May 6th, 2008 | Academic Publishing, Bjoern Brembs, Bora Zivkovic, Catriona MacCallum, Martin Fenner, Open Access Publishing, Randolph Nesse | 4 Comments
Last week I had the opportunity to have dinner with a group of very interesting and (and, dare I say it of researchers who rid the world of cancer and explore the origins of life?) fun people. Bjoern Brembs was nice enough to invite me to a get-together at the top of Berlin’s Fersehturm, some 230 meters above Alexanderplatz. The view was spectacular, though most of the time I was too caught up in the discussion to pay much attention. Catriona MacCallum, Martin Fenner, Randolph Nesse and Bjoern Brembs offered their views on where academic publishing is going and what is wrong with the system we currently live (and suffer) under.
Below are some of Bora’s photos, shamelessly ripped from his blog.
Mark the Chelsea fan and Catriona enjoying a cool Berliner Pilsener
Bjoern Brembs, apparently also a soccer handball enthusiast. Yeah, they don’t *throw* balls in soccer 
Bora is up in arms against the less progressive elements of the publishing industry
Martin Fenner’s wife (to whom I apologize - my memory for names is terrible) and humble me
By the way, even if you don’t know a thing about evolutionary medicine or psychology, you should definitely have a look at Randolph Nesse’s blog.
May 5th, 2008 | Other Stuff | 3 Comments
Edit: Be sure to read Krishna Kumar’s take on blogging, work and creativity.
Oh my, I didn’t manage to write a single post in the whole of April.
While blogging fatigue seems to be a widespread phenomenon, it’s a particularly soft spot when your research is largely about blogging and you are in the process of organizing a panel at an international conference concerned chiefly with personal Web publishing technologies and how they are changing how we talk about science - among other things.
But, as always, time is the essence. I’m starting to wonder what on Earth I was doing a year ago that allowed me to blog so much (or rather: what I was not doing). Perhaps that’s the wrong way of looking at it though. Yes, blogging takes a lot of time, but it very much depends on how you approach it. Maybe I’ve been a little too concerned with saying it all, i.e. with restricting myself to the planned, substantial and structured writing that we are accustomed to in other contexts . Blogging isn’t always like that and I believe that that’s a good thing. The minimal audience for a blog, as I love to repeat incessantly, is its author. In other words, a blog can be useful as a tool to systematically structure your thoughts - nothing more, nothing less. Forgetting about readership and self-reflexivity (i.e. thinking What is this good for? What goal am I trying to achieve?) can be exactly the right kind of self-motivating strategy. Don’t get me wrong - blogging with a purpose is great. But the luxury of having no specific purpose in mind can be a good thing sometimes, especially when you’re starting to feel that blog writing is actually a burden, a chore that you have to take care of. Obviously, when you’re writing for an institution or in a professional context you are well-advised to think of your readers. But if you’re not enjoying what you do it’s bound to show sooner or later and it seems that with blogging, much of the pleasure that people draw from the activity is a direct result of its unfocusedness - a sort of ‘my blog is my castle’-attitude in communicative terms.
A friend once told me she preferred the original way of blogging: “rambling incoherently to yourself on the street”. Blogging doesn’t have to be quite that bad, but sometimes it helps to ramble just a bit.
Mar 20th, 2008 | Open Access Publishing | No Comments
HASTAC’s Cathy Dadvison has an interesting post up on the economic issues associated with open access. From the piece:
In any case, publishers have to have some motivation, some guarantee not that they will make money (very few scholarly publishers make money) but that they won’t lose it. The for-profit publishers (and there are many scholarly publishers such as Wiley that do a healthy, for-profit business) will need some form of compensation. The scholarly non-profit publishers (largely but not exclusively university presses) will need some method for offsetting any revenue lost from open access. Unless that bottom-line is figured into the equation, there is no motivation for someone to be a publisher. Without publishers, then authors have to be in the business of self-publishing. That’s fine . . . but, as I’ve written about many times in this blog, self-publishing isn’t free. And it isn’t easy. And, most definitely, it isn’t “professional.” Finally, authors should be in the business of writing (which is hard enough); we should not also have to be publishing our own writing and doing all that is required to have it published in a polished, formal way (i.e. not in the casual and spontaneous format of a blog but as refereed, responsible online scholarship).
I absolutely agree with Cathy’s observation that open access doesn’t mean zero cost. The costs of publishing are significant and that is not something that magically goes away with open access.
That being said, I can’t help but wonder whether our perception of self-publishing as non-professional will persist. Arguably, the more polished a publication is the more it is geared towards posterity. It’s very much like paper publishing: what is released is a ‘finished’ product that is no longer updated. Of course I am not implying that peer-review, citing of sources and other cornerstones of academic discourse are not important. But what makes these things - in principle - impossible to have in blogs, in conjunction with pieces which are not modeled after print texts? Citing and linking are highly transparent processes in blogs (or in any other hypertext). And surely systems of peer review could be put into place as well (probably a form of open peer review). Perhaps we’ll find some answers to these questions in November.
