Session 1 (May 31)

Scholarship, Scholarly Publishing, and Scholarly Communication
(Part 1)

Title page of first volume of the Philosophical Transactions, from 1665. Full title: "Philosophical Transactions: Giving some Accompt of the Present Undertakings, Studies and Labours of the Ingenious in Many Considerable Parts of the World."

Title page of first volume (1665) of the Philosophical Transactions, one of the earliest scholarly journals. Image by Stefan Janusz, shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY 4.0).

Topics will include:

  • Introductions and overview
  • Research vs. scholarship vs. scholarly publishing vs. scholarly communication
  • What counts as a scholarly contribution?
  • Common types of scholarly journal articles
  • What is the scholarly record? How do works “enter” the scholarly record? (In-class reading: What is the ‘the scholarly record’?)
  • Persistent identifiers in scholarly communication

Assignments for June 5:

  1. Review course site and syllabus.
  2. If you don’t already have one, create a CUNY Academic Commons account.
  3. Join course group. (Note: The course site is public, but the course group is private, only visible to those enrolled in the course.)
  4. Respond to all Session 1 prompts in group forum.

Readings for June 5:

Buranyi, S. (2017, June 27). Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? The Guardian.

Fyfe, A., Coate, K., Curry, S., Lawson, S., Moxham, N., & Rostvik, C. M. (2017). Untangling academic publishing: A history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research [Report].

Chen, G., Posada, A., & Chan, L. (2019). Vertical Integration in Academic Publishing: Implications for Knowledge Inequality. In L. Chan & P. Mounier (Eds.), Connecting the Knowledge Commons—From Projects to Sustainable Infrastructure: The 22nd International Conference on Electronic Publishing – Revised Selected Papers (pp. 15-40). OpenEdition Press. (PDF of full book available on Academia.edu)