News from the Collective

SpringerNature, owner of Springer Open, Nature, and BioMedCentral, positions itself as a leader in the open access movement. However, Springer, Nature, and BMC are only 3 of the brands of the parent company, SpringerNature Group. The purpose of this post is to raise awareness about the dual approach of the parent company with respect to copyright and intellectual property – positioning itself as both a leader in open access and a leader in IP maximization, and to encourage those with a sincere interest in the goal of open access to learn about, and question, organizations with an interest in serving this area.

While the SpringerNature site today states that it is:

“A new force in research publishing
Springer Nature is the world’s largest academic book publisher, publisher of the world’s most influential journals, and a pioneer in the field of open research” (from: https://group.springernature.com/gp/group”

…another of the company’s brands, Macmillan, is sending letters to creators complaining that library lending is cannibalizing sales, and is further restricting paid library use of works. See the Canadian Urban Libraries’ Council on this matter here:
http://www.culc.ca/cms_lib/CULC%20Statement%20on%20Macmillan%20US%20Lending.pdf

Following are the brands listed on the SpringerNature group site as of today:

Our brand sites
Springer
Nature Research
BiomedCentral
Palgrave Macmillan
Macmillan Education
Springer Healthcare
Scientific American

In addition to open access, this company is involved in toll access textbook publishing and rentals and educational services that appear to compete with public education services. Even among the 3 brands involved in open access, 2 (Springer and Nature Research) have a long history of making money through subscriptions and sales. Even today, this is probably a much larger source of income than open access, and one of these brands’ main assets is copyright ownership of a large corpus of works.

To understand the potential futures of open access, it is important to understand the nature of the players involved. The friendly staff of Springer Open are no doubt a pleasure to work with for people in the OA movement, and sincere in their embrace of OA. However, when they tell you that true open access requires open licensing granting blanket downstream permission for commercial uses, they might not be aware that some of these commercial uses could involve for-profit textbook sales and rentals.

Unlike Elsevier, SpringerNatureGroup does not post financial information on its website. As a publicly traded corporation, Elsevier is obliged to provide this kind of transparency, including profits and business strategy. The corporation as a form of business can be viewed as an early form of openness in business; anyone can buy shares and participate in profits and decision-making. Springer is privately owned, and has no such obligation. In this respect, Springer is far less open than Elsevier.

Originally posted on the Global Open Access List and the Radical Open Access List.

** Click here to head straight to our free, downloadable X! 10.0 Blog-O-Versary Mix! It’s okay, like Tupac, we ain’t mad at ya!  It’s cool to come back here though and check this out. **

We didn’t have a clue where the blog was headed when we started out in 2009, packed into AT’s humid apartment on Seminary in Binghamton, alternately helping him pack, looking through his records, and making plans for this writing thing we were going to do together to stay in touch. I had a newborn baby strapped on my chest, Aaron was leaving BU to start a PhD program at Rutgers and Liana was embarking deeply into her dissertation (and just a year later for Kansas City. . .for the full origin story, catch our recent co-authored piece “The Pleasure [is] Principle: Sounding Out! and the Digitization of Community” in Digital Sound Studies). Our tight-knit research crew was facing so much change and uncertainty, that I’m pretty sure we decided to name the blog Sounding Out! as a form of echolocation. If talking and thinking about sound waves had brought us together in the first place, perhaps their resonance could stretch out to fill the unknown contours of the future that lay ahead.

And over the past decade, it has. Not just for us as friends, co-workers, and eventually shared hive-mind cells, but for the field of sound studies, which in the same decade went from “huh?” to “emerging,” then from academic hipster cred and to everybody’s tryna put “soundscape” in everything, to the New York Times magazine does a cover story on it AND you can now get a Masters in it at Northwestern University in Chicago [shout out to SO! special editor Neil Verma, who not only edited a media stream for us from 2013-2016 but—among many other awesome things—helped get this very program up and running]. It’s no coincidence that the field’s trajectory and reach has grown exponentially along with ours, and we are proud as hell of that.

