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.
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.
Nov 16th, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Linguistics, Open Access Publishing, Presentation | No Comments
As you can probably tell by the long pauses in between posts, I am still not quite back to my normal blogging routine, but thankfully things are picking up little by little. Last week I held two presentations, one at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (concerned with the eLanguage project) and another at the University of Paderborn (about using the Web for linguistic research). Oh, and I can announce with some degree of pride that I have published my first peer-reviewed article (in First Monday, together with Peter Reimer) which is also related to eLanguage.
WALS and eLanguage (MPI-EVA, Leipzig)
Corpora, Blogs and Linguistic Variation (Paderborn)
Puschmann, Cornelius, and Reimer, Peter. “DiPP and eLanguage: Two cooperative models for open access” First Monday [Online], Volume 12 Number 10 (1 October 2007)
Oct 9th, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Other Stuff | 3 Comments
Being a researcher naturally involves dealing with complicated topics that are often hard to explain to the uninitiated. Understanding how the human brain functions, what the difference between synthetic and analytic languages is or what role landscape plays in the novels of Don DeLillo all requires some prior knowledge about those subjects. Without that knowledge, you may not have the least idea what a teacher or instructor is talking about.
But sometimes it all sounds like babble, even to those familiar with the terminology and the right theoretical background. Maybe you’re tired or distracted, maybe the writer is being vague, or perhaps the presenter is just not very skilled at presenting.
What you then get is best described by this paper and this presentation by computer scientist Doug Zonker.
The interesting part is: to non-academics it is silly to the point of idiocy, whereas I had to make a conscious effort to not fall from my office chair because I was laughing so hard. Subverting conventions is funny, but only if you know them well enough to recognize the parody.
If you find Zonker amusing, be sure to read this as well.
Oct 5th, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Open Access Publishing | No Comments
danah boyd recently posted a brilliant piece about why she’s not ready for the academic job market. My main reason for finding it brilliant is that much of what she says is exactly what I have on my mind these days - I also hope to complete my PhD next year, have the burning desire to do more research and fear being tied down in the long, grueling and bureaucratic process that is tenure track. Says danah:
I have been watching friends go through the tenure process and it makes me sick. There’s no room for innovation, for playing outside of the rules. You have 7 years to publish X articles in the *right* journals in the *right* way. My favorite phrase associated with this is “Least Publishable Unit.” In other words, what’s the minimum contribution you can make to get a good publication out of it. I don’t write like that and I don’t want to. I also think that most of the “respected” journals are so locked down as to be inaccessible to broader audiences. I want to be an academic, not a hermit. I believe that academia is an institution built on knowledge creation AND dissemination. My goal is to write for public audiences, to make knowledge palatable and interesting and accessible. I want to contribute big ideas that will make a difference, and to leave the mini-contributions for my blog.
Things are different in many ways on this side of the pond, but not necessarily any better. On the way to professorship we have the Habilitation which is essentially Dissertation 2.0. Again you write a book (normally a longer one) and again you present and defend your findings, only this time before your entire Fakultät, which generally means that a lot of tenured professors from a number of different disciplines get to judge your work. Think someone from philosophy making a call about the work of somebody from Japanese or Asian studies and you have the right picture.
And then, as danah points out, there’s all the antediluvian ritual associated with publishing in academia.
There was a time, now strange and long gone to the wired and paperless of us, where getting something published also meant that it had won the approval of peers, or at least the approval of an institutional publisher willing to print a few copies. Those times are gone now - getting it out there no longer means that it as been approved, that people agree with it or that it’s good. And quite frankly, I don’t see the problem with that, because I’m a grown-up and in my field I can generally tell a good article from a bad one, peer-reviewed or not. I’m not saying that peer-review is not useful for separating the wheat from the chaff. But I believe that access is the most important thing and that writing for the “right” journals because that’s what your supposed to do is wrong when they exist in walled gardens that are only accessible to a select few. I will continue to self-publish because danah is spot on: academia is an institution built on knowledge creation AND dissemination.
Digital technology affects us in all areas of life by empowering the individual on an unprecedented level. That means that institutions and social conventions lose influence to a degree - we no longer depend on printing presses and the goodwill of entrenched institutions in quite the same way we used to. But while comparably there’s a lot of personal freedom in academia, there’s also a lot of pressure to fit in, because the quality of what you do is always judged by your peers. The dissertation is basically the initiation trial you have to go through, even more so in the U.S. than here, and for some it turns into a one-way street.
