Texts and Literacy in the Digital Age:Assessing the future of scholarly communication

Tony HirstDepartment of Communication and

SystemsThe Open University

Scholarly communication

“In the established scholarly communication system, the concept

of a journal publication dominates our definition of a unit of communication”

D-Lib Magazine, September 2004Volume 10 Number 9, ISSN 1082-9873

Rethinking Scholarly Communication: Building the System that Scholars DeserveH Van de Sompel, S Payette, J Erickson, C Lagoze, S Warner

http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/aw/d-lib/dlib/september04/vandesompel/09vandesompel.html

Author “Editing”

Peer Review

Page layout Publication

Deposit

Publish to whom?

• Peers• Other disciplines• Research students (training)• Undergraduate students (teaching)• Industry (knowledge/technology transfer)• News media (expert commentary)• Public (public engagement)

Publish what?

• Text• Diagrams• Data• Analyses on, or views over, datasets (queries)• -> protocols

Peer Review

• Quality control• Replicability• Validity• Clarity• (Discovery/extension – recommend additional

references)• Conformity with formal publishing norms

Publish for what purpose?

• Reviewing the field• Making the next step in an argument• Documenting a process• Collecting and/or analysing evidence/data• Correcting an error elsewhere• [ANCHORING KNOWLEDGE]• (Making a claim, building reputation)

• Influence policy

Summaries as an aid to discovery

Discoverability“Einstein Google Logo At Google…” by dannysullivan

2 The structure of communication networks

The atoms of publication

1 The structure of communication networks

Under a network view, the silos become self-evident

Echo chambers

Visualization of the Citation Impact Environments of Scientific Journals, Loet Leydesdorff

“Scientific journals tend to cite one another in dense clusters which

represent specialties.” [ Leydesdorff ]

Co-author networks

“Hashtag communities”

Personal Twitter Networks

Scholarly communication as

HISTORICAL RECORD

or

ACTIVE COMMUNITY PROCESS

“Reach”

“Influence”

“Reputation”

Participatory Activity

(Communication through participation)

2 The atoms of publication

“In the established scholarly communication system, the concept

of a journal publication dominates our definition of a unit of communication”

D-Lib Magazine, September 2004Volume 10 Number 9, ISSN 1082-9873

Rethinking Scholarly Communication: Building the System that Scholars DeserveH Van de Sompel, S Payette, J Erickson, C Lagoze, S Warner

http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/aw/d-lib/dlib/september04/vandesompel/09vandesompel.html

Anchored inTIMEand

GRANULARITY

Open Notebooks

http://cameronneylon.net/blog/a-little-bit-of-federated-open-notebook-

science/

[ http://bit.ly/ifp3kq ]

“A week or so ago, Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) left a comment on a blog post which sparked a

conversation about feeds and their use for generating useful information. I pointed Tony at the feeds from my lab notebook but didn’t take it any further than that. Following this he posted a series of graph visualisations of the

connections between people tweeting at a set of conferences and then the penny dropped for

me…sparking this conversation on twitter…”

“Over a couple of days we used Twitter for communication, DropBox, GitHub, Gists, and Flickr for sharing data and code, and the whole process was carried out publicly”

“So another win for open approaches. Again, something small, something relatively simple, but something that came together because people were easily connected in a public space and were routinely sharing research outputs, something that by default spread into the way we conducted the project. It never occurred to me at the time, I was just reaching for the easiest tool at each stage, but at every stage every aspect of this was carried out in the open. It was just the easiest and most effective way to do it.”

Documentas a

DATAbase

Co-author networks

Living Documents

( Dexy.it )

Wouldn't it be superb instead if, when faced with a long-tail query like "obama foreign policy cuba venezuela", we could answer not with a list, but with a relevant composite article that pulled together the key points from all those articles into one overview document - dynamically.the key points from all those articles into one overview document - dynamically.

Version Control

Issue Tracking

(Issue tracking can bea social activity)

Author “Editing”

Peer Review

Page layout Publication

Deposit

2 The structure of communication networks

The atoms of publication

Tony Hirst

@psychemedia

blog.ouseful.info