(Note: We are re-advertising this call for proposals originally issued September 2015)
The MLA Books Panel seeks to publish a comprehensive overview of scholarly communications in the life and health sciences for librarians and biomedical professionals. The publication will define scholarly communications in the 21st century through discussion of current concepts and state of the art. It will also review the history of the field and examine the forces that have caused it to radically change in the last two decades, and explore future developments, emerging technologies and practices.
Areas of focus for chapters include:
- History of traditional academic publishing and communication models and challenges to those systems, including scholarly journal price inflation and new digital platforms
- Measuring author impact through journal rank and impact factors, and new measurement tools including altmetrics
- Peer review – challenges to traditional methods and new models, including open peer review
- Professional networking and informal communications – listservs, blogs, and social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Biowebspin, PubMedCommons, and ResearchGate
- Publishing models and impact of successful biomedical open access journals (PLOS One, etc.)
- NIH open access policies and PubMed Central, as well as other government agency open access and depository policies
- Knowledge translation models and barriers in clinical practice
- Research data management – concepts, methods, and making data discoverable through metadata , linked data and data curation profiles
- Institutional repositories in biomedical settings – software and platforms, biomedical metadata considerations, promotion and depository policies at academic institutions
- Digital preservation of electronic publications, gray literature, and data
- Legal and ethical issues in scholarly publishing – copyright (particularly in relation to author’s rights), HIPAA regulations and clinical research publication, plagiarism, and published research retraction
The target audience is health and life sciences librarians, and biomedical researchers, faculty and graduate/professional students. Where possible, the book will highlight model programs and practices
at academic health sciences libraries and academic medical centers.
The book will have at least one editor and may include contributions from academic health sciences librarians or information professionals. If you are interested in serving as an editor or author, please contact JoLinda Thompson. For more information on the MLA publishing process, please visit the FAQ page.
JoLinda Thompson
Systems Librarian
Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library
George Washington University
jlt@gwu.edu
