Thank you to Anne, Paul, Nick, Ernst and everyone else who attended for the very stimulating discussion that provided me with a number of new ideas – I’m looking forward to continuing it!

Edit: unfortunately SlideShare has mangled my OpenOffice presentation, making all bullet points mysteriously disappear. Duh.

Usage Map of Science

Here’s the full paper by Bollen et al, explaining the methodology in detail. Thanks to Adrian Pohl.

Now I’m perfectly aware that my discovery of Twitter for getting valuable updates from colleagues and keeping in touch (not literally a discovery, of course – I don’t live under a rock -, but in the sense of “I actually want to use that”) comes many years late. But while I was working on my dissertation and other projects, I found that I had a very limited capacity for new technology and not a lot of patience to adjust my medial habits. A microblog is not rocket science from a usage perspective, but when you’re already up to your throat in emails and the schedule is tight, experimentation is generally not too high up on the agenda. That, and I believe that academics in particular are prone to having their share of scruples when it comes to things like Twitter.

Let me use myself as my own test subject for a moment. The time it takes to adapt to a new tool (time that many people in research feel they sorely lack) is one factor. But what is it specifically about (many) academics that causes them to be reluctant about writing a research blog or using a social network for purposes related to work?

Why we (don’t) blog

I’m sure others have already made that point, but many (I daresay most) academics are traditionalists when it comes to new technologies, for several reasons. A central one is how success and failure are determined in academia. In business, a company has to adapt to it’s environment. It has to be well-adjusted to the needs of its stakeholders; it needs to understand the marketplace. It also makes sense to take risks to gain a competitive advantage over others, at least while the reward is worth it.

But things are different at universities and research institutes. The environment in academia – those forces that determine whether what you’re doing is fantastic or mediocre, thoroughly researched or shoddy – are not external forces, but your own peers. There is no true “outside”, which is why we have the metaphor of the ivory tower. Even funding agencies and university administrations ultimately rely on experts from the field. We are constantly evaluating each other via peer review, tenure committees and grant applications. Academic “introversion” – the focus on a specific field of research and the associated community of researchers – happens because we don’t really have to care about anything other than our success inside our discipline, since that success will determine the overall direction of our career – up or down, towards tenure or away from it. Naturally, this makes the individual scholar focus quite narrowly on what his peers are doing and a whole lot less on what the rest of the world deems important. A researcher and his field are the primary constituents in this interaction, while everything else is secondary. In conjunction with the fact that an academic career typically unfolds over a much greater timespan than careers in other areas do, a degree of herd mentality is almost inevitable.

That situation has a profound effect on how academic researchers think and it is the basis for why traditional journal publishing has not been replaced by blogging and twittering over night. Because while the “outside world” is comparatively unimportant in academia, the “inside world” is of pivotal importance. This inside world is shaped by those who have the most influence and power and in science and academia these are generally senior researchers. Your reputation in the eyes of your peers (and especially the major players in your field) is likely to be the most valuable asset to you as a young researcher.

What’s in it for me?

A colleague and friend of mine recently remarked that he didn’t see the use of blogging in an academic context. What do I gain from it in terms of my career? was the question he was asking, and I had to agree with him that there is not very much to be gained from writing about your research as long as your peers aren’t doing it. It’s new!, it’s cool! and everyone is doing it! aren’t really relevant arguments in academia, unless everyone includes those leading the field or colleagues that you want to be in touch with.

Similarly, the idea of reaching more people with your research, for example by putting up preprints of your publications on your website, is only moderately exciting to many researchers. When I urged a well-known linguistics professor to update her department profile page, because it would allow her to reach many more people via search engines – “people who are perhaps completely unfamiliar with your work”, in my words – she responded rather unexpectedly “but do I really want all of those people to be able to find me?”.

Scholarly communication inside of your own discipline and connecting with the general public are two very different issues to most researchers and the first is usually deemed indefinitely more important than the second.

