Reason, risk, and reward: Models for libraries and other stakeholders in an evolving scholarly publishing ecosystem

Scholarly publishing, and scholarly communication more generally, are based on patterns established over many decades and even centuries. Some of these patterns are clearly valuable and intimately related to core values of the academy, but others were based on the exigencies of the past, and new opportunities have brought into question whether it makes sense to persist in supporting old models. New technologies and new publishing models raise the question of how we should fund and operate scholarly publishing and scholarly communication in the future, moving away from a scarcity model based on the exchange of physical goods that restricts access to scholarly literature unless a market-based exchange takes place. This essay describes emerging models that attempt to shift scholarly communication to a more open-access and mission-based approach and that try to retain control of scholarship by academics and the institutions and scholarly societies that support them. It explores changing practices for funding scholarly journals and changing services provided by academic libraries, changes instituted with the end goal of providing more access to more readers, stimulating new scholarship, and removing inefficiencies from a system ready for change. © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association.

Rhyme and Reason: Analyses of Dual Retrieval Cues

If and only if each single cue uniquely defines its target, a independence model based on fragment theory can predict the strength of a combined dual cue from the strengths of its single cue components. If the single cues do not each uniquely define their target, no single monotonic function can predict the strength of the dual cue from its components; rather, what matters is the number of possible targets. The probability of generating a target word was .19 for rhyme cues, .14 for category cues, and .97 for rhyme-plus-category dual cues. Moreover, some pairs of cues had probabilities of producing their targets of .03 when used individually and 1.00 when used together, whereas other pairs had moderate probabilities individually and together. The results, which are interpreted in terms of multiple constraints limiting the number of responses, show why rhymes, which play a minimal role in laboratory studies of memory, are common in real-world mnemonics.

DEMOCRACY ISN'T THAT SMART (BUT WE CAN MAKE IT SMARTER): ON LANDEMORE'S DEMOCRATIC REASON

Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016In her recent book, Democratic Reason, Hélène Landemore argues that, when evaluated epistemically, “a democratic decision procedure is likely to be a better decision procedure than any non-democratic decision procedures, such as a council of experts or a benevolent dictator” (p. 3). Landemore's argument rests heavily on studies of collective intelligence done by Lu Hong and Scott Page. These studies purport to show that cognitive diversity – differences in how people solve problems – is actually more important to overall group performance than average individual ability – how smart the individual members are. Landemore's argument aims to extrapolate from these results to the conclusion that democracy is epistemically better than any non-democratic rival. I argue here that Hong and Page's results actually undermine, rather than support, this conclusion. More specifically, I argue that the results do not show that democracy is better than any non-democratic alternative, and that in fact, they suggest the opposite – that at least some non-democratic alternatives are likely to epistemically outperform democracy.