Cornelius Puschmann's Blog

I read about this new book series titled Scholarly Communication: Past, present and future of knowledge inscription this morning on the Humanist mailing list. Since scholarly communication is one my main research interests, I’m thrilled to hear that there will be a series devoted to publications focusing on the topic, edited and reviewed by a long list of renown scholars in the field.

On the other hand it’s debatable (see reactions by Michael Netwich and Toma Tasovac) whether a book series on the future of scholarly communication is not a tad anachronistic, assuming it is published exclusively in print (seems to be the case from the look of the announcement on the website). New approaches, such as the crowdsourcing angles of Hacking the Academy or Digital Humanities Now, seem more in sync with Internet-age publishing to me, but sadly such efforts usually don’t involve commercial publishers**. My recent struggles with Oxford University Press over a subscription to Literary and Linguistic Computing (the only way of joining the ALLC) has added once more to my skepticism towards commercial publishers. And not because their goal is to make money — there’s nothing wrong with that inherently — but because they largely refuse to innovate when it comes to their products and business models. Mailing a paper journal to someone who has no use for it is a waste of resources and a sign that you are out of touch with your customers needs… at least if your customer is this guy.

Do scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences* still need printed publications and (consequently) publishers?

Do we need publishers if we decide to go all-out digital?

Do we need Open Access?

I have different stances in relation to these questions depending on the hat I’m wearing. Individually I think print publishing is stone dead, but I also notice that by and large my colleagues still rely on printed books and journals much more heavily than digital sources. Regarding the role of publishers and Open Access the situation is equally complex: we need publishers if our culture of communication doesn’t change, because reproducing digitally what we used to create in print is challenging (see this post for some deliberations). If we decide that blog posts can replace journal articles because speed and efficiency ultimately win over perfectionism, since we are no longer producing static objects but a constantly evolving discourse — in that case the future of commercial publishers looks uncertain. Digital toll-access publishing seems to have little traction in our field so far, something that is likely to change with the proliferation of ebooks we are likely to see in the next few years.

Anyhow — what’s your take?

Should we get rid of paper?

Should we get rid of traditional formats and post everything in blogs instead?

Is Cameron Neylon right when he says that the future of research communication is aggregation?

Let me know what you think — perhaps the debate can be a first contribution to Scholarly Communication: Past, present and future.

(*) I believe the situation is fundamentally different in STM, where paper is a thing of the past but publishers are certainly not.

(**) An exception of sorts could to be Liquid Pub, but that project seems focused on STM rather than Hum./Soc.Sci.

Note: this introduction, co-authored with Dieter Stein, is part of the volume Selected Papers from the Berlin 6 Open Access Conference, which will appear via Düsseldorf University Press as an electronic open access publication in the coming weeks. It is also a response to this blog post by Dan Cohen.

Timely or Timeless? The Scholar’s Dilemma. Thoughts on Open Access and the Social Contract of Publishing

Some things don’t change.

We live in a world seemingly over-saturated with information, yet getting it out there in both an appropriate form and a timely fashion is still challenging. Publishing, although the meaning of the word is undergoing significant change in the time of iPads and Kindles, is still a very complex business. In spite of a much faster, cheaper and simpler distribution process, producing scholarly information that is worth publishing is still hard work and so time-consuming that the pace of traditional academic communication sometimes seems painfully slow in comparison to the blogosphere, Wikipedia and the ever-growing buzz of social networking sites and microblogging services. How idiosyncratic does it seem in the age of cloud computing and the real-time web that this electronic volume is published one and a half years after the event its title points to? Timely is something else, you might say.

Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, discusses the question of why academics are so obsessed with formal details and consequently so slow to communicate in a blog post titled “The Social Contract of Scholarly Publishing“. In it, Dan retells the experience of working on a book together with colleague Roy Rosenzweig:

“So, what now?” I said to Roy naively. “Couldn’t we just publish what we have on the web with the click of a button? What value does the gap between this stack and the finished product have? Isn’t it 95% done? What’s the last five percent for?”

We stared at the stack some more.

Roy finally broke the silence, explaining the magic of the last stage of scholarly production between the final draft and the published book: “What happens now is the creation of the social contract between the authors and the readers. We agree to spend considerable time ridding the manuscript of minor errors, and the press spends additional time on other corrections and layout, and readers respond to these signals — a lack of typos, nicely formatted footnotes, a bibliography, specialized fonts, and a high-quality physical presentation — by agreeing to give the book a serious read.”

A social contract between author and reader. Nothing more, nothing less.

It may seem either sympathetic or quaint how Roy Rosenzweig elevates the product of scholarship from a mere piece of more or less monitizable content to something of cultural significance, but he also aptly describes what many academics, especially in the humanities, think of as the essence of their work: creating something timeless. That is, in short, why the humanities are still in love with books, why they retain a pace of publishing that is entirely snail-like, both to other academic fields and to the rest of the world. Of course humanities scholars know as well as anyone that nothing is truly timeless and understand that trends and movements shape scholarship just like they shape fashion and music. But there is still a commitment to spend time to deliver something to the reader that is a polished and perfected as one can manage. Something that is not rushed, but refined. Why? Because the reader expects authority from a scholarly work and authority is derived from getting it right to the best of one’s ability.