Incentives for using social media in academic contexts

But that doesn’t mean that blogging, microblogging and other froms of social media won’t eventually take off with academics. In fact, I think we’ll see these practices take on a central role in scholarly communication in a matter of several years, maybe a decade. Driving this development will be a combination of cultural and technological factors:

1. The familiarity of today’s student generation with social media in non-professional contexts will make adoption of these technologies in research and academia a natural process as today’s students become tomorrow’s professors.
2. The fact that university administrators and people at funding agencies will also grow increasingly  familiar with blogging and different forms of social media will result in these forms of communication becoming more and more incentivized. Anything that is recognized as a real publication will eventually be used, but while blogging and twittering are still considered to be gray literature, the gain associated with using these forms of publishing is not sufficient.
3. The “death of paper” in academic communication will also spur this development. While the natural sciences already predominately publish digitally, the Humanities and social sciences are lagging to various degrees. Of course much is being published digitally, but very few senior Humanities scholars will object to their work appearing only in print, as long as it’s with a prestigious publisher. Once this shifts to digital resources being the primary form of scholarly communication, further-reaching changes are likely to follow.

Even though paper is on the way out physically, it will take us much longer to get rid of it conceptually. Our model of doing research is to a large extent based on the epistemic stability that paper provides by virtue of its medial characteristics. Because what is printed, bound and stored on library shelves is not mutable, it works to support our interpretation of information being something stable and tangible. What we as researchers say in a casual discussion over coffee, in a presentation at a conference and in a published and peer-reviewed paper are very different things, both in terms of form and content. A research paper addresses the faceless and very artificial audience of the academic public, with no visible speaker and very little personal dimension of expression. This is not a god-given trait – personal correspondence between scholars was the forerunner of today’s academic writing – and the rise of social media, which is all about communication between people, makes in plausible that we will see a movement back into that direction.

Change the practice and the practice changes you

The rapidness of interpersonal communication on the Internet is bound to boost the speed of scientific discourse dramatically, which now, by comparison, seems to take place in slow motion. This is not possible unless not only how we communicate about science changes, but how we do science itself. Projects like OpenWetWare hint at the kind of shift that is likely to occur in the natural sciences – towards a highly collaborative and iterative wiki-style form of investigation. In the social sciences and (especially) the Humanities the paradigm shift towards digitality may be even more fundamental, because publishing itself is such a fundamental part of being a researcher in these disciplines. New methodologies and research questions will merge with new forms of discourse about research in these areas and the changes seem likely to reconfigure profoundly what Humanities as a term will mean in the future.

Perhaps it’s ultimately the sense that incorporating social media tools is bound to reshape how we deal with information and generate knowledge that keeps many academics from doing it.  We have a hard time imagining sometimes that the genres we use in given institutional contexts (education, law, business) are the result of the technology used to create them and that these changes are not the result of a conscious effort, but a natural development that we have little control over.

Me, I’m curious to see what a world full of twittering academics, webcasts, virtual conferences and interactive research papers will be like. Contrary to what some skeptics seem to believe, I suspect it will not be the end of serious research as we know it.

The Corporate Blogging Bibliography (corporatebloggingbib.ynada.com)

Since I’m also active in the library and information sciences community, I thought a simple list would not suffice and decided to use the Zotz plugin for Zotero, which is part of MIT’s Citeline project, to build a ‘2.0-ish’ bibliography. Note that metadata is missing in a few places and DOIs/links are not included with all sources.

To make importing these works into your own collection even easier, I’ve also uploaded the whole thing in Zotero RDF, RIS (Endnote) and BibTex formats. It would have been cool to embed everything directly into the page, but I must admit that I was too lazy to figure out how precisely that works.

In case you’re looking for an excellent citation management tool – Zotero totally rocks. I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone working with academic literature.

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.

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’.

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.

WALS and eLanguage (MPI-EVA, Leipzig)

| View | Upload your own

Corpora, Blogs and Linguistic Variation (Paderborn)

| View | Upload your own

Puschmann, Cornelius, and Reimer, Peter. “DiPP and eLanguage: Two cooperative models for open access” First Monday [Online], Volume 12 Number 10 (1 October 2007)

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.

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.