Faculty are inundated with email invitations to publish in scholarly journals or to serve on their editorial boards. Many of these solicitations are completely valid, but an increasing number of these journals are engaging in predatory publishing practices.
Predatory publishing, a term coined by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian and associate professor at the University of Colorado, Denver, is an unwanted and undesirable side effect of the open access movement and Beall has become widely known as the “go-to guy” when it comes to checking the validity, authenticity, or value of these invitations.
Beall maintains several resources that are great tools for promotion boards, hiring committees, and, as it turns out, librarians. The renowned Beall’s List of predatory publishers lists “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly Open-access publishers,” on his Scholarly Open access blog. Additionally, Beall maintains a list of standalone journals and a list of criteria—covering everything from editors, staff, and business management to transparency, integrity, journal standards, and publishing practices—for identifying predatory Open-access publishers.
The Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies (CAS) has been a frequent users of Beall’s list, since nationally and internationally recognized researchers at the Center are primary targets of invitations to participate in scholarly communication in various ways. Addiction science has been experiencing an influx of new journals and conferences, akin to health sciences.
In the July issue of The Agenda, we invited you to read part one of this interview in the Center of Alcohol Studies Information Services Newsletter, in which Beall explains how he became involved in the growing area of predatory publishing, discusses the most vulnerable groups in academia, and gives an update of the current situation. Part two, focusing on topics of greater interest for librarians, is now available in SALIS News. Beall advocates for educating users about not only predatory publishing, but also the various forms of open access and publishing standards, so that they can avoid the traps of predatory publishers.
Making Rowan University and Camden County College Students Feel Welcome
Through a partnership agreement, Paul Robeson Library is now the campus library for Rowan University and Camden County College students. Bart Everts is the library liaison for these students and has started a new Facebook page to share information about their library privileges and resources. The agreement allows students to access the library, use library databases, and check out books using their student ID cards. Robeson also has computers reserved for their use.
Morroe Berger–Benny Carter Jazz Research Fund
Each year the Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS) awards up to ten grants of $1,000 each to assist jazz researchers. Half of the awards are designated for students in the Rutgers University-Newark Master’s Program in Jazz History and Research and half are awarded to scholars from other institutions or unaffiliated researchers to enable them to visit IJS in conjunction with their projects. To date, we have given more than 70 awards to scholars and students worldwide working in a variety of disciplines, including jazz history, musicology, bibliography, and discography.
Applications for the 2017 grants are due October 21, 2016. Awards will be announced by November 14.
“Homecoming! Some Highlights from the Library of J. Milton French” at Alexander Library
Homecoming! Some Highlights from the Library of J. Milton French is on display now in the Scholarly Communication Center at Alexander Library. This case exhibit features a selection of volumes recently donated to Rutgers by the family of J. Milton French (1895–1962), a Milton scholar and professor of English at the university from 1940 to 1960.
The books on display include rare first and early editions of works by John Harington, Richard Barckley, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, John Suckling, George Wither, William Wollaston, and John Milton.
New Brunswick Music Scene Symposium Planned for October 27, 2016
Save the date. Special Collections and University Archives will hold the next New Brunswick Music Scene Archive symposium on October 27, 6 p.m. in the Teleconference Lecture Hall at Alexander Library. Stay tuned for more information, including the participants. In the meantime, here’s a look back at the 2015 symposium, featuring a who’s who of New Jersey music (http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/news/symposium-local-notables-inaugurate-new-brunswick-music-scene-archive).
Credit: Laura Anderson Barbata.
Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries Welcomes “Laura Anderson Barbata: Collaborations beyond Borders”
This fall, the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries in the Mabel Smith Douglass Library will welcome the 2016-17 Estelle Lebowitz Endowed Visiting Artist Exhibition, Laura Anderson Barbata: Collaborations Beyond Borders. The exhibit contains selected highlights of textile, sculptural, 2-dimensional, and video works from the traveling exhibition Transcommunality.
“Peep Show: Books from the Art Library X Room” Exhibit at Rutgers Art Library
Megan Lotts has raided the X Room to put on a case display of beautiful, surprising, amusing, and impressive books.
Stop by to get a taste of the treasures that reside in the Rutgers Art Library’s archives.
On August 18 the Libraries upgraded to Full Text Finder, EBSCO’s newest holdings and link management tool designed to replace its A-to-Z and LinkSource services, which are being phased out. A-to-Z is the product that powers the Libraries’ electronic journals search. LinkSource is the product that powers its link resolver service (locally known as “Get it @ R”). You may notice some changes to these interfaces. Below is a quick summary of what to expect.
