Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to give a presentation on new forms of scholarly publishing, Open Access and Open Research at a virtual meeting organized by Catalina Danis of IBM’s Social Computing Group. It was great, although preciously little time for discussion remained, due to a slightly overambitious (i.e. too voluminous) presentation on my part. Thankfully, the session next week will be used for discussion and I am very much looking forward to that. Once more, a big thanks to Catalina for inviting me and to everyone who attended.
Edit: if this looks strange, please reload the page. For reasons I cannot fathom slideshare’s embeds manage to blow up the page unless I manually adjust the source code…
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.
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.
It’s no longer cool - or even ok - to publish a web site in PDF to browsers and some other data via a WS-* type web service to others. Instead, once you forget about browsers being the only user agents, quite a bit of the web 2.0 developments seem very natural.
So the participative aspect of web 2.0 starts well before everyone creating content; it starts with not making restrictive assumptions about who and how people - or programs - will use your site. Let the web participate in reusing your content.
With much of the 2.0 hype coming from a non-technical direction theses days, it is easy to overlook that access is what greases the wheels of the social web. Web 1.0 basically treated every user the same and forgot who you were or what you had just done a moment ago each time you clicked on a link. Data and design were essentially inseparable and websites were conceptualized as real estate on the Net - the more you had, the better (this was the age in which Yahoo still wanted to be a portal). We now get that websites are not like real estate and that our content is not synonymous with our website. People will want to use your content in ways you haven’t anticipated and it hardly matters whether they use it “here” (on your site) or “there” (on a portable device, their own site etc). As Robert points out, Web 2.0 is about making up for technical mistakes that were made in the past and about losing the spatial metaphor that makes us see the Web as consisting of sites and pages.
It’s fascinating how blogs allow you to overhear conversations between people with similar interests, regardless of where they are and whether or not you know them. And then there’s the magic of following links, going from one blog to the next until you’ve forgotten how you even got to a certain place.
What I keep hearing is, how can we impact factorize open science. Well, the answer is, you can’t. Let’s stop trying to find some magic algorithm whereby a machine tells us what quality science is. What’s completely mad to me about this is that we already have processes to assess science quality. Every time you review a new student, every time you look at a grant proposal, heck, even on the infamous tenure committees and research assessments, a group of humans looks at a portfolio of existing or proposed work, and decides whether it is good enough.
I guess because the ways we find and retrieve information have changed drastically, we also expect quality assessment to become automated at some point. One could argue that it already has in other contexts with things like PageRank, though of course that’s popularity being ranked, not quality (the two seem to converge to some extent when it comes to web search).
Regarding terminology (”Open Science”, “Open Research” etc): like Bill, I could care less. Linguistically the Science-Humanities-Social Sciences split doesn’t map to languages other than English anyway. In German we say Wissenschaft (which is all of the above) and add a prefix (Naturwissenschaft for (Natural) Sciences, Geisteswissenschaft for Humanities and so forth). The other thing is where to situate many new disciplines in regards to these traditional categories. If, like me, you do natural language processing, social network analysis and genre studies more or less at once, does that belong to Science, SocSci or Humanities? I don’t know and frankly I don’t care. Human language is just one phenomenon that can be studied with a variety of methods and I won’t wait for disciplinary delineations to catch up. We should call it Open Science and just broaden the semantic range of the word science a bit. Words do, on occasion, change their meanings.
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