Materials used for Bergren Forum “(R)evolutions in Scholarship: Rethinking Scholarship in the Digital Age”   Presented: April 30, 2009: Nevins Theatre, Alfred University

Presentations: Created in In Keynote (for Mac) and Exported to PowerPoint

Part I – Chad Harriss – Powerpoint

Video – “This is Scholarship“

Part 2 – Mark A. Smith – Powerpoint – Speaker Text

Video – “Open Access“

Part 3 – Ellen Bahr – Powerpoint

Open Web (http://hblog.org/tag/the-open-web/)

“Having said all that, if I had an inch on CNN or BBC to talk about the ‘open web’, this is what I would say (based on the mapping that I’ve started here):

‘Think of a place where you and your neighbors decide what the rules are and that the only rule is that there has to be a really good reason to keep people out;
Where you’re greeted with a big welcome mat that says ‘Please come in and play’ rather than ‘Keep out until you’re invited’;
Where you can prove yourself by doing and making things and showing them to the world, rather than waiting in a line to be chosen;
Where you can talk and build with people around the world who see your difference as an asset rather than a liability;
Where the default is to share, rather than to keep hold to yourself;
And where what you read, hear and see is always an invitation to participate and create, rather than a one-way broadcast.

Around the world, people are building a new place on the web that engenders the principles of transparency, openness, sharing, collaboration and participation. The open web is a conversation about how the world can be better, and how ordinary citizens can help build it as an example for others to follow.’

- Bio: Heather Ford is a South African-born webqueen who is passionate the power of the Internet to bring people together to solve common problems.

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What is the Open Web? [Permalink]

http://blogs.concedere.net:8080/blog/discipline/web/?permalink=What-is-the-Open-Web.html

Wed Jul 23 18:59:31 UTC 2008

Even if nobody’s exactly sure what the Open Web is the phrase can still be very useful as a buzzword. But a clearer understanding of the buzzword is a worthwhile challenge (if only so that we have something to blog about). It’s easy to point to particular principles like open standards or specific examples like APIs and mashups as examples of the Open Web. The difficulty lies in tying all these different things together into a single, coherent Big Picture. And given that the web itself is so big, bigger than any single culture or government or corporation or technology or ideology, bigger, really, than anything that has ever come before, it’s unlikely that a big enough picture exists. Any attempt to “sum up” something so huge is probably doomed to fail. But of course this is no reason not to try and do it anyways. So, let’s start thinking big.

Before the web, in the desktop era, the big visionary idea was a computer on every office desktop and in every home. We could save ourselves a lot trouble by starting with this idea. It’s a great place to start because it’s so very simple. But it’s not enough. What’s missing, of course, is the network. Not just the physical realization of the network — the wifi and the HTTP and the network protocol stacks — but also the social realization of the network in the form of other people. After all, other people are the Net’s killer app. The net nothing without that crucial ingredient. If we combine Bill Gates’ vision of universal technological empowerment with Tim Berner Lee’s vision of a world wide web something pretty cool emerges: a vision of every person and every institution communicating with every other person and every other institution through a global information system. Instead of a personal computer there’ll be a browser on every desk and in every pocket and in every device. And ‘browser’ is really just shorthand for a User Agent that can send and receive over the network.

Such a formulation isn’t perfect. There are problems that crop up when words like “every” and “global” are tossed about. But it does serve our purposes well enough; it’s plenty vague but not so vague so as to be useless. We can start here and work our way towards the various bullet-points. Of course the actual derivation is left as an exercise for the reader.

More importantly the formulation also enables us to approach some of the more problematic questions concerning the Open Web. For example it suggests that the problem with technologies like Flex/Flash and Silverlight isn’t so much that they’re proprietary but that they’re controlled by a single vendor. Is it smart to allow a single vendor to control the platform? Nope. But the answer here isn’t completely cut and dry. Technologies like Silverlight and Flex could work fine on the Open Web as long as they also work with the Open Web. So long as they integrate and work well with all the other web technologies out there (and thus don’t try to dominate the ecosystem) then there’s no reason they can’t join in. The more the merrier. Integration and control seem to be much more important than matters of proprietariness and openness. A reasonable case can certainly be made that companies should be allowed (even encouraged) to innovate and do their own thing so long as they also support standardization whenever possible. This might be the Open Web version of being a “good citizen.”