The new e-journals search interface is a little cleaner, better organized, and offers a variety of new features including:
Responsive autocomplete to facilitate known title searching
Discipline-specific browsing to help users identify titles in their subject area
Filters to refine results by subject, format, or publisher
Click to enlarge.
The new link resolver menu has been streamlined to help users determine the availability of an item faster, more efficiently, and with less confusion. New features include:
Improved menu layout and design
Intuitive labels and icons
Real-time catalog lookup for print holdings
Fail-safe options in case of link resolver error
Click to enlarge.
Please be sure to update any guides or tutorials that refer to these products. Links to the old A-to-Z Journals and Citation Linker pages have automatically been updated in LibGuides, but you may want to double check your guides just to be sure.
As with any software migration, you may notice some irregularities as we work to resolve temporary glitches. If you have any questions or wish to report a technical problem, please contact serials@rutgers.libanswers.com.
Special thanks to the Serials Team for their work migrating our holdings data as well as the Web Team for their help customizing the design of the interface.
A recent policy change means that high resolution images from the Rutgers University Photo Gallery are now available free of charge for Rutgers projects.
Douglass Library. Nick Romanenko/Rutgers University
The gallery offers access to professional images of Rutgers buildings, faculty, staff, and students. Previously, low resolution images (72 dots per inch, suitable for projects such as PowerPoint presentations, email newsletters, and webpages) were available for free download, while high resolution images (300 dots per inch, suitable for print projects such as flyers, posters, and brochures) had to be purchased for $20 each. Now, however, because of changes due to RCM, the high resolution images are also available at no cost to the Rutgers community.
Finding the perfect image for your project is as simple as following these three easy steps:
Log in to the gallery using your NetID and password.
Browse through the categories to identify a photo you like.
For low resolution images, read and accept the terms and conditions to download the image immediately; or, for high resolution images, contact photo archivist Jane Hart with the file name and how you intend to use the photo.
In the event that you can’t find an image you like in the gallery, you may request access to the University Communications and Marketing Photo Archive, which contains thousands of additional photos for your perusal. Contact Jane for access to the archive.
Rutgers University-Newark’s Honors Living-Learning Community (HLLC) is an initiative intended to go beyond high SAT scores or high school rankings. The goal is to identify and blend an international group of traditional and non-traditional students into a curriculum based on themes of “Local Citizenship in a Global World,” and focusing on academic, social, and personal development.
Among the targeted student populations are high school graduates, first-generation college students, transfer students, veterans, older students, General Education Development (GED) recipients, student parents, and financially independent students. Dana librarians will be important liaisons in building the effort, according to Bobbie Tipton, the library’s point person who recently met with Marta Esquilin, the associate dean of HLLC and assistant professor of professional practice. HLLC will be divided into “cohorts,” each containing about ten students, which may be mentored by a librarian. The curriculum will be a mixture of core classes specific to HLLC, as well as a capstone project, filled in by required classes to earn an undergraduate degree.
Among the areas of instruction librarians would provide to new and transfer students through workshops are finding their subject librarian; finding core databases in the subject area; using a citation manager; determining the correction citation style for the subject; and avoiding plagiarism.
“This is intended to be a holistic learning experience with a strong emphasis on social justice and community,” Tipton said. “It is definitely an expanded definition of ‘honors’ that goes beyond academic performance. The intention is to educate movers and shakers in social engagement.”
Credit Line: Laura Anderson Barbata, Performance for San Pedro Festivities, 2011, Zaachila, Oaxaca. Photo: Marco Pacheco / Image courtesy of the artist.
This fall, the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries in the Mabel Smith Douglass Library will welcome the 2016-17 Estelle Lebowitz Endowed Visiting Artist Exhibition, Laura Anderson Barbata: Collaborations Beyond Borders. The exhibit contains selected highlights of textile, sculptural, 2-dimensional, and video works from the traveling exhibition Transcommunality.
Save the Dates: Tuesday, November 1st, 5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m Join us for a reception in honor of the artist at 5 p.m. and a free public artist lecture on in the Mabel Smith Douglass Room at Douglass Library.
Wednesday, November 2nd, 10:30 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Barbata will presentLa Extraordinaria Historia de Julia Pastrana, a performance work in progress at Alexander Library in the Scholarly Communications Center.
Background: Born in Mexico City and based in New York, Laura Anderson Barbata’s work focuses on participatory art initiatives that document communities and traditions, using storied art forms as platforms for social change, contemporary performance, group participation, and protest. Her collaborative and ongoing transdisciplinary works have been initiated in places such as the Amazon of Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Norway, the United States., and Mexico. Her practice intertwines traditional and contemporary mediums, so-called “fine art” and popular art, and craft and folk customs forging links between the past and the present, as well as the individual and the community.
