Ryan Kuehhas

        Bibliography and Research in Music

             October 4^th 2015

              Blog # 4

Do Open-Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact?-Kristin Antelman

This article questions the negative and positive impacts regarding more open access to articles. Regarding research articles, I have come to agreement that the more available an article is, the greater the impact is.  Antelman delves into the specifics of studies, data collections, results and discussions. Personally, I would like to absorb this information, and discuss how it relates and impacts my ideas to music: more particularly music performance, and research. Nowadays, there is the ability to find an abundance of information online (Youtube, Naxos, recordings) etc. Just decades ago, the professional musician had to travel further, do more research, and engage more overall in their specified field. This hard work and research alone would give the musician a stronger advantage, developing them into a better musician overall, even if they were not so to begin with. Now, information is so accessible and easy, that the beginner, intermediate, and advanced musician can get better at a much quicker rate. But I think this can be a positive thing; it encourages competition, weeding out the less-strong/capable. For instance, the article suggests that “Free online papers are likely to reach more readers, and therefore attract more citations.” This, metaphorically speaking, is a good thing for music in my opinion. In a day and age, where our school’s genres seem to be dying off by the day, we have resources offered to encourage listening that can demonstrate the strength, likeability, and importance of classical, jazz etc. If I relate the wealth of information that is available for research this day (due to technology) to my specific topic, I would argue that this is also a great thing. Being that my topic, whistling, does not have a lot of books relating, I have the option of reading journals/articles online that will probably end up being the plethora of sources I use for my bibliography, whereas this may not have been as readily available just 10-20 years ago.

Predatory Publishers are Corrupting Open Access-Jeffrey Beall

Beall argues that email became a great innovator, but that spam did not-often taking time and concentration to filter out what is not needed/important. He then relates this to open access publishing. I can see the analogy he is trying to make, however, with even more technological abilities/increases, spam has become less intrusive and easier to sift through. I do however agree with his analysis that open access has caused predatory counterfeits. This is something that I am concerned about. While creating my bibliography, I hope that I am able to tell the difference between a legitimate source, and one that may be an illegitimate copy. Perhaps I will take a look at his blog, Scholarly Open Access, although I am not totally confident that there will be any information regarding my topic. I did enjoy learning that publishers need to resist submitting quickly and easily. This is something we discussed in class, and I would like to learn more about it.

Battling Bad Science-Ben Goldacre

Goldacre went to school to be a doctor and now is an Epidemiologist. He explains that as a scientist, we need to question what we know, whether something is good or bad for you. I thought it was funny when he mentioned that studies show that coffee, licorice, etc. being said to both cause cancer, and prevent cancer.  “We need proper science, proper evidence.” I thought this might have been the most important quote in his discussion. He talks about how trials studies are not perfect. For instance, if you drink olive oil you will have less wrinkles. However, he states that most likely if you devote your daily task to drinking olive oil, you’re probably generally committed to eating healthy in most other areas. What we know is that our beliefs and expectations can be manipulated, therefore control against a placebo is important. I felt that this article was important when scrutinizing articles that have scientific tests, trials, and studies. This can be of importance when writing our bibliography, by making sure not to take these studies as complete fact. I think though, that it may not have as much importance for my topic in particular, since Whistling will probably not delve into trials and studies as much. I do feel that for something like my Doctor Dissertation that I will be researching for post graduate school, this TED video may have more meaning.

Scientific Articles Accepted-Kolata

It is interesting to read how the scientists were all duped solely because there was a hyphen added in a phony email that they received. I think, as written, a ‘white list’ of those open-access journals to meet certain standards might not be a bad idea to help fix this problem. I think it is a little ridiculous that the professional submitting a journal though has to pay the fee for publishing. Sometimes these fees can amount to thousands of dollars. This to me is where the real scam is.

Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (DOAJ)

The organizations described in this article list principles of transparency and practice for scholarly publications. They do not share information about the applications themselves submitted.  I will definitely be keeping these principles handy for my bibliography. Some of the principles of transparency I think will help me locate whether a source or journal is legitimate right now are:

Peer Review Process

Editorial team/contact information

Copyright

Name of Journal

Retraction Watch

Some things that I enjoy about this website is it has a subscription to a blog. This separates itself from the rest of the websites we have been advised to use, as it gives more personal views and opinions of topics. It also includes Facebook, Twitter, and email. I like that it is more modern socially in terms of research and posts. I also noticed that they keep a database of recent posts, something that is important when trying to locate an article that you may have read recently, and can’t seem to find it again. Also, this website currently encompasses most of the other topics we have been studying in Bibliography: Plagiarism, Predatory Journals, Publishers etc. Overall, I am excited to have the ability to use a website that seems more fitting, and socially modern in terms of research, and communicating ideas and opinions.