So what the heck is the Open Web? The answer turns out to be surprisingly straightforward. It’s a web that’s open to everybody and everything. This answer isn’t really satisfactory. Most answers aren’t. But it’s a start.

My section of Bergren Forum Presentation: (R)evolutions in Scholarship Rethinking (my shot at a narrative)
Scholarship in the Digital Age – April 30, 2009
Presented by: Ellen Bahr, Mark Smith  & Chad Harriss

I am grateful for this chance to discuss a few ideas and issues in scholarship that occupy much of my thinking and work these days.  I am also grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with Ellen and Chad on this presentation.  It has been quite rewarding.  We’ve learned a great deal from each other.

Ya .. know .. I almost wish we would have recorded a few of our fruitful conversations and just played them back for you all.  I think you would be very impressed.

Now that I think of it .. perhaps we could have taken some recorded excerpts from those meetings and …. maybe add some video of scholars in action .. creating or using new scholarly formats …And then.. we could have recorded a few screen shots of  some of that scholarship, and laid a running audio commentary of the top of it describing the process.

Of course.. then .. we should put it all up on a wiki and group edit the work by adding some text to give it some structure.  When we finished that, perhaps we could put it up on Chad’s blog for commentary from colleagues .. who knows maybe we’ll want to incorporate some of those peer reactions in a later version.

And, oh wait.. Ellen found that article in the online “Journal of Electronic Publishing” and that website with the animated simulation.  We could link to those as references or perhaps fit them in the body of the work.  Oh ..and then there’s Chad … you know Chad ..  he’ll want to include a “vodcast” of his hero .. MIT Professor Henry Jenkins giving that talk at that forum in Bali.  I would just add an RSS newsfeed from Jenkins blog “Confessions of an Aca-fan” ..   But nooooo, he’d want to capture the oration and the reactions of the audience.  So, we’d add that in there somewhere.  After all, the guy is a dynamic speaker and his comments are a perfect compliment to the high res graphics from van Orsdel’s PowerPoint “Anatomy of a Crisis: Dysfunction in the Scholarly Communications System”  We’ll add it ..It’ll make Chad happy .. And, ya know .. collaboration, its a good thing…

Speaking of good things.. It’s a good thing we have Ellen on our team to keep us organized and clearly focused.  She has such a way with the written word .. and a keen awareness of the power of the visuals.  If we released such a work for free in an AU institutional repository, future scholars would have an easy time finding and re-using our work.  However, our respective promotion and tenure committees may be baffled by it .. but sometimes that’s how innovation works.

Yikes .. P&T .. hmmm ..maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t do it after all.  Maybe we PowerPoint presentation is the better idea …. and everyone will be more comfortable.  Yes …. it is will better for us politically, it looks better on our CV and will conform nicely to our P&T scholarship guidelines.

You know, I do wonder when new scholarship will find its place beyond our legacy, paper-based systems.  I wonder when they’ll come a time when we can wholeheartedly encourage innovation, and value new powers of digital scholarship.  I also wonder how we will organize it, present it, evaluate it, share it and adapt policies to recognize new formats .. hmmmmmm .. perhaps we should take a closer look.  Mr. DeMille … I’m ready for my PowerPoint.

This is an extremely broad topic to discuss in a very few minutes.

Many of points we address here would benefit from their very own Bergren forum.  Indeed, several of our discussions are found as themes for entire conferences, and the discussion in the literature is overwhelming.

Out of necessity we confined our discussion to new scholarship whose content is presented electronically and is available on the Internet.  And, on that we will still only be able to scratch the surface.

We’ve had to exclude any discussion of “electronic monographs” or new formats presented in other electronic environments.

Lets see… Beyond paper .. what are some of the actual benefits electronic publication?  Why should we consider it?

What we know we can do is:

• annotate by linking within and outside our electronic documents
• make it available 24/7/365 from anywhere
• full-text search
• enlarge and enhance graphics
• link to and from citations and the scholars other works
• use formatting contexts.. so that the content is parsed and presented non-linear fashion
• solicit comments and have a dialogue with our readers
• incorporate Web 2.0 functions such as newsfeeds to blogs and websites
• appeal to multiple learning modalities, with sound and video
• create simulations
• store and archive the raw data of our research
• offer pre and post publication versions of our work for comment and discourse
• retain our rights, share our work and self publish on a blog or website
• deposit our work in an institutional repository when we can care for it and manage it and perhaps re-use it over time
• we can broadcast it over channels like iTunes or YouTubeU

We also know that ..