Among her most well-known projects are: Transcommunality, a decade-long project with communities in Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, and Brooklyn highlighting the moko jumbie stilt walking tradition; Intervention: Wall Street, a collaborative performance with the Brooklyn Jumbies that took place during 2011’s Occupy Wall Street protests; and The Repatriation of Julia Pastrana, a project involving the return of Ms. Pastrana (a woman who was exhibited in the 19th century as the ugliest woman in the world) for burial in her homeland of Mexico.
Barbata’s work is included in numerous private and public collections, among them, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; and Landesbank Baden-Wϋrttemberg, Stuttgart, Germany. She is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte, FONCA-CONACULTA, México; and the Julia Pastrana project is supported by the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte, FONCA-CONACULTA, México.
Rutgers is not the only major New Jersey institution celebrating its 250th anniversary this year!
On Saturday May 23, I attended the Medical Society of New Jersey’s 250th Anniversary Celebration and Inaugural Gala. The celebration was held at the Heldrich Hotel in New Brunswick, on the actual 250th anniversary of the Medical Society of New Jersey’s first ever meeting, also held in New Brunswick (at Duff’s Tavern!). The Medical Society of New Jersey (MSNJ) is America’s oldest state medical society, and has over 5000 members. RBHS–Special Collections holds a nearly complete run of MSNJ journal publications from 1848 to 2005, as well as substantial archival holdings of its constituent Burlington, Essex, Hudson, Monmouth, Passaic, and Warren County Medical Societies. We also hold the records of the Medical Alliance of the Medical Society of New Jersey (formerly the Women’s Auxiliary).
Credit: Robert Vietrogoski
At the gala, I joined Dr. Peter Carmel, the emeritus chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery at New Jersey Medical School. Dr. Carmel is also the current president of the Medical History Society of New Jersey and a recent past president of the American Medical Association! During the program, Dr. Carmel presented a well-received illustrated historical retrospective on the MSNJ’s founding and its centennial and bicentennial celebrations. Some of the images used by Dr. Carmel were drawn from RBHS–Special Collections materials.
For the gala, Dr. Carmel also organized an exhibit on Dr. Wells P. Eagleton, the first New Jersey neurosurgeon, and a medical luminary who received the first Edward J. Ill award from the Academy of Medicine of New Jersey in 1939. Thanks to Dr. Carmel’s generous restoration efforts, Eagleton’s actual Edward J. Ill medal was on display. This artifact was rediscovered last summer in storage at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and is now part of the holdings of RBHS–Special Collections. Dr. Carmel’s exhibit and the Eagleton artifacts will soon be on display in the lobby of Smith Library.
Credit: Robert Vietrogoski
If the Eagleton name seems familiar at Rutgers, Dr. Eagleton’s wife Florence Peshine Eagleton was a founding member of the board of managers of the New Jersey College for Women (now Douglass College) and a Rutgers trustee from 1932 to 1946. She made the bequest in 1956 that established Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics, which itself is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.
The newest addition to the RBHS–Special Collections artifact collection is the commemorative 250th anniversary “challenge coin” given to gala attendees by Captain Joseph P. Costabile, the incoming MSNJ president. The gala was a most enjoyable event and I hope to extend the relationship between the Medical Society of New Jersey and RBHS–Special Collections. (And for those familiar with my normal mode of dress, here is photographic proof of me in a tuxedo!)
Rutgers Future Scholars use Legos at the Art Library to learn about teamwork and libraries. Photo credit: Megan Lotts.
The Rutgers Future Scholars program places rising High School juniors in an internship for one week during the summer. This summer, the New Brunswick Libraries hosted two internships. Ryan Womack hosted 5 students and worked with them on Big Data, and Jill Nathanson hosted 5 students working on gamification.
For those unfamiliar with the Rutgers Future Scholars Program, here is the description from its website:
The goal of the Rutgers Future Scholars program is to increase the numbers of academically ambitious high school graduates who come from less-advantaged communities, inspire and prepare them meet the standards to be admitted to colleges and universities, and then provide tuition funding to those who are admitted and choose to attend Rutgers University.
In addition to working on their respective projects, the interns were provided an overview of the Libraries and had an opportunity to meet a variety of faculty and staff. Snack breaks were hosted each day by librarians, access services staff, and the communications team. The interns also traveled to the Art Library one day to participate in using Legos to learn about teamwork and libraries.
