New Kids Count publication released

The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2006 KIDS COUNT Data Book is now available! The 17th annual national and state-by-state study profiles the well-being of America’s children, and seeks to enrich discussions concerning ways to secure better futures for all kids. The annual Data Book ranks states on 10 key measures and provides data on child health, education, and the economic condition of families. This year, the Casey Foundation also looks at the critical role that early childhood development plays in preparing millions of American children for success in school and life and discusses ways to support family-based child-care providers. The 2006 KIDS COUNT Data Book materials can be viewed, downloaded, and ordered (at no cost) by visiting www.aecf.org/kidscount/sld/databook.jsp.

The KIDS COUNT website (http://www.kidscount.org/) provides users with more than 100 state-level measures on children and provides easy-to-use tools which allow users to generate custom reports including rankings, graphs, and maps, which can be downloaded. Raw data files are also available.

More Fuss about Public Access to Research

You may remember the fuss last year when the NIH Director, E. Zehouni suggested that all NIH research results would be posted to a public, free access internet location for public dissemination. Academics and their professional societies were in an uproar over this proposal and the lack of understanding of how important the publications were to association survival (financially). RSS is in the same boat even though not too many of our folks conduct research for NIH.

Now, a new proposal in the Senate is threatening to broaden the access and reduce the financial income to RSS as well as many other publishing organizations (see below). This proposal would apply to all federally-funded research and require that the reports (and journal articles) be released within six months of the initial journal publication for free access.

I have not read the draft legislation so I can't say what the provisions might be for who will bear the cost of "free access." However, I do know that the income of the RSS will be reduced substantially if all the articles we would have published in our journal were to become freely available to the public after RSS had gone to the expense of reviewing, editing, printing and distributing these articles. In most conversations I've heard about, policy makers say that the authors who would benefit most from the review process should bear this cost along with their institutions. However, I think they do not understand the way institutional budgets work and what resources might be available. I can see that future grants would be written in such a way to transfer this cost to the federal sponsor of the research--and, maybe, that is OK and proper. It does not however address the loss to the Society of this income stream of subscriptions to libraries and others nor the subsequent increase in membership fees to support the other things the organization does.

I encourage you to think about this and take action to let your congressperson hear from you as to how you think it would impact you and what you hold dear about the way things work.

A summary of the article published in the NY Times is pasted below.

Ken Pigg


May 8, 2006

Some Publishers of Scholarly Journals Dislike Bill to Require Online Access to Articles

By SARA IVRY <http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=SARA%20IVRY&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=SARA%20IVRY&inline=nyt-per>
Scholarly publishing has never been a big business. But it could take a financial hit if a proposed federal law is enacted, opening taxpayer-financed research to the public, according to some critics in academic institutions.
The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006, proposed last week by Senators Joseph I. Lieberman <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/joseph_i_lieberman/index.html?inline=nyt-per> , Democrat of Connecticut, and John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, would require 11 government agencies to publish online any articles that contained research financed with federal grants. If enacted, the measure would require that the articles be accessible online without charge within six months of their initial publication in a scholarly journal.
"Not everybody has a library next door. I don't mean to be flippant about it, but this gives access to anybody," said Donald Stewart, a spokesman for Senator Cornyn. "The genesis of this was his interest in open government and finding ways to reform our Freedom of Information laws and taxpayer access to federally funded work."
Some members of the scholarly publishing industry are wary of the legislation. Howard H. Garrison, the director of public affairs at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, an organization whose members collectively publish approximately 60 journals, argued that the legislation would weaken the connection between the journals and their readers and that journals could lose subscribers and ad revenue if articles were available online.
"People won't be able to gauge how many people will be reading the articles and that has ramifications for advertising, promotion," he said. "Does it reach 1,000 scientists, 2,000 or 50? If the articles are on a government Web site, your readership may be halved."
Scientific data is easily misinterpreted, said Joann Boughman, executive vice president of the American Society of Human Genetics, publisher of The American Journal of Human Genetics. "Consumers themselves are saying, 'We have the right to know these things as quickly as we can.' That is not incorrect. However, wherever there is a benefit, there is a risk associated with it."
A year ago, the National Institutes of Health introduced a policy encouraging scientists who had received N.I.H. financing to submit published articles within a year to a central database at the National Library of Medicine. Fewer than 4 percent of researchers have complied.
Catherine McKenna Ribeiro, the deputy press secretary for Senator Lieberman, said mandatory compliance would "foster information sharing, prevent duplication of research efforts, and generate new lines of scientific inquiry." She said in an e-mail message that the bill would, in effect, allow agencies to better monitor what publications were a result of their grants.
Betsy L. Humphreys, the deputy director of the National Library of Medicine, said she was not surprised that researchers had not always complied with N.I.H.'s request. "I think it's like anything else in the lives of busy people who prefer to spend their time doing science," she said.