Scholars who have never met each other can build collaborative works like they’ve done with the : Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The list goes on. There are significant opportunities to enhance our scholarship when we are not confined by paper.

Those opportunities are fairly obvious.  But there are several other benefits of publishing online … that are Not So Obvious.  Here are a few …

When your work is online …

• It is more likely to be discovered
• and cited (and reused)
• we can also capture metrics of usage. Which is a nice measure to have
• and .. finally … online content can extend the traditional  paper bibliography into a “knowledge network” (linking content, citations, scholars & readers and truly become a scholarly exchange)

There is a lot to love about the scholarly potential of new media…

Here Clay Shirky .. Professor of Interactive Telecommunications at NYU … captures this thought quite succinctly in his book “Here Comes Everybody” 

We’re living through—in our historical generation—the largest increase in human
expressive capability in history.”

This is so well said .. However .. many of us might wish to append this statements with a slight addendum..

• First by discussing the evolving economics of scholarship, and

• Then take a look at ONE NEW, perhaps controversial, Digital publication model that is turning the process of scholarly publishing on its head.

Back in the early 90’s .. when we began to see the Internet take hold for both researchers and the common man….  The new construct of publishing scholarly texts online .. sort of crept up on us.  One day its paper journals, next day your librarian is telling you that you can get a copy of the article online in an electronic format.  Simple as that.

We were happy for the conveniences it offered .. but we likely printed them out … and it merely saved us a trip to the library.  In this context, our paper systems of scholarly publishing were not threatened by the new technology, we all saw it as a potential service enhancement.  One enterprise was particularly happy for this development…  the for-profit publisher.

So, essentially, what we saw is the “Same Old Wine in a Brand New Bottle”

Our systems didn’t change… we:

• Retained traditional distribution/economic model .. thru subscriptions, memberships, pay per article.
• The Scholar wrote, the publisher “printed” & the user paid
• The system worked without disruption & was familiar
• And … our friends the “for profit publisher” saw an opportunity to use “online copy” as a “value-added” product or “new” pay service for electronic versions

So in those early days ..we found ourselves lulled into using online text as “electronic copy” and had little reason to consider its additional potential

It was almost as though .. we had a solution, with out a problem .. or so we thought

What many of us failed to recognize at that time .. was, that when text moved from paper to electronic forms …  the whole game changed.  Working in online environments meant that our creations no longer needed to be locked away where only scholars and students with great libraries could access it and use it.

The old publishing paradigm was no longer essential … in fact, it works against encouraging innovation for scholarship in electronic forms

Here is how it goes:

• You donate your Intellectual Property to publishers in return for peer review and dissemination.
• You also donate service as reviewers and editors
• You’ve surrendered your rights to share it .. even though it has become very simple and cost effective to do so
• and you .. your colleagues .. and your institutions … are increasingly unable to buy it back!  We simply can’t afford it

Coincidentally, at this very moment in time we began to find ourselves tied to a publication model that would become unsustainable.

Just as we began to harness technology to create, publish and access in the online environment, an ongoing crisis was reaching a fever pitch.   The issue, of course, was, and remains, then skyrocketing costs of scholarly journals.

What was once regarded as the “libraries serials crisis” is now recognized by stakeholders in the academic arena  as “everybody’s serials crisis.”  To this day, Libraries worldwide continue to struggle with journal costs that have compounded at 4 times the rate of inflation since the mid-1980s.

I was watching a “vodcast” recently (yes a vodcast) … and Professor Stuart Scheiber of Harvard University recounted his institution’s attempt to keep up with these rising costs by hyper-inflating the library budget to keep pace.

In this graphic published by the Association of Research Libraries … the top dark blue line represents the average cost of journals from 1986 to 2006.   The light blue line just below it reflects the average journal expenditure in ARL libraries at that same time.  Following the parallel trajectory, it is easy to see how libraries valiantly attempted to keep up with costs.  Professor Scheiber goes on to share with his audience that the point at which the lower curve turns down, has , he says, a technical term… he tells that his technical term is called … “giving up.”  He laments that even Harvard, with its magnificent resources, found that keeping pace was simply unsustainable.

And so ….  At this time we find the convergence of new technology and failing economic model is further complicated by the growing awareness that scholars are finding other significant uses for advances in technology to enhance their work.

