I stumbled into a social network through a link on the LITA list. PRONETOS is:

a home to communities and scholars of every academic discipline: a global think-tank of the leaders in your field.

I’ve been trying to make sense of FaceBook. While I think I understand it,  I don’t get it. I haven’t found anything that would draw me to spend much time there.

Pronetos, on the other hand, is an interesting place, with disciplinary focused conversations. It’s worth a second look, and perhaps a third….

Bill Badke’s article in Online provides a helpful analysis of Wikipedia’s acceptance (or lack thereof) in academia…

But notice how very analog that is, just as much of academia remains analog and simply has not bought into the amazing power of the digital Information Age. For most academics, peer review and print publication are a mainstay. True, academia has made concessions to digital reference sources, electronic full text, and open access. But all of this is simply an electronic format for an analog world in which most of what is available as electronic full text has a counterpart print version. Even those peer-reviewed, open access, online-only journals are produced by the same principles as print production—submission to an editor, peer review, and publication in tidy volumes and issue numbers.

….

But isn’t that just the point? Wikipedia users appear to be abandoning a world of certainty for an intangible universe made up of half-blown ideas and blatant errors. The problem is, they have not abandoned anything. They have never been part of the analog generation. Wikipedia is their world, and it has met their needs wonderfully. To tell them to use only the print encyclopedias for reference information is to make them ask, “Why should I when Wikipedia is at my fingertips?” They don’t know the analog world very well, and what they see is a law of diminishing returns—too much effort for too little benefit.

I would add that it seems to be more than simply a difference between analog and digital culture. It seems to me that Wikipedia assumes a different epistimological model than does a print encyclopedia (and most of academia). Wikipedia assumes that knowledge can be gathered, developed, organized and made accessible through collaborative social networks that are not based on sources authorized by the traditional structures of expertise of academe.

Open Access Research

From the announcement:

We have recently started Open Access Research (OAR) http://ojs.gsu.edu/oar a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that will enable greater interaction and facilitate a deeper conversation about open access, including topics such as:

* open access journals
* institutional support for open access
* open access publishing services and software
* open access repositories (both institutional and subject-based)
* electronic theses and dissertations
* the impact of open access on scholarly research and communications.

If you are engaged in research relating to open access, or if you have an article in mind, please contact us. OAR’s first issue will be in August, 2007 and will subsequently be published three times a year. Submissions received by March 31, 2007 will be considered for the August issue; subsequent submissions will be considered for future issues.

Send inquiries to:

William Walsh
Head – Acquisitions
Georgia State University Library
100 Decatur St. SE
Atlanta, GA 30303
wwalsh@gsu.edu

The print on demand model services are becoming more main stream and naturally are becoming central to the business model for a number of publishers. This is particularly true for those publishers who are willing to print what are likely to have small target audiences. One of the issues this raises is marketing. One of the ways libraries obtain books is through major book vendors who obtain a stock of the books and make them available through approval plans, etc. If a publisher publishes only through POD, a new form of marketing will be required…

Technology Rewrites the Book – New York Times
The print-on-demand business is gradually moving toward the center of the marketplace. What began as a way for publishers to reduce their inventory and stop wasting paper is becoming a tool for anyone who needs a bound document. Short-run presses can turn out books economically in small quantities or singly, and new software simplifies the process of designing a book.

I’ve been following a project at the Institute for the Future of the Book (IF:Book), hosted by the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC. Kathleen Fitzpatrick has been guiding a project designed to address a number of problems in scholarly communication.

Working with a group of humanities scholars, IF:Book began identifying obvious problems: failing university presses, junior faculty having difficulties finding publishers, long delays between research/writing and publication, peer-review functioning as a gatekeeper rather than facilitating collaboration, and costliness of books/journals. Ultimately they began to feel that the current model for academic publishing does not promote the kind of scholarly communication and collaboration they desire. To quote from her recent announcement:

Our shift from thinking about an “electronic press” to thinking about a “scholarly network” came about gradually; the more we thought about the purposes behind electronic scholarly publishing, the more we became focused on the need not simply to provide better access to discrete scholarly texts but rather to reinvigorate intellectual discourse, and thus connections, amongst peers (and, not incidentally, discourse between the academy and the wider intellectual public). This need has grown for any number of systemic reasons, including the substantive and often debilitating time-lags between the completion of a piece of scholarly writing and its publication, as well as the subsequent delays between publication of the primary text and publication of any reviews or responses to that text. These time-lags have been worsened by the increasing economic difficulties threatening many university presses and libraries, which each year face new administrative and financial obstacles to producing, distributing, and making available the full range of publishable texts and ideas in development in any given field. The combination of such structural problems in academic publishing has resulted in an increasing disconnection among scholars, whose work requires a give-and-take with peers, and yet is produced in greater and greater isolation.

Yesterday, Fitzpatrick announced the beginning of what the IF:Book is calling the Media Commons. This initial effort to establish a “scholarly network” will focus on the field of media studies. I thought you might be interested not so much in the field, but in the efforts by others in the humanities to develop new models for scholarly communication designed foremost to serve scholarly dialogue. In the the announcement, Fitzpatrick describes a broad variety of scholarly writing sustained by and facilitating a network of scholarly engagement. You can read the full announcement at the link below:

http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/07/introducing_mediacommons_or_ti.html

Rice University Press is being revived in an attempt to break the problematic cycle of scholarly publishing…

Inside Higher Ed :: New Model for Scholarly Publishing
Rice University on Thursday announced a plan to shake up those interconnected problems. Rice University Press, which was killed in 1996, will be revived. But unlike every other university press, it will publish all of its books online only. People will be able to read the books for no charge and to download them for a modest fee. Editors will solicit manuscripts and peer review panels will vet submissions — all in ways that are similar to the systems in traditional publishing.