The students working with Jill Nathanson created an event for transfer students. The challenge was to create an event that reinforced the library instruction transfer students received in their library sessions while also making it fun and giving them an opportunity to interact with other transfer students. The students worked together to create a team based activity that will be used this fall at the Alexander Library.
The students working with Ryan Womack explored data science with R, working through exercises on data wrangling, data analysis, and data visualization using the R open source statistical software environment. By working with real-world College Scorecard data, the students gained understanding of the challenges and possibilities of working with live, raw data sources.
Click to enlarge. Photo credit: Michael Joseph, Rutgers University Libraries.
In preparing a pop-up exhibition for the Northeast Victorian Studies Conference in April, we turned up a previously unknown and unrecorded letter from Charles Dickens bound into one of the Libraries’ books. Written by Dickens on 24 November 1849 to the Reverend John Dufton, the 3 p. letter responds to Dufton’s pamphlet, The Prison and the School: a Letter to Lord John Russell, M.P. (London: John W. Parker, 1848). Dickens writes warmly in support of the pamphlet, though he registers a disagreement with Dufton’s apparent enthusiasm for the “reformatory influences” of the new “model prisons,” noting, with a Dickensian touch, that the reformatory spirit cannot “[survive] the unnatural air of the solitary cell.”
Penal reform was a complex and pressing topic, then as now. The skepticism of the reforming capacities of prison Dickens shared with Dufton anticipates his 1850 essay “Pet Prisoners,” as well as David’s cynical views of the “model prison” in chapter 61 of David Copperfield, which Dickens would begin writing in 1849. Despite their disagreement on what Dickens calls a “momentous”—and Phillip Collins in Dickens and Crime (1968) a “blood-heating”—issue, Dickens concludes his letter on amiable terms by inviting Dufton to visit him in London. Quite familiarly, he invites himself to visit Dufton: “if I should find myself near Ashford as I generally do, sometime in the autumn I shall make bold to remind you for a few minutes, of our correspondence.” No such visit has been recorded.
Dickens thought well enough of Dufton’s pamphlet to keep and annotate it, and it has survived into our time. Regrettably, however, it is currently unavailable to scholars. In 2010, it was sold by Henry Sothern Limited to a private collector in Switzerland (see Piccadilly Notes 56 [2010] item 100, no. 11). [i]
Click to enlarge. Photo credit: Michael Joseph, Rutgers University Libraries.
Dickens and Dufton were not strangers. Elsewhere in the volume housing the Dickens letter (noted below) is a manuscript note, dated 1846, from George Cruikshank to Dufton, written on behalf of Dickens and the Committee of the Ashford Mechanics’ Institution, thanking Dufton for sending a lecture, as requested.
The letter is captioned “Devonshire Terrace.” Dickens lived at 1 Devonshire Terrace (now 15-17 Marylebone Road, Marylebone), near Regent’s Park, from December 1939–1851.
John Dufton was rector of Warehorne, in the Ashford Borough of Kent and the author of other ephemeral publications including National Education, What it is and What it Should be (1848).
The letter has escaped detection because it was all but buried within an extra-illustrated copy of Blanchard Jerrold’s Life of George Cruikshank (1882). As Ron Becker discovered in a search of the archives of the Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, Don Sinclair recorded the acquisition of the volume in 1956:
Click to enlarge. Photo credit: Michael Joseph, Rutgers University Libraries.
Without doubt the most striking single gift is that of the Class of 1933, which had presented earlier an extra-illustrated set of Benjamin West material. The present gift, preserved in the same form, is the Jesse Metcalf collection of George Cruikshank prints and manuscripts. It is interleaved in a first edition of Blanchard Jerrold’s Life of George Cruikshank (1882), published originally in two octavo volumes, here expanded to seven gilt-edged, large folio volumes
bound in scarlet crushed Levant morocco. The items have not been counted, but a careful estimate places the number of prints at nearly a thousand, with perhaps six dozen manuscript letters. Virtually all types of Cruikshank’s artistic work are represented (oil paintings excluded): etchings, some in color, woodcuts, at least one original watercolor, etc.; caricatures, book illustrations for Dickens and others. His well-known Temperance series, The Bottle (1847) and The Drunkard’s Children (1848), are present. The first volume also contains his famous Specimen of a Bank Note—not to be imitated (1818), a bitter, effective caricature inspired by the hanging of several women convicted of passing counterfeit notes. Engraved in banknote style, it shows eleven hooded figures hanging by the neck, and other macabre decorations. (19:2)
George Cruikshank (1792–1878) was an important caricaturist, illustrator, and print-maker, perhaps best known now for his illustrations of Sketches by Boz (1836) and Oliver Twist (1838). In George Cruikshank, Life, Times and Art: Volume 1, 1792–1835, Robert E. Patton notes that Ruskin thought him second only to Rembrandt in etching (8). “He infused his pictures with a humor at times bawdy, crude, sentimental, inconsequent, grotesque, bathetic, or pathetic. Like Dickens, to whom he was frequently compared, he was both a ‘special correspondent to posterity,’ focusing a journalist’s eye on the rapidly changing world around him, and a visionary humanist, outraged by injustice, greed, and folly, sympathetic to the defenseless and neglected,moralistic toward those who abused their power, their prerogatives, their neighbors, or their bodies.” (8)
Michael Joseph
Kevin Mulcahy
[i] Andrew McGeachin, e-mail message to M. Joseph, March 31, 2016.