Integrating Social and Physical Sciences

Colleagues, this announcement was posted recently to RUSOC-L. I know not all members of RSS participate in this list, so I thought I would use this blog to provide additional notification. It is the kind of communication and discussion I suspect we will see more of as people become more familiar with the capabilities offered by computer-mediated communication via the Internet. Cheers.

Ken


IntSci - Integrated Science for Sustainability

This is an invitation to participate in an electronic discussion (e-conference) on how to help science initiatives to be more focussed on practical problems, integrated across perspectives and sectors, and interdisciplinary. The conference is called "IntSci", and will run from the 1-15 March 2006, and you can subscribe from http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/research/social/IntSci_sub.asp
This e-conference seeks to bring together researchers, policy makers, funders and others with an interest in looking at how science can contribute to change in sectors such as sustainability, environment and health. Problem solving in these areas requires stakeholders - including scientists - to engage in practices of joint inquiry, collaborative learning and adaptive management. This is a growing area for science and society - and one that is increasingly promoted within research and development (R&D) activities. We are particularly interested in how to broaden science teams beyond those with technical skills (particularly from the hard sciences) to answer problems, to also include social researchers with complementary skills in the management of participation, conflict and learning (soft sciences). This e-conference will focus on this, and the issues that arise from it.
An e-conference is a moderated discussion conducted via the Internet using email. It is different from other electronic "chat" or "discussion" forums in that it builds in a mechanism (the moderators) to ensure that participants follow through an agreed upon agenda, and that the conference observes a strict time-line. Further guidance and background material will be supplied after you are subscribed. Please note that you can subscribe using "digest" options that minimise the e-mails you get to one each day.
This e-conference is part of research undertaken by the Landcare Research Collaborative Learning group ( http://social.landcareresearch.co.nz ). The moderators for this conference will be Margaret Kilvington, Chrys Horn, and Will Allen. The e-conference and promotional software, discussion archiving and technical support for the conference are being provided through the NRM-changelinks http://learningforsustainability.net gateway site.
If you are interested in subscribing to this conference then you can visit the following webpage: http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/research/social/IntSci_sub.asp Or send a blank e-mail to IntSci-subscribe@learningforsustainability.net. If you have any problems subscribing, or would like to know more please e-mail us directly. We look forward to working with you next month.
best regards
Will Allen Chrys Horn Margaret Kilvington
Landcare Research: Collaborative Learning group http://social.landcareresearch.co.nz/

Country Boys--a Story of Poverty in Appalachia

Mil Duncan, RSS member, former RUPRI Board member and professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, spoke with Frontline recently about poverty in Appalachia. The interview was part of a PBS Frontline special, Country Boys, featuring a documentary examining the life of two boys growing up in rural America. To read the text of the interview with Mil Duncan, go to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/readings/duncan.html.

If you have news about yourself or other rural sociologists, please let me know so these can be featured on the RSS Web Site.

BTW, if you have not already seen, the new image RSS site is operating. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Katrina Response by RSS

With support and participation from USDA/CSREES, the Farm Foundation, the Southern Rural Development Center, the Community Development Society and the National Association of Community Development Extension Professionals, RSS has organized a meeting of about forty individuals representing these organizations to develop a plan of action to guide a joint response to the disastrous situation created by hurricanes this summer across the South. This meeting is being held in Nashville, TN next week. I will have a report on the outcome of this meeting in the next TRS, so I hope you will watch for it. I feel certain there will be opportunities forthcoming for many more RSS members to play a role in implementing this plan when it is completed.

