3473 - Open Scholarship in Sociology

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Description

Sociology, like other academic disciplines, seeks to conduct research that
improves our understanding of the social world. We want that research to be relevant, to
reflect as well as interact with the social actors for whom it is relevant; we want it to be efficient, to maximize collaboration and exchange, and to make the most of our limited
resources; and we want it to be accessible, to be read and debated by a wide audience
beyond our disciplinary boundaries and university walls. These challenges seem more
acute now than at any time in recent memory. We are at a potential crisis point, where
public confidence in science and academia is highly contested, where political actors at
the highest level use their power to squeeze – if not directly attack – academic
researchers whose work they find inconvenient, and where the economics of higher
education is high on the agenda of public discourse. And yet our scholarly
communication system, especially journal publishing, remains mired in the structures of
the past – moving too slowly and costing too much – which impedes the quality, quantity,
efficiency, and responsiveness of our research. Open scholarship is a broad response to
these deficiencies. This session brings together sociologists whose research and
institutional initiatives address these challenges through the lens of open scholarship.

Speakers include a representative from open access journal Sociological Science; the
director of the open repository SocArXiv, and two researchers who study the politics and
economics of social science research.

Sub Unit

• Special Sessions

Session Organizer

• Philip N. Cohen, University of Maryland

Presider

• Philip N. Cohen, University of Maryland

Individual Presentations

• Open Scholarship: Who Wins, Who Loses, and What Does It Mean for Sociology? - Elizabeth Popp Berman, State University of New York-Albany

• Can Open Access Publishing Save Sociology, and From What? - Kim Weeden, Cornell University

• Peer Review in Sociology Doesn't Have to be Such a Disaster - Philip N. Cohen, University of Maryland