• Mozilla’s Persona Project: http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/02/mozillas-persona-project-wants-to-help-manage-your-online-identity/
• Apple address book data accessed by many apps: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/15/applebook/
• Google Chromebooks in schools: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57365703-264/27000-google-chromebooks-headed-to-u.s-schools/
• Australia mandates open access to biomedical research within 12 months: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/australia-to-open-publicly-financed-biomedical-research/35505?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
• Elsevier boycott continues: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/why-are-we-boycotting-elsevier
• Leter from @FakeElsevier: http://fakeelsevier.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/dear-elsevier-employees-with-love-from-fakeelsevier/

Running time:
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The new issue of Dandelion Journal, "On Brevity", is finally up & running: http://dandelionjournal.org

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Links:

European Union Presses Google to E.U. to Delay Privacy Policy Changes
On (Not) Learning to Code
Elsevier Boycott Gathers Pace

Running Time: 46:40

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[N.B: I annotated his original text by adding some hyperlinks just in case, to make discussion more accessible to all and provide further info if needed].

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Links mentioned on the podcast:

Apple Introduces Tools to (Someday) Supplant Print Textbooks
Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement
How Wikipedia Turned Off the Lights
Publishers Applaud Research Works Act
Supreme Court Upholds Law That Pulled Foreign Works Back Under Copyright
Facebook Deletes University’s History Project for Violating Social Network’s Rules

Running time: 1:00:31
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Open Humanities Press (OHP) and MPublishing are pleased to announce the publication of six open access books on critical theory, continental philosophy and cultural studies. Each title will be freely available as full-text HTML, as well as a paperback edition. The titles are being released on a rolling publication schedule beginning 15 December at:

http://openhumanitiespress.org

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