Mar 14th, 2008 | Linguistics, Teaching | No Comments
Here’s a bit of shameless self-promotion: I’ve made some updates to my CV to include two presentations and an article about eLanguage that was published last fall. And in the (I assume fairly unlikely) case that you’re interested in a blog-based introduction into English linguistics: I’ve assembled a table of contents for the topics that were covered in my class in the winter semester.
Mar 11th, 2008 | Corporate Blogging, Pronouns | 1 Comment
I’m currently working on a paper on pronominal use in corporate blogs and I thought it would make sense to blog a compressed version here.
Personal pronouns, specifically those of the first and second person, are characteristic for any kind of language use that can be described as ‘involved’, i.e. in which some sort of discourse situation between a speaker and one or more addressees exists. A frequent mistake is to assume that use of ‘I’ and ‘you’ necessarily makes a text ‘less formal’, more ‘personal’, or that, by contrast, texts in which the third person is preferred are more formal, ‘objective’, or serious.
But this is not quite accurate. Imagine that you want to tell your colleague that you’ve just spoken on the phone with a client. You might say something like “I just spoke to X and he canceled our meeting next week”. You could also use such an expression in an E-Mail, only that you might specify a time and date instead of writing that you “just” spoke to X. Or perhaps you’ll decide to speak of yourself as part of a team and write that “we” spoke to X. But in no plausible scenario would you refer to yourself in the third person, whether with a full noun (your name) or a third person pronoun (he/she). Such a behavior would not just be unusual or somewhat inappropriate - it would cause people to worry about your mental health in a serious way.
The same applies to the use of the second person. Imagine that you are having a conversation with Bob and he makes a suggestion that you don’t agree with. While you are facing and clearly addressing him, you say “Does Bob think that this is a good idea?”. It is very unlikely that any addressee would appreciate this kind of behavior. Or, imagine you are talking to Sue while Bob is also present and you consistently address her as “you” and him as “he”. Your behavior would be interpreted as impossibly rude and just by using the wrong pronoun you would be sending an extremely strong and unequivocally negative message.
In other words, when you are actively involved in a conversation you must use the pronoun of the second person, just as use of the first person pronoun to refer to yourself is the default.
Why is this important and what does it have to do with blogs?
While face-to-face communication has been around longer than man has been capable of using language, written communication is still a pretty recent innovation. As long as they were stored on paper and therefore costly to produce, the primary function of written texts was to archive information. Public records, historical documents, religious texts and learning materials all had the purpose of overcoming the key limitation of speech: that it is ephemeral, transient and inaccessible unless one happens to be in the right place at the right time.
Speech is shaped by the situation it takes place in. ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘now’ and ‘then’ are all clear and unambiguous in their reference as long as all participants have access to the context to which all these words are anchored. Now think about the kinds of things written down in the abovementioned documents and it becomes clear that these are largely independent from a specific context. Why is that? Because the person who puts down something on paper assumes that it will be read by people unknown to him, possibly in a distant future. It simply makes no sense to refer to the reader as ‘you’, his location as ‘here’ and the time of writing as ‘now. And beyond that it is not plausible to refer to oneself a whole lot either, since the fate of one individual hardly seems relevant to the world at large when publishing in such an expensive medium. Diaries and personal letters obviously differ in that respect, the former genre being primarily concerned with the writer himself (therefore inevitably having an ‘I’) while the latter clearly addresses a specific person (and consequently has a ‘you’).
But what really stirred things up when it comes to interpreting writing as a form of communication was the Internet.
Firstly, the Net makes lightning fast, cheap and unlimited communication possible. Secondly, because hyperlinks allow people to causally connect one piece of writing with another, an expression and its context no longer exist in the kind of separation from one another that was characteristic for pre-digital writing.
Take this blog. The header states that it is written by “Cornelius Puschmann” and concerned with “corporate and institutional blogging, linguistics, open access and other things that interest him”. Since this post is published in Cornelius Puschmann’s blog you have every reason to believe that “I”, when used in a post, refers to me. If I refer to to a point in time called “now” you could further deduct that I’m talking about the time of writing and figure out when exactly that was by looking at the post’s time stamp.
In other words, a blog provides some of the context that is accessible in a conversation and that was previously not accessible in written texts. For that reason, some of the linguistic strategies of spoken language are used: bloggers refer to themselves via the first person pronoun and to their reader via the second person.
But now comes the decisive part. Self-reference is not just plausible because bloggers like to write about themselves, but also because it is an essential part of any ordinary conversation. Think about the last time you had a chat with anyone that went on for more than a few moments and you’ll find with almost complete certainty that your referred to yourself at some point.