At the same time many of us are painfully aware that legacy institutional policies afford little or no recognition or reward for pursuing and leveraging the power of new technology for scholarship.

The primary and justifiable condition remains today…

• We need an accredited Scholarly publishing model
• We must retain and value peer review
• AND .. we need a system that supports and assures integrity.

Many institutions and scholars feel we have arrived at a breaking point.  In some scholarly circles, this tension between, cost, function, and process is becoming… something akin to “We’re Mad as Hell and We’re Not gonna take it any more!! “

As a result it has spurred some radical thinking in the scholarly community and here is one result….

[Graphic]  Open Access Movement

Yes .. parallel to many of the new services we see on the Internet… scholars and institutions are helping to create a new model where there is no cost to the end user.

This convergence of crisis and opportunity is leading to development of a robust “Open Access publication model.”

“Open-Access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.   What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder”

Some advantages of OA are that it ….

• Removes barriers to access
• Re-establishes author rights
• Has Cost efficiencies & less time to ”press”
• Facilitates broad pre & post pub review
• Encourages collaboration and data sharing
• Greatly increases the visibility of a scholars work

Unfortunately .. in its infancy .. OA has suffered from some misconceptions that hampers and delays its adoption .. these include:

• The false impression that Open Access is incompatible with Peer Review
  - This is simply not true.  There are several functioning models that replicate the paper process.  Quality … and oversight … are quite separate from the “technologies” of publication.
  
• The other mistaken perception is that .. Retaining Authorship Rights is a reflection of lack of quality.
  - Again.. not true  ….  simply because an author chooses to exercise his/her rights to determine how and where their work is used .. is clearly unrelated to quality … there is no real logical connection there

Very quickly I want to tell you a little more about Open Access Models:

• They generally come in 2 flavors:  OA Jourals & Digital Repositories
• The OA Journals are Peer Reviewed or Refereed publications made freely available.
• The Number of Open Access Journal titles is growing by leaps and bounds .
• The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists 4067 OA titles & rising
• As with paper, OA Journals are produced and delivered by independent publishers, societies, and discipline-centric online communities.

As I mentioned, the unique attribute of OA publishing is that the costs of publication are borne upfront .. often by the author,  professional society, scholar’s home institution or research sponsor

This has some scholars concerned that we are merely transferring one cost model for another.

However:

• After startup costs OA journals are significantly cheaper to produce and nearly free to distribute.
• Many OA journals that charge processing fees will waive fees in some circumstances.
• OA journals with institutional subsidies tend NOT to charge processing fees.
• Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts.
• Some OA publisher waive the fee for all researchers affiliated with institutions that have purchased an annual membership

The Second flavor of Open Access content is found in Open Repositories or Digital Archives

These systems:

• Deliver & archive OA scholarship which may or may not be peer reviewed
• Often house pre-prints, post-prints, theses, images, or simply raw data
• Are hosted by universities, laboratories, or discipline-centric organizations.  (such as PLoS, BioMed, etc.)
• Repository Content conforms to the metadata standards that allow the works to be interoperable with other systems, and so enable “harvesting” and sharing between compliant archives.
• In addition, There is robust free open access software such as DSPACE, the system used by SUNY where the Scholes library has contributed selected Eng. Theses and MFA Thesis Images

As an aside:

It was recently reported in the Chronicle that nearly two-thirds of pay-access journals allow the author an archival copy for posting Institutional repositories upon request  (Suber, in Chronicle February 12, 2008)

Tipping Point:

Many consider that Open Access publishing has reached a tipping point toward broad acceptance:

Some Indicators are:

• Valid, systematic, publishing and review practices have emerged
• Strong supporting advocacy and research leadership organizations are working closely with universities & publishers (i.e. SPARC, Open Access Initiative, Public Knowledge Project, EDUCAUSE, etc.)
• And as Chad mentioned ..Influential scholarly publishing industry affiliates like “Nature Publications” are working with.. rather than against ..this movement.. and delivering a variety of content for free

We are also starting to see Academic & Government agencies jumping on the bandwagon by requiring (or strongly encouraging) faculty and researchers to retain non-exclusive rights to their work and deposit a copy of their publications in repositories for free, open distribution.

Perhaps, the most well known government policy is the recent National Institute of Health mandate that requires authors of publicly funded research to deposit a copy of their resulting publications in the BioMed Central Repository for access by all taxpayers.