Chris Anderson has a really nice discussion of two models of “peer-review” on Nature.Com where Nature is hosting a debate on the topic.

Technical solutions: Wisdom of the crowds
In the scarce world of limited pages in top journals, prestige is earned through those journals’ high standard and exclusivity. That comes, in part, from the process, which involves impressing the very discriminating combination of an editor and a few respected researchers. Defining ‘peer’ relatively narrowly is part of the game. It’s not always fair or efficient, but in a world ruled by reputation, having successfully run that gauntlet is proof of at least some kind of fitness.

But in the abundance market of online journals or that of post-publication filtering, where each paper is competing with all the other papers in its field, it’s more sensible to define ‘peer’ as broadly as possible, to maximize the power of collective intelligence. In that market, prestige is just one factor in many determining relevance for a reader, and the more filtering aids that can be brought to bear, the better. From that perspective, these are exciting times. The experiments of Nature, PLoS journals and others will reveal where and how these techniques work best. But Wikipedia and Digg have already demonstrated that they do work.

I’ve been looking at emerging publishing options. Future of the Book has several I’ll mention in a future post, but I thought I would point out that Yochai Benkler whose book: The Wealth of Networks : How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom has just recently been published has also made the book available via PDF download and in a Wiki. Here is his description for what he hopes will happen in the Wiki:

The basic idea is to make this Wiki a place where people who read the book can do at least four things. First, collaborate on writing a summary of the ideas and claims of the book, as an initial point of entry. Second, provide an easy platform through which to access underlying research materials: both those used in the book’s notes, and more importantly, resources that are useful for further research, refinement, and updating. Third, the Wiki should be a place where participants can describe, link to, and analyze examples of the phenomena the book describes. The purpose is not to “make the case” for the book or find “gotcha” counter examples. What we are trying to do is provide a real research tool, annotated bibliography, and platform for collaborative learning. Examples and counter-examples should be selected and described with that purpose in mind. Fourth, the Wiki is itself a learning platform about what is valuable in a learning platform. Through separate pages devoted to ideas and experiments of what can be done with an online book to make it a learning platform, we hope to expand the range of uses to which this Wiki can be available.

One has to register to see the changes, comments, etc. from other users which are substantial. It is an interesting model for scholarly discourse that includes but moves beyond traditional scholarly publishing.

I’ve mentioned before Katleen Fitzpatrick’s collaboration with the Future of the Book to create an electronic scholarly press. Her May 3 summary of a meeting that took place is remarkable several reasons. The fact that a group of scholars was willing to seriously discuss and support the concept is remarkable. The group developed a set of principles that suggest their new publishing environment will:

• promote intellectual discourse in all its forms;
• design its process to improve the quality of that discourse;
• encourage openness in its process and its products, while offering a range of options to authors;
• share the tools that underlie its process;
• provide for the preservation of its products;
  support collaboration and experimentation;
• make visible the social networks that underlie intellectual discourse; and
• leverage the information that results from the impact and use of material published by the press.

Fitzpatrick goes on to say:

The first two of these principles are of the utmost importance: if the purpose of scholarly publishing is to further the dissemination of ideas, which in turn produces new advances in scholarship, then a process that takes advantage of the technologies that networked systems make possible can only be an improvement. The average scholarly book takes over a year to move from manuscript to published book, and that’s after the lengthy delays produced by the current peer-review system. Adding to this the fact that getting reviews of such books published can take several years more, it begins to become clear that intellectual discourse is not being served, not even remotely, by print. It is little wonder that so many scholars have begun blogging; it’s currently one of the few ways to have conversations about ideas in anything like a timely fashion.

What’s clear from her statements is that the group is drawing a distinction between scholarly publishing and scholarly discourse. She is not willing to allow the ineffectiveness of the first to interfere with the second.

A similar dissatisfaction prompted the development of digital repositories to reduce cost and time for dissemination of findings in scientific research. From that has developed the Open Archives Initiative and protocols for harvesting metadata. It will be interesting to see how the efforts of Fitzpatrick and her colleagues shape the future of publishing.

Speaking about the future of scholarly publishing, Kate Wittenberg echoes what I’ve been saying for awhile:

The Chronicle: 6/16/2006: Beyond Google: What Next for Publishing?
Most students today arrive at college assuming that a Google search is the first choice for doing research, that MySpace is the model for creating online content and building peer communities, and — perhaps most important — that multitasking with various electronic devices, often from remote locations, is the traditional way to do class work. The implications of those changes must transform our publishing strategies.

If “digital natives” are the next audience for our scholarly resources, shouldn’t we be thinking about new ways to organize, store, and deliver our content? In fact, is content even what we should be focusing on for this next generation of users, or are the tools, functionality, and access built on top of the content what are of real value?

Hers is one of a growing number of voices suggesting the need for radical change in scholarly publishing. I really like her phrase: “Beyond Google.” It’s hard now to envision life beyond Google, but it may be better to think not about the demise of the company, but what happens as Google becomes a commodity. What will be the emerging trends, expectations, etc. that will shape the information discovery and seeking patterns of our users.

Frederick Nesta has a brief article entitled: “Google Your Library’s Mission,” in Library Journal‘s June issue that suggests a few ways the Google corporate philosophy might help libraries plan for their future. Nesta pushes us to think beyond traditional collections and services. Perhaps what lies beyond Google is a different way of being libraries…