Now think about advertising. Think about brochures, instruction manuals, news, or about your average company website. These text types generally don’t have self-reference because arguably they are not about the writer but concerned with third parties (newspaper articles, history book, encyclopedias). But in those genres where ‘you’ is addressed all the time (ads, corporate websites and many others) we encounter a paradox: someone is talking to us but we have no clue who it is, because there is no self-reference. Someone wants me to buy something, but I can’t say who it is.
Blogs solve this problem by mandating a speaker. Any blogging software or platform requires at least one user and his name is credited each time he publishes something. Blogs are customized by their owners and reflect the likes and dislikes of the blogger. Without a blogger, no blog.
Human beings are highly sensitive to relevant social-contextual information and when that information is withheld it seems implausible and fake to us. But exactly this is an everyday practice in advertising: addressing the reader/listener/viewer is common practice, even when there is nobody there who could plausibly be addressing him.
(Part 2 will follow soon)
Mar 10th, 2008 | Academic Publishing, Open Access Publishing | No Comments
I just came across this article in the WSJ (via open…). From the piece:
In the future, it’s likely that a new, more flexible model will develop in which some scholarly papers, published under the banner of an online journal, will be peer-reviewed, while others will appear without any such apparatus, destined to rise or fall based on their contents and their authors’ reputations. The challenge, in the coming new world of open access, will be keeping the best of the current system while jettisoning the rest. Maybe some scholar would like to study the question — and publish his findings for all to see.
I’m pretty sure the differences between publishing in an open access journal vs. saving your paper in an institutional or disciplinary repository are already being assessed, but the the author is spot on in his evaluation - both approaches can co-exist peacefully. Journals will increasingly mean ‘reviewed’, not just ‘published’.
Mar 4th, 2008 | Academic Publishing, Open Access Publishing, Open Science, Visualization, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment
Wow, I think I’ve never had a post title as long as that one.
As some of you might know, I’m very much engaged in the Open Access movement and involved in several projects related to making scholarly information more accessible. In light of this, I am enthusiastic to announce that I will be organizing a panel with the working title New Forms of Scholarly Communication: Blogs, Wikis and Web 2.0 in Academia at the Berlin 6 Open Access Conference in November. The event is the successor to previous Berlin conferences organized by the Max Planck Society and its partners and will take place here in Düsseldorf.
What exactly is behind the title of the panel? Essentially, I envision a bundle of presentations centered on these interconnected aspects:
- research publishing beyond e-books and e-journals - what new forms of publishing (if any) has the Net brought us?
- new ways of dealing with data - how do platforms such as IBM’s Many Eyes and MIT’s SIMILE library affect how we can look at data and, consequently, how we publish?
- new ways of collaborating - how do new means of communication and collaboration affect us - for example, the use of social bookmarking tools to create shared bibliographies, use of wikis to collaboratively write books etc?
- new ways of evaluation and discussing - how do approaches such as open peer review affect our view of science and the way in which we evaluate research results?
I am pinging the institutions and individuals listed below, which I believe could contribute greatly to making this an interesting and diverse panel. Please do let me me know (via blog or email to puschmann@gmail.com) if you are interested in contributing, or if you have suggestions for subtopics or speakers.
Tools/Technology
Zotero
Many Eyes
SIMILE
SciVee
Research into eScience and blogs/wikis/social networks in an academic context
Virtual Knowledge Studio
HUMlab
Lilia Efimova
Eszter Hargittai
New concepts and approaches in publishing/reviewing
Nature Peer-to-Peer
Living Reviews
Note that these are just a few names that popped into my head spontaneously - there are many more.
I also realized this morning that one immensely interesting speaker on the changing forms of information and on how we share it, disseminate it and evaluate its usefulness would be JP Rangaswami. About 1,5 years ago, I read this fascinating post by JP about what he called “livebrarians”. The post, in which he sketched out differences between the Net and physical libraries, ignited a debate about what role information “professionals” (in other words, librarians) can play in a read-write environment where retrieval happens via keyword search and semantic information is annotated automatically or by amateurs. I particularly liked this quote: “my problem is I really think that any damned fool can be a librarian.” I fully agree. JP has also recently posted about Many Eyes, a project that I very much want to integrate into the discussion.
One might think that open access publishing is a very specific issue, relevant only to academics and librarians, while what we generally call Web 2.0 is just a bundle of trendy buzzwords and an opportunity for tech companies to make money, and that the two issues have little to do with each other. But I believe that means not seeing the big picture. Ultimately, open access publishing is about making information accessible to anyone with an interest in a given area of research, because it is assumed that what can be created as a result of the information being free is worth more than what can be earned by selling it. Open access is to research what open source is to software and for that reason it should be every bit as relevant to companies.