And. recently several college faculties within include those at MIT, Harvard, and Stanford have adopted Open Access publication mandates requiring faculty to assign non-exclusive rights where possible and to contribute a copy of their scholarship to their own institutional repository.

In addition, international economic and public policy communities are on board with multinational agreements and declarations on Access to Research Data from Public Funding

- from Timeline of the Open Access Movement – Peter Suber
Last revised, February 9, 2009.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm

Conclusion:

The Open Access Movement has become a cause .. but no doubt a controversial one

However, those parties who have signed on

• demonstrate a philosophical commitment to removing barriers to access
• are committed to raising the level of understanding and conversation regarding scholarly communication
• encourage authors, to determine how their work will be used and distributed
• inspire action on policy and practice
• celebrate the value of scholarship to a home institution

By the way .. those of you who like the idea of exercising your rights to freely distributed your work for the common good may be interested in “Creative Commons Licensing”

This popular free service allows you to selectively release your exclusive rights to reuse, duplicate and distribute your work according to your wishes and without requiring permission.

I will close by restating..

• We’re heading into new territory here.
• We are in the midst of a cultural transformation whose impact on communication will be as significant as the invention of the printing press.
• We are now in a moment where we can and must reconsider and re-calibrate our work with new purpose.

Now I’ll turn the discussion over to Ellen and she will have a look under the hood and talk about how new models actually work and what we as scholars (and as an institution) can do to adapt to the new landscape.

How to Develop “Breakthrough” Products and Services

I watched the three available video lectures (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/15-356Spring2004/CourseHome/index.htm)  and found them fascinating – the professor is Eric von Hippel from MIT and he is talking about how breakthroughs happen.  I am still trying to figure out how to apply this to the services we provide so any insight is much appreciated.  In a nutshell, he talks about where innovations come from – usually users and not those who are satisfied by the product or service but the lead users who are making a product/service better.  I am not sure exactly if or how this would fit into this discussion but I would be willing to work with someone or a group to see if we can come up with something.  The other premise is that the questions we ask start to change as we find the lead users and that you often go outside of your field to find the answers.
Thanks!  Anne

Anne L. McFarland
Head of Bibliographic and Digital Services
B216 Milne Library
SUNY-Oneonta
Oneonta, NY 13820
607.436.2026

Open Education

This is Scholarship

Selected Works Referenced

Promotion & Tenure Policy Documents

College of Arts & Sciences. (2006). RPT document. California State University San Marcos. Retrieved January 18, 2008, from http://www.csusm.edu/faculty_affairs/Evaluation%20Page.html

College of Humanities. (2005). Appointments, promotion, and tenure document. The Ohio State University. Retrieved January 18, 2008, from https://humanities.osu.edu/cohi/FacultyDocuments/apt/

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. (1994). College promotion, tenure, and reappointment document. Indiana University South Bend. Retrieved January 18, 2008, from http://www.iusb.edu/~lasi/documents/ptrdocument.pdf

New & Remediated Forms of Scholarship

Arola, Kristin L., & Ball, Cheryl E. (2007). A conversation: From ‘they call me doctor?!’ to tenure. Computers and Composition Online. Retrieved July 19, 2007, from http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/doctor/

Braun, Catherine C., McCorkle, Ben, & Wolf, Amie C. (2007). Remixing basic writing: Digital media production and the basic writing curriculum. Computers and Composition Online. Retrieved July 19, 2007, from http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/braun/index.htm

Brooks, Kevin, Tomanek, Michael, Wald, Rachel, Warner, Matthew, & Wilkening, Brianne. (2006). What’s going on? Listening to music, composing videos. Computers and Composition Online. Retrieved January 18, 2008, from http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/brooks/index.htm

Crane, Gregory. (Ed.). (n.d.). The Perseus Digital Library. Retrieved January 18, 2008, from http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/

Cushman, Ellen. (2004). Composing new media: Cultivating landscapes of the mind. Kairos, 9(1). Retrieved July 19, 2007, from http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/9.1/binder.html?http://www.msu.edu/%7Ecushmane/one/landscape.html

Davis, Evan, & Hardy, Sarah. (2003). Teaching writing in the space of blackboard. Computers and Composition Online. Retrieved July 19, 2007, from http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/DavisHardy/index.html