Other things we are most proud of:

• that, on separate occasions in the past year, two brilliant people have told us that reading SO! inspired them to go to grad school because our site hosted and valued research on sound by/about women of color (these stories are literally our favorite and inspire us to go even harder!).
• growing deep, connected relationships among scholars and professionals in the field infused with fun and feeling amongst the brilliance and rigor.
• surpassing one MILLION unique clicks (not that “metrics” has ever been our goal but holla!!).
• getting on the podcast tip early (2010!!) and staying weird as hell with it (free format por vida!).
• always being down to shout out and collabo (over the years we’ve worked with Antenna, Locatora Radio, The Radio Preservation Task Force, IASPM-US, Soundbox, The Middle Spaces, Tuned City Brussels, WHRW 90.5, Everything Sounds, Not Your Muse, and The UC Riverside Punk Con,  among many others. In 2020 we have something going with the Zora Neale Hurston festival in Eatonville, Florida. . . stay tuned!).
• publishing a post on “Old Town Road.” IJS. Our regular writers always bring it. Thank you to Justin Burton and Robin James, our current roster, and to all of our past fam: Regina Bradley, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Maile Colbert, Osvaldo Oyola, and Andreas Pape.
• pushing so hard for our reach, readership, and coverage to become increasingly global (in the past year we hosted pieces from and/or about Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Cuba, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, and Ukraine).
• developing a strong undergraduate internship program through Binghamton University that brings us literally the best interns in the WORLD . They bring us new ideas, excitement, and new social media accounts, and we entrust them with everything we know about editing and digital publishing. It’s been a blast, and we are so proud they’ve all gone on to do wonderful work in the world.
• that our roster of writers more accurately represents the diversity of sound studies scholars than any other publication out there by leaps and bounds.
• that SO! has continued to evolve in interesting ways while strengthening and refining our guiding mission over the years: to find, nurture, and share accessible top-notch scholarship/art/thought that investigates how power impacts how we sound and listen, while amplifying sound studies knowledge toward social justice.
• AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, that so many readers have put their faith in us and so many amazing writers have thought of us as a home for their work. We take your trust so very seriously, and remain humbled by your generosity and confidence. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for being Sounding Out! along with us.

I’m trying to keep it short and cute today, not saying too TOO much because this post [our 624th!] is neither a retrospective nor a tribute, but a celebration. . .as Diddy once said, we ain’t going nowhere! [Editors’ Note: Other notables JS has referenced in the previous decade of Blog-o-Versary posts includes Bob Marley, LL Cool J, De La Soul, Schoolhouse Rock, Dionne Warwick, the Solid Gold Dancers, S.E. Hinton, Beyoncé, Langston Hughes, X-Ray Spex, A Tribe Called Quest, Fred Moten, Bill Withers, and . . . Taylor Swift. Oof.]. And bet, we have AMAZING things planned for next year, including forums on Soundwalking while POC (starts next week!), the 50th anniversary of Charles Mingus’s Ah Um (guest edited by Earl Brooks), audiobooks (edited by Liana Silva), and sound and climate change (guest edited by Anja Kanngieser), an undergraduate sound studies showcase,  and . . . . . . . . . .

[]

we just finished a book proposal for a Sounding Out! anthology: working title Power in Listening: The Sounding Out! Reader.

[ insert airhorn sound here ]

YES! We couldn’t be more grateful for the last ten years, and we couldn’t be more excited for what’s coming up next.  Even though we didn’t know where we were headed in 2009, we have arrived nonetheless, and all because we knew what we wanted—to create a community just like this one. Happy X! Blog-o-Versary to all of us, today!

–JLS, LMS, and AT

XXXXXXXXXX Highlight Reel XXXXXXXXXX

• Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo successfully defended her dissertation, and had the chance to open for Bikini Kill in June, under her stage name Sammus. In fall of 2019 she will be starting a two-year postdoc at Brown University’s music department, and will be getting married to fiction writer Lance Akinsiku. She is presenting a Making/Doing session at this year’s 4S Conference in New Orleans in September.
• John Melillo has a new essay on the French sound poet Henri Chopin in Ties: Journal of Text, Image, and Sound. His book, The Poetics of Noise, is under contract for Bloomsbury’s Sound Studies list.
• In summer 2018 Kristin Moriah began a position as an Assistant Professor of African American Literary Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “Where Are the Black Angels?” her review of Mickalene Thomas’s historic exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario is forthcoming in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 123, as is “A Greater Compass of Voice: Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Black Performance in Nineteenth-Century North America,” which will be published in Theatre Research in Canada. She is excited to attend the ASA annual meeting in Honolulu where she will present “Playing the Red Record: Black Feminist Recording Practices.”
• Phillip Sinitiere published several pieces on W. E. B. Du Bois in The North Star. He also co-organized a forum on Shirley Graham Du Bois at Black Perspectives. He is the 2019-2020 W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar at UMass Amherst.
• SO! Ed-in Chief Jennifer Lynn Stoever published three essays in 2018/19: “‘Doing fifty-five in a fifty-four’: Cop Voice, U.S. Policing and the Cadence of White Supremacy” (Interdisciplinary Journal of Voice Studies), “Black Radio Listeners in America’s ‘Golden Age'” (Journal of Radio and Media Studies), and “Crate Digging Begins at Home: Black and Latinx Women Collecting and Selecting Records in the 1960s and ‘70s Bronx” in the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Studies, which you can download for free here.