From the NYT article:
For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun. The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years.
Eight years. Jesus. If all goes well I’ll be done with my thesis a year from now. I doubt that my investigation into corporate blogging will change the world, but on the upside it should be concise, readable and not outdated by a decade.
Sep 20th, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Web 2.0, iScience | No Comments
This is the first part in a series of posts in which I’ll think aloud about the future of academic research and the role that social software could (should?) play in it. My central idea is that research should become more transparently collaborative and that publicly funded projects and initiatives should focus on enabling individual researchers instead of institutions. Too often, what is described by the term e-science* is the development of unwieldy and byzantine systems that seek to anticipate and solve a huge array of problems, many of which have already been solved elsewhere. Because we tend to conceptualize software as tools - objects that can be used to perform certain tasks - we tend to believe that more functions equate to a better product. This view is problematic because it ignores the situation of data in a networked environment, where the user is free to use a variety of different web-based services in combination and can thus effectively create his own system. I want to begin by looking at how we can use social software as an information management tool.
* I’m not talking about scientific grid computing here (the original meaning of e-science), but about more general tools for areas such as academic publishing, information and knowledge management, teaching which are also often described as e-science applications.
*****
A while ago, I looked at the slides for a presentation on something pretty and colorful that either started with “e” or ended with “2.0″. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what exactly it was about, as all those fancy products and services eventually become a blur in my oversaturated cortex. But it wasn’t really the presentation as such that I found interesting. Going through the slides, I came across this memorable quote from a Japanese student that caught my attention:
When you lose your cell phone, you lose a part of your brain.
The quote got me thinking. What service or device equates to part of my brain for me (apart from my cell phone)?
The answer? iGoogle.
I’ve been using the service for only a few months now, but in conjunction with a handful of other products (many of which are integrated into my iGoogle page via widgets) it has become the single place where my email, appointments and bookmarks live together. Beyond that, I also use it to store ideas that spontaneously pop into my head. I keep a virtual scratchpad for notes. I have a to-do list with prioritized items. I have access to my calendar, email, feeds, bookmarks and documents when I log in, no matter where I am. Other services such as My Yahoo! do the same thing. They allow you to build a personal information ecology that’s always at your fingertips.
Right, so what’s so special about this?
First, there’s the fact that iGoogle allows you to tie different informational strands together in a personalized environment. We have enough neat applications and more than enough sources of information. The problem is that they all live in different places and that they usually don’t talk to each other. A lot of people have already pointed this out, but it’s something that can’t really be said often enough: we have to stop thinking that we need better, bigger tools with more functions when what we really need is better integration of existing “little” tools into personalized informational mosaics.
The second advantage is that your personal informational bundle is accessible everywhere you go, as long and there’s a computer with an Internet connection available.
Thirdly (and this tends to be overlooked), you can’t ever really lose a piece of information that you create or maintain online. I lose paper notes all the time and a hard drive can die unexpectedly. Sure, you can counter the former problem by being better organized than I am and the latter one by keeping backups, but information on the Web is virtually indestructible.
Fourth, you can share everything. I’ve been using Google Documents for quite a while without sharing any of my files, but recently we were brainstorming for a collaborative project and the document sharing feature turned out to be very useful. And sharing bookmarks on del.icio.us has vast potential for groups of collaborators.
The catch is that what’s presented in iGoogle is not just information, it’s my information. I can arrange it around myself in a pattern that makes sense to me in the same way that I arrange furniture in my office. It’s a pattern that can change over time and that only has to appeal to me - it’s optimized for my personal informational needs. This kind of individualized coherence makes certain things possible. Think about it like this: when all your colleagues have their offices in the same hallway as you do, you can easily drop in for a chat or to discuss an idea that just popped into your head. Now think about how most research tools work. Are they part of a pattern, a pattern that can be rearranged by the user? Generally the answer is no.
We tend to associate the whole Web 2.0 shebang with tuned-in, social-media-creating adolescent hipsters who supposedly do nothing all day long but to “share and remix” content, but when you think about it “share and remix” is what researchers have been doing for hundreds of years, albeit with different tools. The free dissemination of human expression is what characterizes social media, we are told. Wait, isn’t that what science is all about? Of course science is hardly just about expressing oneself. Among other things we have peer review, academic titles and scholarly societies to assure that what is published under the label “research” is not just opinion. And you can argue that disseminating an article on solar physics via arXiv.org is not the same thing as uploading a video of the mentos and coke experiment to YouTube. But thinking critically that’s a difference in scope and culture, as in how we value the article vs. how we value the clip, what you can do with different forms of content and who can pass an authoritative judgment on uses and forms.