Ellertson, Anthony. (2003). Some notes on simulacra machines, Flash in first-year composition, and tactics in spaces of interruption. Kairos, 8(2). Retrieved July 19, 2007, from http://english.ttu.edu/KAIROS/8.2/binder.html?features/ellertson/home.html

Rice, Rich, & Ball, Cheryl. (2006). Reading the text: Remediating the text. Kairos, 10 (2). Retrieved July 19, 2007, from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/10.2/binder2.html?coverweb/riceball/index.html

Sorapure, Madeleine. (2006). Between modes: Assessing student new media compositions. Kairos, 10(2). Retrieved July 19, 2007, from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/10.2/binder2.html?coverweb/sorapure/index.html

Walker, Joyce. (2006). Hyper.activity. Kairos, 10(1). Retrieved July 19, 2007, from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/10.2/binder2.html?coverweb/walker/index.html

Wesch, Michael. (2007). Web 2.0…The machine is us/ing us. Retrieved January 18, 2008, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

I.  Traditional journals migrate online (Early 90s’)

Cause: 

• Because its there.
• Leverage significant strengths of non-linear functions .. hyperlinking, full text searching

Effect:

• Paper-inspired model, same publication and peer-review process
• Retains and enhances Subscriber-pays model
• A radical change when it comes to access, but not a radical change in the publication model itself

Example: A print journal that publishes an exact replica online

II. Traditional Paper models becoming unsustainable (swapped OA heading for cost idea)

Cause:

• Library budgets either flat or in decline
• Movement led by libraries subscribing to STM (science/technology/medicine) titles which they could no longer afford
• Call for publicly-funded research to be made freely available
• LIbraries supporting their scholars research can not afford to buy it back

Effect:

• Open access journals begin to emerge (date?)
• Retains quality-control of traditionally-published journals (peer-review, editorial board) but journals are free
• Author-pays model instead of subscriber-pays model

Example: BioMed Central

III. Quantity of available research explodes prompting new access and organization paradigm

Cause:

• Quantity of research is constantly growing; journals on new topics being started all of the time (moved from above category)
• Need for Speed: Emerged in response to the need to speed dissemination of research
• Ease of publication

Effect:

• Subject archives emerge
• Publish e-prints which includes pre-prints (not yet peer reviewed) or post-prints (peer reviewed)
• Author deposits paper into the archive (self-archiving)

Example: arXiv.org

 
IV. Taking Back the Rightful Ownership

Cause:

• New avenues for dissemination authors have publication alternatives
• Opportunities for new research sharing mechanisms
• Technology encourages and facilitates collaboration

Effect:

• Institutional repositories emerge (date?)
• Encouraged by SPARC report in 2002; access improved through development of OAI metadata protocol
• A place to publish and archive the research output of an institution
• Undermines concept that value is derived from the place where an item is placed/published
• Issues of authority

Example: ?

——————————-

???
 
Experimentation with media to see what it can do

• Focused primarily on the opportunities that digital media provide
• Example: Perseus/Vectors/Google Earth projects, or something along those lines

 
Social networking tools

• Emerged more recently as a tool for scholarly communication
• Example: maybe use example from Media Res (CSI video and Chad’s essay)

 ——————————-

History of academic publishing and the results (or why we are where we are)
http://library.kent.ac.uk/library/papers/jwts/develop.htm

“Most of the results of scientific, technical and medical (STM) research are published as papers or articles in refereed journals. These journals have developed over time to a standard model. The researcher submits a prospective paper to a journal relevant to the topic. The editorial board of that journal checks for relevance and basic quality. The articles that pass this test are sent to referees who assess it for overall quality. They may reject it, accept it with changes, or accept it as is. Accepted papers are copy-edited to improve appearance, readability, etc. The article is then collected together with others and published in an issue of the journal. All of this has been influenced by the model of publishing required by the paper-based journal. For example the logistics of the paper journal give rise to the ‘issue’. There is nothing in the design of the research paper that requires that it be published as part of an issue. The need to co-ordinate the activities of editors, referees, printers, distributors, marketing departments, etc, has given rise to the ‘publisher’. In order to recover the cost of operating this organisation the publisher usually requires the writer of the paper to pass copyright in the paper to the publishing company. Finally the publisher sells subscriptions to the journal to cover the production and distribution cost and to make a profit. Thus we have the rather odd situation that the writer (researcher) gives away the rights of the paper for free then he/she needs to be a subscriber (that is, to pay) to read the journal in which it is published. The whole academic journal publishing industry is based on the fact the producers (researchers) of the goods (papers) give them away in exchange for dissemination and then have to buy access back in the form of subscriptions.”