And remember, the “notes” on our Facebook page is *still the best place to hear about calls for art, calls for posts, and upcoming conferences, shows, and volumes in sound studies. “Like” us here and please continue to keep us in the loop regarding new projects. We love to signal boost, as you can probably tell by our very active Twitter feed!

Clic here for Sounding Out!‘s Blog-O-Versary “X!” mix 10.0 with track listing (and of course which writers suggested which songs)!

—

Jennifer Lynn Stoever is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Out! She is also Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, lead organizer of The Binghamton Historical Soundwalk Project and author of The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016).  

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

• 2018 “Sound the Alarm” mix 9.0
• 2017 “!!!!Resist!!!!” Blog-O-Versary mix 8.0
• 2016 Blog-O-Versary “!!!!!!!” mix 7.0
• 2015 Blog-o-Versary 6.0 Keep on Pushing! (Our 400th post!!)
• 2014 #flawless 5.0 celebration and mix
• 2013 Blog-o-Versary 4.0: Solid Gold Summer Countdown!
• 2012 #Blog-O-Versary 3.0: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (The Awesomeness)!
• 2011 “Awesome Sounds from a Future Boombox” 2.0
• 2010 First Blog-O-Versary party mix: A Celebration of Awesomeness

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: X!

SUBSCRIBE TO THE SERIES VIA ITUNES

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X!

Priests, “Texas Instruments”—THE EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE
Government Cheese, “Fish Stick Day”—Kevin Archer
Princess Nokia, “Brujas”—Reina Prado
Sammus, “Mighty Morphing”—Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo
Lucreccia Quintanilla, “Como Mujer (Ivy Queen+General Feelings+NaRemix)—Lucreccia Quintanilla
LSD, feat. Sia, Diplo, and Labrinth, “Genius”—Kaitlyn Liu
The Beths, “Future Me Hates Me”—James Tlsty
Fever Ray, “To The Moon and Back”—Airek Beauchamp 
Solange, “Binz”—Liana Silva
Ghostface Killah, “9 Milli”—Rob Ryan
Sly & the Family Stone, “Thankful & Thoughtful”—Walter Gershon
Conan Osiris, “Telemoveis”—Carlo Patrão 
Beyoncé, feat. Kendrick Lamar, “Freedom”—Jenna Perez
Lizzo, “Tempo”—Jennifer Lynn Stoever
Brother Ali, “Own Light (What Hearts Are For)”—Phillip Sintiere
Holly Herndon, “Frontier”—John Melillo
X-Ray Spex, “Identity”—Aaron Trammell
Mitski, “Washing Machine Heart”—Kelly Hiser
Meridian, “A Fire in the City”—Julie Beth Napolin
D-Lite, “Groove Is In The Heart”—Eddy Alvarez
Drake, “Started from the Bottom”—Kristin Leigh Moriah

—

***Click here to read our Blog-o-versary year-in-review by Ed. in Chief JS 

This post links to a preliminary review of Debat & Babini’s preprint PlanS in Latin America: a precautionary note (citation details below) – in brief, Latin America has long been a leader and role model, and these authors have no peers; an open offer to conduct a full peer review (with conditions), and a link to a post highlighting my current perspective on open peer review and an invitation to participate in experimentation with, and discussion about, open peer review. A link to this post as an offer for a full open peer review will be sent to Debat, Babini, and the editor of PeerJ.