This is not to say that individual members of RSS are not already engaged in such recovery work as, indeed, they are. Some could not avoid it! Shirley Laska of the Univ. of New Orleans and Director of the Center for Hazards Assessment has been engaged in research and action efforts and has testified before the House Science Committee's Basic Research Subcommittee last month. In that appearance Shirley described her work with FEMA where she has noted that "... social science research demonstrates that agency assistance should be locally situated, take place over a significant period of time, and develop ongoing working relationships with community officials." Her work at the Center has also discovered that "... repeatedly-flooded structures are found in clusters and thus the response must be spread across local areas, not by individual homes." Shirley has also demonstrated that participatory approaches have proven to build community resiliency, an important factor in recovery activities.

John Green of Delta State University has given leadership to efforts in East Biloxi to build on this participatory approach, convening a meeting of institutional responders in October and building a project that engages citizens in self-recovery efforts. John's website ( see http://ntweb.deltastate.edu/vp_academic/jgreen/Institute_CBR/CBR%20and%20Disasters/CBR_and_Disasters_Main_Page.htm) not only provides a vehicle for disseminating information from a variety of sources, but shares a research agenda developed by participants at the October meeting and describes his own (and Anna Kleiner's) community-based research agenda being implemented in East Biloxi. As you may realize, community-based research is also an action agenda and intended to be empowering for local citizens, further building community resiliency.

Bob Gramling and Bill Freudenburg (along with Laska) have been meeting with Kai Erikson who is leading an ASA-sponsored response effort. Bob reports he is far too busy working with local leaders on a variety of issues to be able to attend the Nashville meeting. "Go get 'um, Bob!"

I suspect there are other RSS members who are similarly engaged and other efforts that I'm not aware of and don't have room to report on here. If you know of someone or some thing you would like to share with RSS members, please send it along or post it in a response on this blog. While the specific aspects of the hurricane disasters in the South are horrendous and tragic in many aspects, there are also general features of sociological importance to learn and to share that may assist recovery efforts in another place and time. It is to that, as well as the immediate needs, to which rural sociologists are so often dedicated.

Your thoughts???

Ken Pigg

Note: Quotes attributed to Laska taken from the Washington Update, November 21, 2005, Vol. 24, No. 21 published by COSSA.

New ERS Report on Rural Labor Force

Low-Skill Employment and the Changing Economy of Rural America
By Robert Gibbs, Lorin Kusmin, and John Cromartie

This study reports trends in rural low-skill employment in the 1990s and their impact on the rural workforce. The share of rural jobs classified as low-skill fell by 2.2 percentage points between 1990 and 2000, twice the decline of the urban low-skill employment share, but much less than the decline of the 1980s. Employment shifts from low-skill to skilled occupations within industries, rather than changes in industry mix, explain virtually all of the decline in the rural low-skill employment share. The share decline was particularly large for rural Black women, many of whom moved out of low-skill blue-collar work into service occupations, while the share of rural Hispanics who held low-skill jobs increased. Economic Research Report No. (ERR10) 38 pp, October 2005.

For more information contact Robert Gibbs, RGibbs@ers.usda.gov

This report can be downloaded at: http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/ERR10/

Interdisciplinary work?

Many of us are subject to performance reviews that focus attention on the amount and quality of interdisciplinary work we do. Others may also be subject to situations where interdisciplinary is, more or less, a requirement for success. At the recent COSSA meetings I learned that Robert Axelrod, incoming President of the American Political Science Association, is launching an effort to learn more about what is required to facilitate interdisciplinary research, teaching and analysis of public policy.

Axelrod offered a few examples to illustrate what he thinks are important issues. Among these are:

1. Identify "best practices" for the promotion of interdisciplinarity in universities, institutes, departments, curriculum, professional societies, journals, and foundations.
2. Work through our annual meeting committees or other venues to increase the visibility of interesting people and projects that go beyond a single discipline.
3. Set up a process to select and publicize some of the best current examples of articles and books across the social and behavioral sciences.
4. Given the difficulty of establishing a new peak journal for all of the social sciences, work with Science magazine to expand its coverage of the social sciences. Help Science increase its ability to recruit truly outstanding submissions, and to conduct discerning peer review across the social sciences.
5. Find synergies between the interdisciplinary theme, and other priorities of our Associations such as promoting diversity in our professions, and enhancing the public presence of social science.
6. Build on interdisciplinary initiatives already underway.

Dr. Axelrod asked that I pass along this invitation to RSS members with a request to send comments and suggestions to him at axe@umich.edu, with a copy to the Exec. Dir. of APSA, Michael Brintnall at brintnall@apsanet.org.