Progressive Geographies

Academics’ top tips for publishing success in The Times Higher Education. As long as you read with attention to different disciplines and academic systems, and treat all of this as advice, there are some useful suggestions here.

This looks a very interesting new initiative – ScholarlyHub.org Given the problems of academia.edu and Researchgate (see my post here and the comments to it, for example), this seems a project which is long overdue.

At ScholarlyHub we believe that a critical attitude does not stop with the platforms we use. Growing threats to open science have made it more crucial than before to develop a sustainable, not-for-profit environment. One that allows you to publish, share, and access quality work without financial constraints; find and work with colleagues in fields you’re interested in; develop research and teaching projects; store datasets securely, and mentor and be mentored in order to improve your work and help others. Above all, we want to foster an environment that meets our needs as individuals and scholarly communities and where we are in control, not myopic political agendas, greedy publishers, or data merchants. We believe that scholarship does little good behind pay walls, that metrified rankings rarely promote innovative research, and that transparent communication is vital to quality scholarship and healthy societies. Therefore we’re taking the best of the new and the best of the tried to create a truly open-access repository, publishing service, and scholarly social networking site, with large scope for members’ initiatives. And it will be run by scholars: not for profit, greater market share, or political kudos, but for their own growth and everyone’s benefit.
Join us, support us, and get involved!

They also have some FAQs, introduced by:

ScholarlyHub will redefine scholarly social networks. It aims to become a member-run and owned, non-profit portal for sharing and improving scholarly communications among scholars and between scholars and the public at large. It seeks to provide a dynamic, multidisciplinary, peer-to-peer, open-access environment that combines traditional and innovative quality control procedures, pre- and post-publication services, and opportunities for network-based collaboration, publication, mentorship, learning and debate. Its successful development will make scholarship across disciplines visible and accessible, foster the sustainable preservation of research and protect scholars’ independence from conglomerate publishers’ market-oriented needs on the one hand and myopic government agendas on the other. In doing so it is guided by these Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures.

While the actual configuration of ScholarlyHub will be determined through an ongoing discussion among its members, its ethos is that of an open, not-for-profit global learned society, supported by modest, sliding-scale membership fees. All members have an equal voice and enjoy the site’s full range of services, including personal websites, data storage, in-mail, job and conference wikis, mentorship programs, teaching aids and access to a variety of review protocols. ScholarlyHub will not sell users’ data and will be run for and by its community.