Feb 23rd, 2008 | Harvard, Open Access Publishing, iScience | No Comments
The question smells of hyperbole, but it’s an idea that’s rather persistant for me. But let’s start at the beginning.
If you’re active in the Open Access community, you’ve probably read about nothing else in the last week: the Harvard Open Access resolution. In a nutshell, everything that’s published by members of the faculty will be made available on the Net for free, unless the author asks for an exemption. While some scholars might do this, it means that the bulk of what is published by researchers at Harvard will be Open Access from now on.
From Everybody’s Libraries:
This is the first university-level open access mandate in the US, from the most prominent university in the US, and as many have noted, this is a huge step forward for open access to research. There are two aspects to the mandate: the familiar aspect directs faculty to supply Harvard copies of their papers to post; the more novel aspect stipulates that Harvard automatically get the rights to post their faculty papers for free. Harvard allows faculty members to exempt papers from these requirements, but it must be done in writing, with reason, separately for each paper that a faculty member wants to exempt.
I find this approach ingenious. As people maintaining institutional repositories have come to know, there are two main barriers to distributing one’s faculty’s work in one’s repository: getting hold of the work, and getting the right to publish the work. The first of these can be handled in various ways; whether the faculty, the departmental administrators, or the librarians get the content to the right place, it’s all purely a matter of local negotiation. But that’s not the case with rights. By the time we repository maintainers get content from authors, the authors have often signed their rights away to the journals that published the papers. The publishers have effectively called dibs on redistribution rights, and we can’t distribute unless they agree to it. A faculty member that may want to have us distribute her work too may no longer have the power to let us– she’s already signed that right away to someone else.
In a sense, the question of how Open Access can be facilitated has always been discussed by the wrong people. No level of activism could ever solve the key problem: that the majority of researchers do not truly care about how their work is distributed - and why should they? Harvard’s decision has the potential to make what seemed a complicated situation rather simple:
- to get a job at a prestigious university, a scholar must sign an agreement to publish OA
- when the scholar has an article ready for publication, he forwards it to the librarian who manages the institution’s repository (or to an admin who takes care of that)
- anything that ends up in the repository is globally available via Google Scholar and similar services
- keyword searches combined with a knowledge of the disciplinary landscape (i.e. I know that X, Y and Z have published things relevant to my research before - what about their other work?) are how researchers find relevant sources
What does this mean for traditional peer-review and the future of scientific journals?
I think that, quite plausibly, this could be the beginning of the end for both of these institutions.
Think about it. Right now, the idea of quality control via commentary and evaluation of a piece of research is married with making it available. An article is only published after having been reviewed, because that is how the print process works. But once digital availability is guaranteed regardless of quality, this no longer makes any sense: evaluation and discussion of a paper and it’s availability are two separate issues. Journal publishers will no longer have to fuss around with technical issues if publication, storage and archiving are handled through their institution’s repository. Those functions will be entirely where should have been in the first place: with the libraries. Repositories will replace journals as the ‘place’ where articles are stored - the exciting question is what will replace them as the place where they are discussed and evaluated. It’s hard not to see the immense potential for open peer review and moderated discussions. And once papers truly live on the Net (i.e. are hypertext and freely accessible) it is only logical that they will be linked and crossreferenced in the same way that blogs are.
I know that there are skeptics who believe that this will have a negative impact on the quality of published research. But that mistakes the Internet for a browsable medium, for a resource that you can ever look at in its entirety. It no longer makes any sense that only what has been deemed worthy should be principally available. What is truly significant scientifically will be recognized by peers and separated from what is of lesser relevance - as it has been the case. But no longer will availability and quality be two ends of the same equation.
Feb 7th, 2008 | Research, Tools | No Comments
A few days ago, I finally got around to installing a VPN client software on my laptop at home so that I can access my library’s catalog when I’m not on campus. This is a major step forward in terms of convenience because it allows me to
- go to Google Scholar and search for articles and books
- use the link resolver to see if my local library has access
- go to the publisher’s page
- download not only the citation but the entire article with Zotero
Zotero is truly awesome once you use it in that way - not just as a bibliographic database, but as a digital archive. And as I found out, my university library has a very good selection. The only trouble is that many researchers may not be aware at all that the access they have is provided to them by their library. “We don’t need you any more - everything is available on the Internet these days” seems to be a phrase that librarians frequently hear these days. If there is a party involved in the discussion over Open Access and how we treat scientific information that desperately needs to wake up, it isn’t librarians or the publishing houses. It’s the bulk of researchers out there.
Jan 27th, 2008 | Blogosphere, Style | No Comments
That’s an extremely poignant quote about blogs and bloggers from NYRB’s Sarah Boxer. Read her very insightful piece here (via LanguageLog).
