Here’s another way to frame publishers like IGI: they are vampire presses. They appear to be alive (disseminating ideas), but really they are dead (concealing ideas). They capture and feed on fragile individuals in order to advance their kind as a whole. They move in the shadows, sealing deals with institutional buyers under cover of night. Their goal is to hide their secret and pass it down through generations, adding to their number only as many as are needed to progress the line.
I think Ian hit’s it on the head. I’ve long had IGI/Idea Group on my boycott list. I have heard many stories of poor editing and low standards of acceptance in relation to their books. There are many publishers pursuing the ‘lower barrier to entry’ model of academic publishing and it is putting quite a bit of pressure on the system as a whole. We need to be careful with these presses and all secondary presses in terms of academic productivity, as they aren’t necessarily helping anyone and in the end as Ian says they are praying on people.
I’ve been working on our annual report. Here are some interesting stats:
The CDDC has been referenced in over 250 books, over 500 scholarly publications total. We’ve appeared in numerous textbooks, academic papers, etc. Last year we had over 2 million unique addresses visiting our servers and we transferred over 4terabytes of information. We have around 65000 links to our site, many are duplicates, but around we do have links from at least one university on every continent that has a university, and usually we have many links from many universities. We have links from corporations, and many links in the international non-profit sphere. Our materials have been used by millions of people and in hundreds courses and likely will continue to be used for some time.
I think the point of this little review is to say, while the CDDC isn’t hugely productive in its own research, though we have done some cool things and will try to do more, what we do well is that we do provide an anchor and the infrastructure for past, current, and future research. This provision of resources is something that we do, that not many organizations do and we do it in a way that does not usually intrude upon the work being done.
The World Wide Web has, obviously, gotten pretty popular. You’re using it right now. It’s estimated that there are more than 12 billion publicly accessible websites on the WWW today.
Gopher, meanwhile, has stagnated. According to the biggest Gopher search engine, there were less than 100 Gopher sites left in the world as of 2007. And Mozilla has announced that future versions of Firefox (starting with Firefox 4) will not even be able to display Gopher sites.
The study asked approximately 400 undergraduates aged 18 to 25 whether they agreed with these statements:
If I have explained to my professor that I am trying hard, I think he/she should give me some consideration with respect to my course grade — 66.2% agree
If I have completed most of the reading for a class, I deserve a B in that course — 40.7%
If I have attended most of the classes for a course, I deserve at least a grade of B — 34.1%
This is where you have to explain that ‘tries hard and fails’ is a real category of life. Failure isn’t just a real option, it is a really good option for many students. I think there is a real issue with ‘learning design’ if failure isn’t an option.
President elect Obama has several very large problems to solve, but just because he has majorities in the house and senate does not mean it will be an easy job, it will be very difficult because after almost 30 years of the same politics based in money. Where to start? I’d actually start with campaign finance reform, limit the effects of lobbyists influence and put congress in closer relationship to their elect.
