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Alumni access policies in public university libraries

Authors: Natalie Burclaff and Johannes Britz

Summary: Reviews library open access policies in one US university system from the perspective of alumni. Includes good historical account of policy changes since 1970s.

Abstract: This paper explores the current library access policies for alumni at a public university system using document analysis, observations and interviews. We found that alumni are specifically addressed in only two library access policies, and borrowing privileges through cards, on-site access and restricted access to electronic resources are common elements in the policies for community users. There are opportunities to expand and standardize services, and we recommend addressing alumni in policies as a separate user group.

 

Burclaff, Natalie, and Johannes Britz. “Alumni Access Policies in Public University Libraries.” Inkanyiso, Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 3, no. 1 (2011): 1–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ijhss.v3i1.69496.

Source: Alumni access policies in public university libraries

Added 2018-04-27

A genealogy of open access: negotiations between openness and access to research

Author: Samuel Moore

Comment: A discussion of the history of different conceptions of Open Access, their origins and how they play out in the policy and political arena today.

Abstract: Open access (OA) is a contested term with a complicated history and a variety of understandings. This rich history is routinely ignored by institutional, funder and governmental policies that instead enclose the concept and promote narrow approaches to OA. This article presents a genealogy of the term open access, focusing on the separate histories that emphasise openness and reusability on the one hand, as borrowed from the open-source software and free culture movements, and accessibility on the other hand, as represented by proponents of institutional and subject repositories. This genealogy is further complicated by the publishing cultures that have evolved within individual communities of practice: publishing means different things to different communities and individual approaches to OA are representative of this fact. From analysing its historical underpinnings and subsequent development, I argue that OA is best conceived as a boundary object, a term coined by Star and Griesemer (1989) to describe concepts with a shared, flexible definition between communities of practice but a more community-specific definition within them. Boundary objects permit working relationships between communities while allowing local use and development of the concept. This means that OA is less suitable as a policy object, because boundary objects lose their use-value when ‘enclosed’ at a general level, but should instead be treated as a community-led, grassroots endeavour.

Moore, S. (2017). A genealogy of open access: negotiations between openness and access to research / Une généalogie de l’open access : négociations entre l’ouverture et l’accès à la recherche. Revue Française Des Sciences de l’information et de La Communication 11.

Source: A genealogy of open access: negotiations between openness and access to research

“Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence | Palgrave Communications

Authors: Samuel Moore, Cameron Neylon, Martin Paul Eve, Daniel Paul O’Donnell & Damian Pattinson

Comment:  A discussion of how the word “excellence” means very little in the context of research evaluation, and can actually be quite damaging. Reviews a range of literature on issues in research evaluation with a focus on rankings and quantitative assessments.

Abstract: The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organizations, from art history to zoology. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate “excellence” as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning in academia. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism. To investigate whether this linguistic function is useful we examine how the rhetoric of excellence combines with narratives of scarcity and competition to show that the hyper-competition that arises from the performance of “excellence” is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, and homophily to this rhetoric. But we also show that this rhetoric is an internal, and not primarily an external, imposition. We conclude by proposing an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity-building. In the final analysis, it turns out that that “excellence” is not excellent. Used in its current unqualified form it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship. This article is published as part of a collection on the future of research assessment.

Moore, S., Neylon, C., Paul Eve, M., Paul O’Donnell, D., and Pattinson, D. (2017). “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence. Palgrave Communications 3, 16105.

Source: “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence | Palgrave Communications