Spring 2006
Scholarly perspectives on the impact and future trends of publishing in an electronic environment
Scholarly Communication: Constancy & Change
Blaise Cronin
What has changed and what has held constant since Mr. Henry Oldenburg founded The Philosophical Transactions in the 17th century? Will scholars continue to publish as they have done? Will the academic journal persist in recognizable form? Will traditional peer review cede to new forms of open peer commentary, including blogs?
Forget the romanticized image of the lone wolf scholar—a pensive Wittgenstein pacing his rooms at Cambridge, Einstein ambling to and from his office at the Institute for Advanced Studies. The reality is rather different, as authors jostle to bring their intellectual wares to the attention of their peers and libraries struggle to deal with the so-called ‘crisis in scholarly publishing.’ What, in fact, does it mean to be an author? How is the ‘author-function’ being recast in an age of ‘post-academic science’? What happens when there are dozens or even hundreds of co-authors? Who exactly is the author? Who speaks for the collective? How is credit allocated?
Even that time-honored exhortation ‘Publish or perish!’ is beginning to sound passé; it is quite possible these days to publish and perish, given the mass of books and articles competing for attention. Publish in a third-tier journal and you’ll be damned; publish conventionally when your peers are placing their work in open access journals and institutional/disciplinary repositories and you may just be ignored. Want to grow your citation count? Just try self-archiving.
Of course, disciplinary cultures vary. What works for particle physicists won’t necessarily work for critical theorists. In the humanities, junior scholars are boxed between the Scylla of rising expectations and the Charybdis of oversupply; yet publishing electronically may still be a gamble. In the symbolic capital markets of academe, where and how you publish are critical factors in the calculus of career advancement.
For better or worse, bean counting has become a way of life in higher education. Academic administrators tally what they can, sometimes what they shouldn’t. Publications are enumerated and categorized, impact factors invoked, lifetime citation scores computed, hits and downloads tallied. In the digital environment it is much easier to count the beans, but who decides what counts? And who does the counting?
These are the kinds of issues I shall address in my presentation.
Blaise Cronin is the Rudy Professor Information Science at Indiana University, where he has been dean of the School of Library and Information Science since 1991. He is concurrently a visiting professor in the School of Computing at Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland. His books include The Citation Process (1984), The Scholar’s Courtesy (1995) and The Hand of Science (2005). He is editor of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. He was a founding director of Crossaig, an electronic publishing start-up, which was acquired in 1992 by ISI in Philadelphia. Professor Cronin holds a Ph.D and DSSc. in information science from the Queen’s University of Belfast and an honorary D.Litt from Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh.
The Digital Ad Fontes!: Scholarly Research Trends in the Humanities
Jordan J. Ballor
The rapid advent of technological innovations in academia is changing the face of scholarship. I will focus on two major aspects of these innovations, relating to the depth and breadth of scholarly research.
With respect to the depth, electronic databases and more recently the digitization of texts have brought unprecedented access to primary source materials. Resources like Early English Books Online (EEBO) have implications for research in a number of fields, including history, philosophy, theology, and literature. One of the main features of these projects is the increase in the accessibility of texts: they are now available virtually “on demand.” Time and energy that used to be spent on the acquisition of texts is now freed for deeper engagement of the primary materials themselves.
Regarding the breadth of scholarly research, the digitization of secondary sources, especially journal articles but also some books, makes the search for relevant discussions across disciplines far easier. Undertakings like JSTOR are making available full-text searches of decades and in some cases centuries-old journal articles. If a particular figure or technical phrase occurs in the text of a journal article from any number of fields, a few keystrokes are now sufficient to find it. This reality has the potential to spur significant interdisciplinary dialogue.
The confluence of these two aspects in contemporary scholarly research results in an era of unprecedented access for researchers to primary and secondary source materials. But these developments carry with them a corresponding increase in the responsibilities of the scholarly enterprise. To whom much is given, much is required!
My presentation will touch on a number of specific research tools. These will mostly be drawn from the areas of my own expertise (theology and history) but will have direct bearing on a number of other disciplines, including philosophy, literature, and language
Jordan J. Ballor serves as associate editor of the Journal of Markets & Morality, a peer-reviewed academic journal promoting intellectual exploration of the relationship between economics and morality from both social science and theological perspectives. He is also a Ph.D. student in historical theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Mich. and the author of “Scholarship at the Crossroads: The Journal of Markets & Morality Case Study,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 36, no. 3 (April 2005).
Access, Inertia, and Innovation: Turbulent Times in Scientific Publishing
Rosalind Reid
The past decade has been one of tectonic change in how science is done, how it's communicated and how it's funded. Arguably the greatest transformations have been brought about by the Internet, which has revolutionized how scientific knowledge is shared. Yet the dream of an open and flexible global environment in which knowledge is discovered and disseminated remains elusive even as the Internet's rise has increased public access to vast troves of pseudoscience and junk science. Advocates of "open access" science publishing lament that the best science remains largely encased in virtual vaults, inaccessible to many of the creators of past and future knowledge. The splintered nature of science--the separation of practitioners into disciplines and rival communities, often with disparate cultures and needs--has kept scientists and institutions from converging and insisting on more open, efficient and inexpensive information-sharing methods.
I will offer modest proposals for progress on these fronts and provide a peek at some novel forms of scientific communication flowering in the digital age.
Rosalind Reid is Editor of American Scientist, the magazine of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, where she collaborates with scientists, mathematicians and engineers on the presentation of research to a broad audience. She gives frequent talks and workshops on communicating science and science-publishing issues, has taught science news communication at Duke University and is now helping organize a series of regional mini-workshops on the visual communication of science, co-sponsored by MIT, the Harvard Initiative for Innovative Computing, the National Science Foundation, and Sigma Xi.
Ms. Reid came to the magazine from a career in journalism. After receiving bachelor’s degrees in political science and journalism from Syracuse University, she won awards as a reporter for newspapers in Maine and North Carolina. She holds a master’s degree in public policy sciences from Duke and was research news editor at North Carolina State University from 1984 to 1990. In 2003 she spent three months at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as the first Journalist in Residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. During her 13 years as Editor, American Scientist has won numerous awards for general excellence, design and editorial quality and has developed a full-text electronic version, a low-bandwidth archive for developing-country scientists, and several electronic newsletters.
Ms. Reid is a member of the National Association of Science Writers and the International Federation of Science Editors.
The event is free and open to the Public
Registration is required
