Digital Scholarship

Martin Weller

Book on Digital Scholarship

Blogging as microcosm of digital scholarship

Blogging is…

Social

Blogging is…

Democratic

Blog posts can be..

Tech

Politics

Footie

Professional

Informal

To no-one To 1000s

Some questions

• Do they represent 'proper scholarship' (whatever that is)• Are they central or peripheral to practice?• Are they applicable to all domains?• Are they more useful for some scholarly functions than

otters eg teaching?• How do we recognize quality?• Do they complement or replace existing channels?• Should we reward them through official routes such as

tenure?• Should bloggers use institutional systems or separate

out their blogging and formal identities?

Digital scholarship is a shorthand for…

Digital gives common format

Network gives frictionless distribution

Social network gives new means of connecting

Openness is a way of working that facilitates connections

The Boyer view of scholarship

• Discovery

• Integration

• Application

• Teaching

<http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/digschol1 >

Give me your views

Tenure and reward

3 legged stool

How do we recognise dig schol?

enthusiasm for the development and adoption of technology should not be conflated with the hard reality of tenure and promotion requirements in highly competitive and complex professional environments. Experiments in new genres of scholarship and dissemination are occurring in every field, but they are taking place within the context of relatively conservative value and reward systems that have the practice of peer review at their core.”

Harley et al 2010

Cheverie et al (2009): “While this community talks about ‘publication’, the language used implies that digital scholarship is of significantly lesser value, and word of mouth to younger colleagues discourages digital scholarship in the hiring, tenure and promotion process

Senior people don’t get it

Outsourced evaluation

Waters (2000): “ to a considerable degree people in departments stopped assessing for themselves the value of a candidate as a scholar and started waiting for the presses to decide”.

Recognising digital scholarship

• Recreating the existing model

• Finding digital equivalents

• Generating guidelines that include digital scholarship

• Using metrics

• Peer-assessment

• Micro-credit

• Developing alternative methods

Heppell (2001) “we continually make the error of subjugating technology to our present practice rather than allowing it to free us from the tyranny of past mistakes.”

How might we recognise digital scholarship?

Publishing

Research

Authoring

Submission/Review

Rejection/Modification

Publication

Distribution

Parties

Funder

Author

Publisher

Libraries

Reader

£

£

£

Business

• $23 billion STM publishing

• Reed-elsevier $1.5B profit 2009

• UK 2007, writing = £1.6B, peer-review = £200M editing = £70M

• Library costs for journals increased 302% from 1986-2005

The squeeze

• Funders mandate

• Libraries withdrawing from Big Deal

• Open Access

Open Access

• Green/Gold routes

• Rights

• Citation

• Openness allows new connections

• Commercial publishers = $3400 per article. Non-profit organisations, = $730 (Clarke 2007)

New models

• Zero cost journals

• Added value

• Levels of peer review (PLoS)

Why don’t you publish open access?

Network weather

Imagine…

• Teaching

• Conference

• Authoring

How might network weather impact your discipline?

Conferences

• Amplified

• Online

• Backchannel

The new conference archive

To make a conference viable you need people to attend and pay fees

To attend people need to get funds from their university or project

To justify this they need to give a presentation

A presentation needs to be peer-reviewed so they can include it on their CV

People only attend conferences that offer this

Alternative formats

• Barcamp

• Pre-presentation

• Voting

• Produce something

Would you attend a non-traditional conference?

What does it all mean?

A failure of ownership

Technology engagement is key

Potential to radically change practice

Digital scholarship gives alternatives where there were none previously

“it was a revolution. And we all know what

happens in a revolution. You see what goes, you see what stays, you see

what comes.

Martin Amis

“We should determine what

goes, what stays, and what comes.

These are exciting times!