Most of you have, by now, visited the Rutgers Connection Migration Support website. I hope you are finding a lot of useful information there, but if anything is missing, please let us know using the Submit Your Questions form. This story is meant to update everyone on the newest pieces of the migration plan. Most importantly, to let you know that everyone’s email in Rutgers University Libraries will be migrated August 23–25, 2016. The exact grouping will be worked out in collaboration with AULs and library directors.
Kickoff meeting:
A successful kickoff meeting was held on Friday, July 22, with four representatives of OIT, all UCSs; and all IIS staff, joined by a special Migration Representative from the Health Sciences Libraries. A four-hour recording of that discussion is available with RUL NetID authentication–but you are hereby warned: It is heavy on technical jargon! Unless you want to delve into every detail, you would be better off perusing the support site and attending the upcoming information sessions and subsequent training.
Prepping for the migration:
But first, as the most important part of preparations, we must collect information about all existing accounts, as only one account per Rutgers employee can be migrated automatically. Content from other accounts should be first transferred to the primary account, or migrated later.
For this purpose, IIS has developed an instrument with half a dozen questions and a lot of help on how to respond to them. Please use your NetID to log in (each RUL member needs to fill it out personally or with the help of their UCSs) and provide the required information about the Rutgers email accounts you currently hold. The more accurate the data we receive, the more efficient and more painless the migration will be.
Since the new email and calendaring tools will appear quite different from what Zimbra users are used to, IIS will offer a series of 90-minute information sessions August 8–19 in several libraries covering all three geographic regions. The schedule for these sessions will soon follow via RUL_Everyone messages, and will be available on the support site’s calendar by August 5.
The plan for the migration:
All three hundred email users at RUL will be migrated over a three-day period August 23–25. Groups of account holders will be scheduled for each day based on organizational, geographic, and logical criteria. When you come to work on your assigned day of the migration, all your email and calendar appointments will be ready for you in the new system. You can immediately access them and continue working with them in the new interface called OWA (Outlook Web Access) by logging in through any browser using the link connect.rutgers.edu and your new email address [NetID]@libraries.rutgers.edu. (Please see details about account names in the Questionnaire and at the support site.)
Throughout the days of the migration, IIS staff and UCSs will be “roaming the halls” in the libraries to help users access their mailboxes using the client of their choice: The desktop version of Microsoft Outlook, available on every RUL workstation, is the preferred client for work in the office, while any browser may be used to log into OWA away from your desk.
Training opportunities:
Two-hour-long introductory, instructor-led, classroom-based, hands-on training will be offered in several sessions over two days of the migration. If you cannot make it during those days, the training sessions will come back after Labor Day, including more advanced training later on. Individual introductory sessions will also be available for those who learn best that way. Please check back to the support site’s calendar around August 15 for the exact schedule and to sign up.
In the first wave of training sessions we will focus on the communication tools included with Rutgers Connect (which is, as you know, a customized version of Microsoft’s Office 365 running in the Microsoft cloud): OWA (and Outlook on the desktop), Calendar, People, Tasks, OneDrive for Business (cloud-based file storage), and Skype for Business. But the rest of the Office 365 tools will also be immediately available to everyone from the same online interface: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. At the same time, the respective applications can be downloaded and installed on your home computer and mobile devices, while you will have them installed on your RUL desktops in the Office 2016 version that is fully interchangeable with the cloud-based apps.
Questions or concerns:
Much more information will continue to become available as we approach the migration week. In the meantime, please let IIS know of any concerns or questions you might have by writing to support@rulhelp.rutgers.edu or using the support site’s Submit Your Questions form.
Faculty are inundated with email invitations to publish in scholarly journals or to serve on their editorial boards. Many of these solicitations are completely valid, but an increasing number of these journals are engaging in predatory publishing practices.
