Pronetos

Seeking to fill a void in the scholarly publications realm, the founders of Pronetos are this week issuing a sneak preview of Open Access Press. Open Access Press helps scholars and learned societies in the humanities and social sciences bring print journals on line. Using the world’s most ubiquitous journal management platform, the Open Journal System, Open Access Press works with publishers to convert existing journals to an online, Open Access format, or create a new digital Open Access Journal. More details will follow next week. Sneak peak at http://openaccesspress.com.

We just got word of a new search engine – Jurn – dedicated to Open Access ejournals in the arts and humanities. The engine is located at http://jurn.org.

By the way, how long will it be before we dispense with the term “ejournal?” We didn’t say “print journal” before the “ejournal” came along. There are varying types of journals (peer-reviewed, non peer-reviewed, academic, professional, et. al.) but a journal is a journal no matter the medium. Additionally, how long will it be before ALL journals are online anyway? Will we still say “ejournal” when everything is online?

The Read Write Web has a post today indicating that President Obama’s Justice Department picks tend to be old school Copyright Lawyers. From the post:

Today, Donald B. Verrilli was appointed to the position of associate deputy attorney general by President Obama. While he is definitely not a household name, Verrilli was the lawyer who represented the music industry in the Grokster case in the U.S. Supreme Court. This appointment by itself wouldn’t necessarily stand out, but the Obama administration has now appointed a handful of pro-copyright industry insiders to prominent positions in the Department of Justice, including Tom Perrelli, who was one of the RIAA’s top lawyers.

As CNet reports, Verrilli, while working as a senior litigator for the Washington law firm Jenner & Block, also represented the entertainment industry in Viacom’s case against Google’s YouTube, and he represented the RIAA in its infamous case against Jammie Thomas.

We’ll be keeping an eye on the goings-on at the Justice Department as the administration’s agenda matures.

Having just held the seminal Northwest Energy Innovation Summit here in Boise this week, lots of us were excited to see the news from Stanford:

Stanford Announces $100-Million Energy-Research Institute

Stanford University announced on Monday that it had raised $100-million to establish a new institute that will study issues like energy efficiency, renewable energy, and global warming, and promote practical solutions to global energy problems.

The Precourt Institute for Energy will allow Stanford to establish one of the nation’s largest research institutes on renewable energy without relying significantly on federal or industry support. The start-up money comes from a collection of gifts, mostly from three alumni, and represents one of the largest amounts the university has ever received for a new program.

That story wasn’t too far ahead of this other story in my Google reader:

Moody’s Sees Stiff Challenges for Colleges—Especially Private Ones—in Next Year

A new annual-outlook report from Moody’s Investors Service says that higher-education institutions are facing a range of challenges in the next year and a half. Although all colleges will face hardship, private colleges will be especially stressed compared with public colleges and community colleges.

So I guess someone needs to tell Stanford that there is a recession on, and someone better tell the Chronicle that Boise State University, Idaho State University, the University of Idaho, and Lewis Clark State College all face losing 10% of their budgets this year and next (i.e., we are especially stressed here, Chronicle staff).

There has been conflicting evidence over the years over whether Open Access articles have a citation advantage over traditional lock-’em-away-in-private-database articles run by traditional publishers. But the evidence seems to be mounting that Open Access offers a distinct advantage, and the world seems to be taking note.

From the post announcing the award:

Dr. Michael Norris has been named as a Highly Commended Award winner of the 2008 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award in the Information Science category for his doctoral thesis ‘The citation advantage of open access articles’.
These prestigious awards have now been running for four years and
attract submissions of an exceptionally high quality from across the
globe in all subject areas.

Congratulations to Dr. Norris and the OA community as a whole for continuing to create content that is getting recognized.

The economic news at the state level is grim – no other way to put it. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reports that 39 states face budget shortfalls totaling $12.3 billion. Many have already spent reserves, raised additional revenue (i.e., raised taxes), or cut spending.

If you are a higher education administrator, faculty member, or staff member the spending cuts at the state level are going to impact your future. Positions will be lost. Travel budgets will be cut. Publication budgets will dwindle. Yet scholarship must go on. What are we to do? Here’s some thoughts.

First and foremost, now is the time to get plans B thru Z in order. Tools like the Pronetos social network, LinkedIn, and Facebook are designed so that you can manage your own personal brand. This is the time to get your profile up to date, and start networking and linking to others. Use these networks to meet people that your contacts know. In a time of survival, your network is your most valuable asset.

Universities are certainly going to see travel budgets cut. Some people may have to miss the next conference. But this doesn’t mean you can’t network with your colleagues. Utilize not only social networks for online networking opportunities in your field, but start using electronic resources to identify new opportunities. For historians, the American Historical Association’s Blog is a great resource for keeping up with new opportunities in the field of history. The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has an excellent podcast series, and is constantly bringing more resources online such as the Bracero Archive. All of these tools make it easier (less expensive) for historians to stay in touch with each other, and acquire expensive and time consuming scholarly resources. The digital world is alive and well in every field and scholars should get to know the resources available to them.

University presses have long been under siege as the economics of journal and book publishing changes radically. Pronetos can help academic publishers move their peer-reviewed content online which dramatically reduces the cost of publication. Those who are more technologically inclined can also use free and open source software to do that of their own volition.

Want to start a conversation in your field, or extend a conversation from the latest conference or meeting? Why not try Twitter? Twitter is officially a “microblog” a way to respond to the question, “what are you doing?” – but with only 140 characters. Lots of scholars are already using Twitter to keep up to date – REALLY up to date. Twitter searches your e-mail contacts and lets you know which of your contacts are already using the service. But don’t stop there – you can invite your colleagues as well.

There are so many ways in which technology can help scholars stay relevant, help universities and presses reduce costs, and ultimately help individuals and organizations weather the economic storm, but these are a few to help get the conversation started.

How would you use technology to help yourself or your institution weather the economic storm?

Greetings all – just a quick note about some code changes to the site, and some new security measures. In our effort to connect the world’s scholars in as seamless a manner as possible, we put up as few barriers as possible to communicating with each other. Unforunately, this has led to some “users” abusing the site by phishing or spamming legitimate Proentos members. Why they chose our site when they could have copied hundreds of faculty e-mail addresses from any number of university website, I don’t know. What I can tell you though is that we are making some changes to the way Pronetos works.

First – our Terms of Use Agreement clearly states that users who engage in inappropriate activities such as phishing or spamming will be banned from using the site. We have banned several accounts where suspicious behavior has occurred. Second, later today we will implement code changes so that only “colleagues” can e-mail other colleagues within the system. This move will insure that only those with legitimate purposes are using the site. It also encourages you to complete your user profile so that other scholars will be able to clearly see whom they are adding as a colleague.

We want Pronetos to be a community where researchers can network and collaborate with other colleagues in their field, and a community that supports the creation of scholarly research. Thanks for helping us reach those goals. We hope we are helping you reach yours.

Hello World! We’re launching a new site to encompass some of the new things that we have going on here at Pronetos.

We kept the look and feel mostly similar so that the users of the Pronetos social network won’t be so confused when they land here on a new page! The social network now has an address of http://sn.pronetos.com. Please update your bookmarks!

But while you are here, take note of some new offerings.

En route to linking scholarly collaboration with the review and publication process, it’s now possible for us to offer electronic journal publication and OAI compliant repositories as hosted services. What does that mean? It means it is now easier than ever for you to start an electronic journal or launch an institutional repository because we can handle all the technology for you.