Once upon a time

There were Traditonal Paper-Based Research/Scholarship ..

[image]

• The content of these journals were sanctioned, published, and peer reviewed by credible external entities such as scholarly societies, research institutions, or government agencies
• The content was presented in accepted scholarly formats of research papers, reports, conference/symposia presentations, and independent research
• The content relied on a textual expression of valid data produced by a tested, measurable, information gathering process.  The result of which, provided new insight to an idea or process that quoted, extended, built upon or altered the work of others.
• The content often provided points of visual reference which included images, graphs, charts, statistical presentations, etc.
• The sponsoring agency sanctioned the validity and relevance of the content primarily by peer review
• The presentation was published in bound paper entities of soft or hard covered containers at regular or irregular intervals based on established criteria
• The presentation included clear authority or authorship responsible for the content as well as clear attribution where the work of others was used in its arguments.
• The sponsoring agency distributed the publication to its members and subscribers for a price.

—————

Then came the Internet

And it became possible for credible external entities to …

• Leverage a faster wider network of peer review and validation opprtunities
• Improve upon traditional scholarly presentation formats to illustrate and reinforce textual and abstract content in more efficient, non-linear, multimodal ways
• Easier to access and gather information from more sources
• Easier to test, measure and validate data, using computational systems
• Invites the opportunity to store, reuse and share oft discarded raw data
• Cheaper to produce
• Easier to distribute to members and subscribers or make available to all
• Easier to reproduce, extend, quote, alter
• Barriers to frequency of publication may be removed
• Opportunities to enhance referential and supporting content through sound, video, advanced imaging and simulation presentation
• Opportunity to reconsider (not abandon) matters of authority and atribution and leverage the significant power of collaboration
• Opportunity for good work to spread faster and quantify actual usage post-publication

———-
We might ask ourselves ..

1. Is the publisher/sanctioning agency credible? What is this threshold?
   
2. Is the scholarship Peer Reviewed? – and how? (traditional, comments, open PR)
   
3. Is authority for the work and supporting references well established?  Does it need to be? (collaboration, community)
   
4. Does this scholarship gain from presentation and distribution in an electronic format?
   (visually, functionally, accuracy, usability, accessibilty, financially, data reuse, etc.?)
   
5. Would this research flourish if it were available free to all?

—-

So what actually happened in scholarly publication…

Publishers began testing the waters:

• Journals built online versions of their journals
• Authors retained their rights to their research and distributed where and how they wish
• Presentation of Scholarship incorporating new media formats

A Crisis of Costs spurred:

• Some Journals have migrated to online-only versions of their journals
• Libraries resist duplication, cut paper titles, and invest in online access.  Several Institutions move to Online-Only (name them)
• Thousands of new online peer reviewed journals have been created

Innovations occurred

• New models of Peer review evolved
• New models of publication emerges and expands beyond societies and institutions to larger discipline-centric scholarly “portals” (
• Repositories of related research is gathered and organized in new places and new ways. (BioCentral)
• Institutional repositories or Pseudo-University Presses emerge (MIT)
• Peer Reviewed Open Access Electronic Journals makes a big

Final Ponder… What has changed?  Which should we emphasize?

Process of Electronic Pubishing
How it alters content

• Library Announces Electronic-Only Journals Proposal – UMass Amherst Library

  tags: aubergren

• Nature Debates: Lessons for the future of journals

  tags: aubergren

• Primer on Peer Review, Payment and Publishing – Open Access Archivangelism

  tags: aubergren

• A Future Academic Discourse « Jacob Kramer-Duffield thinks

  tags: aubergren

• Wired Campus: Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class — via Twitter – Chronicle.com

  tags: aubergren

• Wired Campus: Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class — via Twitter – Chronicle.com

  tags: aubergren

• Academic Earth – Video lectures from the world’s top scholars

  tags: aubergren

• YouTube EDU | Clayton Christensen

  tags: aubergren

• Wired Campus: U. of Richmond Creates a Wikipedia for Undergraduate Scholars – Chronicle.com

  tags: aubergren

• Wired Campus: U. of Richmond Creates a Wikipedia for Undergraduate Scholars – Chronicle.com

  tags: aubergren

• The Lion’s Share, A Podcast Regarding Media Research, is Up! | MediaCommons

  tags: aubergren

• NMC Schlrshp

  tags: aubergren, scholarship, thinking, education, pedagogy, teaching

• A New Push to Unlock University-Based Research – Chronicle.com

  tags: aubergren

• G-Bks Stlmnt

  tags: aubergren

• Open Access: Half step forward, big possible step back | Everything is Miscellaneous

  tags: aubergren

  • dating that academics there are required to put a copy of their published work into the archive,