Open offer to conduct a full peer review (with conditions): if desired by the authors and the journal should the journal wish to accept my conditions, I offer to conduct a full peer review of this article under the following conditions:

• My peer review would be open access but published under, and clearly marked as, All Rights Reserved Copyright, and will include a detailed explanation of this choice at the bottom of the peer review.
• If the journal, PeerJ, wishes to publish the review, what is required:
  • An exception to the journal’s CC-BY policy
  • A mechanism for a “one-time-only” review, i.e. if I agree to review one article, this does not mean that I wish to join the PeerJ community as an author or receive further review requests
• The authors and journal must commit to a particular version for the review, grant a reasonable time frame (minimum two weeks) for the review, and commit to reading and responding to the review. Rationale: it is not a good use of a reviewer’s time to review a version while the authors are already working on another version and/or if the work itself might be complete before the reivew.

The peer review itself becomes an item that I wish to retain and include in my CV, hence the official version from my perspective is included in my institutional repository. Following is a sample of a recent open peer review I did on a related topic:  https://ruor.uottawa.ca/hand
le/10393/39053

Observations and discussion

Please see my post Open Peer Review: a Model & an Invitation (2019 update) for current perspective and an invitation to participate in discussion and experimentation to further open peer review.

Debat & Babini article – citation, abstract and links

Humberto Debat, Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (IPAVE-CIAP-INTA), Argentina

Dominique Babini, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO), Argentina

Latin America has historically led a firm and rising Open Access movement and represents the worldwide region with larger adoption of Open Access practices. Argentina has recently expressed its commitment to join Plan S, an initiative from a European consortium of research funders oriented to mandate Open Access publishing of scientific outputs. Here we suggest that the potential adhesion of Argentina or other Latin American nations to Plan S, even in its recently revised version, ignores the reality and tradition of Latin American Open Access publishing, and has still to demonstrate that it will encourage at a regional and global level the advancement of non-commercial Open Access initiatives.

Access to full-text in English:

https://peerj.com/preprints/27834/

Access to full-text in Spanish:

https://zenodo.org/record/3332621#.XSekx-hKg2z

This post is a preliminary review of Debat & Babini’s preprint PlanS in Latin America: a precautionary note (citation details and links below).

Preliminary review:  Latin America has long been a leader in open access, and had achieved substantially the goals of PlanS more than a decade ago. In 2007, I wrote: “Scielo is an excellent example of what can be accomplished through a nationally subsidized open access program. While the Scielo portal encompasses the scholarly work of many latin countries, Brazil alone, in 2005, brought 160 fully open access journals to the world at a very modest cost of only $1 million dollars” (republished here).

This article is written by experts without peers, and does not really require peer review. This perspective is every bit as worthy of consideration by policy-makers everywhere as anything written by the EU-based OA2020 initiative.

This post will be accompanied by an open offer to conduct a full peer review (with conditions), and some observations on open peer review that are meant to stimulate discussion, however this affirmation of the leadership of Debat, Babini, Scielo & Redalyc warrants a unique post.

Humberto Debat, Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (IPAVE-CIAP-INTA), Argentina

Dominique Babini, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO), Argentina

Latin America has historically led a firm and rising Open Access movement and represents the worldwide region with larger adoption of Open Access practices. Argentina has recently expressed its commitment to join Plan S, an initiative from a European consortium of research funders oriented to mandate Open Access publishing of scientific outputs. Here we suggest that the potential adhesion of Argentina or other Latin American nations to Plan S, even in its recently revised version, ignores the reality and tradition of Latin American Open Access publishing, and has still to demonstrate that it will encourage at a regional and global level the advancement of non-commercial Open Access initiatives.

Access to full-text in English:

https://peerj.com/preprints/27834/

Access to full-text in Spanish:

https://zenodo.org/record/3332621#.XSekx-hKg2z

This is a 2019 update of a post originally published in 2005 on The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics; the original is republished here. This version reflects experience with open peer review (mine and that of others), further reflection, and research conducted since 2005.

These are some ideas for open peer review that can be used today in experiments that may be helpful to shape future systemic approaches. The overall goal is to facilitate open research by opening up preprints, increase transparency in the peer review process, and to allow peer reviewers to take credit for their work. Interested authors and/or reviewers can experiment with this approach today. For example, an author can post a preprint in a repository, seek volunteer reviewers through a listserv or other social media service for a relevant scholarly community and/or ask a colleague to serve as an editor to coordinate the review process and/or serve as a contact for blind reviews.

Examples and links:

Gibney (2016) wrote an article for Nature on peer review overlay journals built on arXiv that includes links to the journals.

