Comments on the Brussels Declaration

A post today on DigitalKoans by Chs W. Bailey discussing the publishers response to scholars' interest in open access.

The recent "Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing" by major scholarly publishers, such as Elsevier and Wiley, can be boiled down to: the scholarly publishing system ain’t broke, so don’t try to fix it. It provides an interesting contrast to the 2004 "Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science" by not-for-profit publishers, which outlined a variety of strategies for making content freely available.

It might also be interesting to read about an ongoing study of new scholars' attitudes and concerns led by Cathy Trower of Harvard. She recently spoke at Auraria and here is some text from the promo.

Trower leads Harvard’s Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE). The COACHE survey of 4,500 tenure-track faculty at 51 colleges and universities has revealed that, overall, climate, culture, and collegiality are more important to the success and satisfaction of early career faculty than compensation, tenure clarity, workload, and policy effectiveness.

COACHE discovered that the some of the key climate variables for junior faculty include: interest senior faculty take in their work, fairness with which they are evaluated, opportunities to collaborate with senior faculty, how well they seem to fit in their departments, sufficient professional and personal interaction with colleagues, and a sense of community in the department.