• Roman de la Rose: Home

  tags: bergrenlink, aubergren

• Scholes Library: NYS College of Ceramics at Alfred University

  tags: aubergren

• Atelier Transfert |

  tags: aubergren

• METRO: Metropolitan New York Library Council – Digital Dilemmas Symposium

  tags: aubergren

• Developing and Sustaining a Culture of Scholarship

  tags: aubergren

• In Search of New Frontiers: How Scholars Generate Ideas – Chronicle.com

  tags: aubergren

• Physicists Set Plan in Motion to Change Publishing System – Chronicle.com

  tags: aubergren

• A New Field Study Identifies Eight Major Types of Digital Scholarship – Chronicle.com

  tags: aubergren

• Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis – Chronicle.com

  tags: aubergren

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Academic Publishing in the Digital Age | HASTAC

  tags: bergrenlink

• AERA SIG Communication of Research :: Ejournals in Education

  AERA SIG Communication of Research Ejournals in Education

  tags: bergrenlink

• aps.arxiv.org e-Print archive mirror

  tags: bergrenlink

• The Agrippa Files

  tags: bergrenlink

• Association of Research Libraries :: ARL 2008 New Model Publications Study: Examples Collected for Analysis (206)

  tags: bergrenlink

• BioMed Central | The Open Access Publisher

  tags: bergrenlink

• Bloomsbury Academic

  tags: free, bergrenlink

• Bloomsbury Academic Launches Creative Commons Only Publishing Imprint – Creative Commons

  tags: free, bergrenlink

• The Bryn Mawr Classical Review

  tags: bergrenlink

• A Digital Humanities Manifesto » A Digital Humanities Manifesto

  tags: bergrenlink, manifesto, humanities, digitalhumanities, education, technology, theory, web2.0

• digital scholarship examples | SlideShare Search

  tags: bergrenlink

• E-Only Peer-Reviewed Scientific Journals

  Conformal geometry & dynamics

  tags: bergrenlink

• Ecology and Society

  tags: bergrenlink

• Educational Research and Reviews

  tags: bergrenlink

• Faculty Of 1000 Biology

  tags: bergrenlink

• Hypercities

  tags: bergrenlink

• if:book

  tags: bergrenlink

• Ithaka :: University Publishing In A Digital Age

  tags: bergrenlink

• The Jungian Society

  tags: bergrenlink

• K A I R O S: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy

  tags: bergrenlink

• MediaCommons | a digital scholarly network

  tags: bergrenlink

• N I N E S

  tags: bergrenlink

• NINES Project Enhances Tools for Digital Research in the Humanities

  tags: bergrenlink

• Pepys’ Diary

  tags: bergrenlink

• Roman de la Rose: Home

  tags: bergrenlink, aubergren

• Scholarly Research Exchange

  Scholarly Research Exchange is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that publishes original research articles in all areas of science, technology, and medicine.

  tags: bergrenlink

• ScholarOne Manuscripts – Scholarone – Science – Thomson Reuters

  tags: bergrenlink

• Science Commons

  tags: Sabbatical, Selfpub, Blog_CpyRt, free, bergrenlink

• Sophie – A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book

  tags: bergrenlink

• SSRN Electronic Library

  tags: bergrenlink

• SUNY Oneonta Music Project | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

  tags: Bergrenlink

• Bonnie J. M. Swoger – CIT 2008

  tags: bergrenlink

• Vectors Journal: Blue Velvet

  tags: bergrenlink

• Vectors Journal: Introduction

  tags: Bergrenlink

• Vectors Journal: ThoughtMesh

  tags: bergrenlink

• Wired Campus: Whitman Takes Manhattan – Chronicle.com

  tags: bergrenlink

• The World of Dante

  tags: bergrenlink

• UpToDate Inc.

  tags: bergrenlink

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Samples

Ejournal Only Peer Reviewed Titles

Chemical educator

Catalysis Surveys from Japan