The practices of academic research have arguably never been more with the times than today. Collaboration, openness and sharing information are core values of academic communities. But many argue that while the scientific ethos may be more en vogue than ever (think about the origins of Free Software in academia) we are still lacking the right tools for science 2.0.
Is that really true? I want to take a little time and look at what networked research tools we have and why, by and large, we are not using them.
The second part of this essay will present and discuss a number of tools for web-based research and collaboration.
Aug 4th, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Blogging Studies, Corporate Blogging, Knowledge Blogging, Lilia Efimova, Microsoft | 6 Comments
While there is the occasional market research study into the adoption of blogs in corporate contexts and people are even thinking about metrics for measuring their success, things are still fairly lacking when it comes to in-depth academic research into what effect blogs have both on organizations and on how they are perceived. But that’s slowly changing. I’ve picked up these two very interesting articles recently, describing the use and acceptance of corporate blogs:
Efimova, L., & Grudin, J. (2007). Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging. Proceedings of the Fortieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press. [pdf]
Kelleher, T., and Miller, B. M. (2006). Organizational blogs and the human voice: Relational strategies and relational outcomes. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), article 1. [html]
The focus in both articles is on employee blogs, which I find to be perhaps the most interesting subtype of company blogs for several reasons. If you are thinking about implementing blogs internally, have a look (and consider this as well).
On a side note: I never realized that Lilia Efimova has a blog (though in retrospect it seems fairly absurd to have assumed she doesn’t) and that it’s full of fascinating research on blogging at Microsoft (seriously Heather, you could have let me know*). That, and I find the way she uses flickr to annotate visualizations quite neat. Hmm, something new for my repertoire and Google Reader…
* I’m kidding of course. I have heard that quite a few people work at Microsoft (and Microsoft Research). I just thought I should ping you, the Microsoft blogger, about the article on Microsoft blogging. 
Jul 17th, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Conferences, Linguistics, Open Access Publishing, PKP 2007, Presentation | No Comments
After a whoppin’ 14 hours of sleep (preceded by an equally whoppin’ 28 hours awake - talk about the no-nonsense approach to jetlag!) I am now back on the ground in Germany. Just in case you’re curious about what’s next on the menu here at CorpBlawg: I plan to write something about blogging and text composition towards the end of the week, inspired by this interesting piece that Jakob Nielsen recently published on his site.
But before I do that I want to briefly point you to this post about the presentation that I held last week at PKP Vancouver. There’s excellent coverage of all presentations held at the conference and I really think that it’s a great idea to blog such an event - a perfect fit, since it was about scholarly publishing and open access to knowledge. While I’m at it, here are the slides for the presentation.
Jul 13th, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Conferences, Open Access Publishing, Web 2.0 | No Comments
As the second day of the conference is winding down, I’m happy that I have this blog to document the great presentations I’ve seen today. Michael Geist is answering questions right now - someone has brought up the Rufus Pollock paper on “optimal copyright duration” and Michael has pointed out how immensely long copyright periods are and how strange that is, for example in regards to software.
Before Michael, I heard a very interesting talk by Gregg Gordon of the Social Science Research Network. Gregg addressed many of the issues I’m also interested in, namely how the landscape of knowledge dissemination is changing in the long term, how trust and reputation are essential in (digital) publishing and how scarcity as a paradigm in scholarly publishing is being replaced by abundance (or even overabundance, some might argue).
Earlier this morning Anita Palepu presented Open Medicine, an open access medical journal that was initiated partly as a reaction to the interference with editorial freedom that Anita had previously witnessed. Highlighting that point - that Open Access is not just about bringing down subscription costs for libraries or a convenient way to increase your impact as a scholar, but that it’s the ideal way to prevent conflicts of interest that are virtually everywhere in a $500 million advertising market was an extremely relevant contribution.
People are filing out of Harbour Centre and soon most of us will be back at our desks, working on projects that will hopefully contribute to furthering access to knowledge for everyone, to bringing down the barriers. I really liked something that John Willinsky said in that context. We all have the right - the human right - to know.
Making that possible is definitely something worth working on.
Note that I’ll write a more complete summary of my messy conference notes in the course of the next few days.
