The Graduate Center’s Mina Rees Library invites all CUNY researchers, regardless of campus, to attend its upcoming workshops about important issues in scholarly publishing. (Each workshop is offered twice, once on a Tuesday and once on a Thursday.) The workshops are especially well suited to faculty, graduate students, administrators, and others engaged in the discovery, production, or evaluation of research publications — including anyone concerned about how profit and the economy of prestige drive and distort the scholarly publishing industry.
Each workshop stands on its own — there is no need to attend one in order to attend another. Simply register for whichever one(s) speak to your interests or needs. If there’s a workshop that interests you that you can’t make, register anyway. The presentations will be recorded and shared with all registrants.
AI and Scholarly Publishing: A 30,000-Foot View
- Tuesday, September 22 at 2:00-3:00pm (Zoom) — registration link
- Thursday, October 8 at 12:30-1:30pm (Zoom) — registration link
This workshop will look at how AI is changing scholarly publishing, especially journal publishing. Topics will include: publishers’ policies for authors and peer reviewers regarding the use of AI tools; complexities surrounding authors' disclosure of use of AI tools; ways in which editors and publishers employ AI in their own workflows; how publishers are profiting from the AI boom; and how AI intersects with copyright. (Please note that this workshop is focused on the intersection of AI and scholarly publishing. It will not cover the many ways researchers can and do use AI during research activities that are not connected to the preparation of a manuscript or the publishing process.)
Impact Factor and Other Research Metrics: What They Mean and What They Don’t
- Tuesday, October 20 at 2:00-3:00pm (Zoom) — registration link
- Thursday, November 5 at 12:30-1:30pm (Zoom) — registration link
How important is a certain article? How influential is a certain scholar? How good is a certain journal? These are complex questions that require nuanced answers. Nevertheless, there is widespread interest in, and reliance on, research metrics that attempt to answer these qualitative questions with simple numbers. In this workshop, we will examine how Journal Impact Factor, h-index, and other metrics are calculated, and discuss what they do and don’t communicate about a work, a researcher, or a journal. We will also look at various problems with citation-based metrics, including the “gender citation gap.” Finally, we will touch on alternative approaches to assessment.
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