A copy of my peer review of a recent article can be found in the University of Ottawa Institutional Repository here: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/39053 In this way my peer review constitutes a scholarly work with a stable URL that I include in my online CV.

See the Open Access Tracking Project tag oa.open_peer_review for 32 items as of July 15, some posted in the past week.

This model would be compatible with, but does not depend on, peer review overlay journals, featuring an overlay of peer review on articles submitted to and archived in institutional and/or subject repositories, the method recommended in 2009 for the UK for transition to open access in the medium to long term by Houghton et al. (2009) as the most transformative and most cost-effective approach.

The idea of open peer review is not new. While this post will not include a full review of related literature, as one example, Stevan Harnad talks about one approach to open peer review as early as 1996, in Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals.

The goals of this model are:

transparent peer review: unlike blind peer review, readers can see the peer review process in action. Rather than accepting an assessment of certification based on a closed system, readers can judge the peer review process per se, for themselves. This model could accomodate a combination of open and blind peer review – that is, a peer reviewer could publish a signed peer review, or provide comments confidentially, depending on the preferences of authors or the discretion of editors. As an example of the latter, when reviewing opinion pieces in an emotionally heated area, some blind review might be seen as preferable to open peer review.

increased scholarly literacy: it is assumed that a transparent peer review process will facilitate science literacy teaching, as more people will be able to see the peer review process in action

better peer review: exposing the peer review process per se will allow for thoughtful reflection on peer review per se, and facilitate research. This will allow for the development of better and more efficient peer review.

peer-reviewer credit: peer review is an important task, which a great many academics undertake on a voluntary basis. A portfolio of signed peer reviews can be added to the author’s c.v. The best peer-reviewers, those who are thorough, considerate, and respond quickly, can be recognised for their work.

facilitate and recognise author controlled peer review: There are advantages and disadvantages to author-controlled peer review, where the author takes responsibility to seek out peer reviewers. While this is not presently recognised as peer review, it is widely practiced. In the author’s view, an article which has been peer reviewed and edited accordingly prior to submission for publication, is likely to be a better article. Authors who seek out comments from colleagues, and peer reviewers who are sought out by authors, are both demonstrating an openness to collaboration and willingness to listen to critique – both important elements in conducting scholarly research. Author controlled peer review could be used to supplement editor-coordinated peer review (a pre-peer-reviewed article might need only one outside peer reviewer, for example, while an unreviewed work might need two or three).

In some cases, author controlled peer review could be an alternative to editor-coordinated peer review. It would be desirable to develop a set of criteria outlining the optimum for peer review (peer reviewer meets certain criteria, is not a former student, teacher, co-researcher or co-author, at least one peer reviewer from a different cultural background – more important in social than hard sciences – and so forth). Authors should explain whether and how they have met these criteria; this could be accomplished by an automated list, where the relevant criteria are checked off. Some of this could be be automated, as well – for example, a database of the author’s works will reveal former co-authors, and automated comparison of the c.v.’s of author and peer reviewer will reveal common affiliations.

Comments on this blogpost or via e-mail are welcome.

Last updated July 15, 2019.

References

Gibney, E. (2016). Open journals that piggyback on arXiv gather momentum. Nature 530: 7558. Retrieved July 15, 2019 from https://www.nature.com/news/open-journals-that-piggyback-on-arxiv-gather-momentum-1.19102

J. Houghton, B. Rasmussen, P. Sheehan, C. Oppenheim, A. Morris, C. Creaser, H. Greenwood, M. Summers, and A. Gourlay, 2009. “Economics implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: Exploring the costs and benefit” (27 January). Retrieved July 11, 2019 from:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/45dd/cb9ebb9c8505a4ac86718734dda3311f91d8.pdf

See also
Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) Editorial 1978 on Open Peer Commentary Thanks to Stevan Harnad.

This post, originally published on December 7, 2007, on the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, (IJPE) is just as relevant today. I am re-publishing today because of technical difficulties for some with access to IJPE and as support for an open peer review post in progress.

National open access journal subsidy

In preparation for some current work in open peer review, this is a re-publication of my August 15, 2005 post on The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics (IJPE), drawing from and building on Harnad’s 1996 work in this area. IJPE is live but some readers (including myself while at work) are reporting that they are not able to connect. Other links have not been tested.

Open Peer Review: A Model & An Invitation