This is not just a long-winded apology to the readers and contributors to this volume, although an apology for the considerable delay is surely in order, especially taking into account the considerable commitment and patience of our authors (thank you!). Our point is something equally important, something that connects to Roy Rosenzweig’s interpretation of scholarly publishing as a social contract. This publication contains eight papers produced to expand some of the talks held at the Berlin 6 Open Access Conference that took place in November 2008 in Düsseldorf, Germany. While Open Access has successfully moved forward in the past eighteen months and much has been achieved, none of the needs, views and fundamental aspects addressed in this volume — policy frameworks to enable it (Forster, Furlong), economic and organizational structures to make it viable and sustainable (Houghton; Gentil-Beccot, Mele, and Vigen), concrete platforms in different regions (Packer et al) and disciplines (Fritze, Dallmeier-Tiessen and Pfeiffenberger) to serve as models, and finally technical standards to support it (Zier) — none of these things have lost any of their relevance.

Open Access is a timely issue and therefore the discussion about it must be timely as well, but “discussion” in a highly interactive sense is hardly ever what a published volume provides anyway – that is something the blogosphere is already better at. That doesn’t mean that what scholars produce, be it in physics, computer science, law or history should be hallowed tomes that appear years after the controversies around the issues they cover have all but died down, to exist purely as historical documents. If that happens, scholarship itself has become a museal artifact that is obsolete, because a total lack of urgency will rightly suggest to people outside of universities that a field lacks relevance. If we don’t care when it’s published, how important can it be?

But can’t our publications be both timely and timeless at once? In other words, can we preserve the values cited by Roy Rosenzweig, not out of some antiquated fetish for scholarly works as perfect documents, but simply because thoroughly discussed, well-edited and proofed papers and books (and, for that matter, blog posts) are nicer to read and easier to understand than hastily produced ones? Readers don’t like it when their time is wasted; this is as true as ever in the age of information overload. Scientists are expected to get it right, to provide reliable insight and analysis. Better to be slow than to be wrong. In an attention economy, perfectionism pays a dividend of trust.

How does this relate to Open Access? If we look beyond the laws and policy initiatives and platforms for a moment, it seems exceedingly clear that access is ultimately a solvable issue and that we are fast approaching the point where it will be solved. This shift is unlikely to happen next month or next year, but if it hasn’t taken place a decade from now our potential to do innovative research will be seriously impaired and virtually all stakeholders know this. There is growing political pressure and commercial publishers are increasingly experimenting with products that generate revenue without limiting access. Historically, universities, libraries and publishers came into existence to solve the problem of access to knowledge (intellectual and physical access). This problem is arguably in the process of disappearing, and therefore it is of pivotal importance that all those involved in spreading knowledge work together to develop innovative approaches to digital scholarship, instead of clinging to eroding business models. As hard as it is for us to imagine, society may just find that both intellectual and physical access to knowledge are possible without us and that we’re a solution in search of a problem. The remaining barriers to access will gradually be washed away because of the pressure exerted not by lawmakers, librarians and (some) scholars who care about Open Access, but mainly by a general public that increasingly demands access to the research it finances. Openness is not just a technicality. It is a powerful meme that permeates all of contemporary society.

The ability for information to be openly available creates a pressure for it to be. Timeliness and timelessness are two sides of the same coin. In the competitive future of scholarly communication, those who get everything (mostly) right will succeed. Speedy and open publication of relevant, high quality content that is well adjusted to the medium and not just the reproduction of a paper artifact will trump those publications that do not meet all the requirements. The form and pace possible will be undercut by what is considered normal in individual academic disciplines and the conventions of one field will differ from those of another. Publishing less or at a slower pace is unlikely to be perceived as a fault in the long term, with all of us having long gone past the point of informational over-saturation. The ability to effectively make oneself heard (or read), paired with having something meaningful to say, will (hopefully) be of increasing importance, rather than just a high volume of output.

Much of the remaining resistance to Open Access is simply due to ignorance, and to murky premonitions of a new dark age caused by a loss of print culture. Ultimately, there will be a redefinition of the relativities between digital and print publication. There will be a place for both: the advent of mass literacy did not lead to the disappearance of the spoken word, so the advent of the digital age is unlikely to lead to the disappearance of print culture. Transitory compromises such as delayed Open Access publishing are paving the way to fully-digital scholarship. Different approaches will be developed, and those who adapt quickly to a new pace and new tools will benefit, while those who do not will ultimately fall behind.

The ideological dimension of Open Access – whether knowledge should be free – seems strangely out of step with these developments. It is not unreasonable to assume that in the future, if it’s not accessible, it won’t be considered relevant. The logic of informational scarcity has ceased to make sense and we are still catching up with this fundamental shift.

Openness alone will not be enough. The traditional virtues of a publication – the extra 5% – are likely to remain unchanged in their importance while there is such a things as institutional scholarship. We thank the authors of this volume for investing the extra 5% for entering a social contract with their readers and another, considerable higher percentage for their immense patience with us. The result may not be entirely timely and, as has been outlined, nothing is ever truly timeless, but we strongly believe that its relevance is undiminished by the time that has passed.

Open Access, whether 2008 or 2010, remains a challenge – not just to lawmakers, librarians and technologists, but to us, to scholars. Some may rise to the challenge while others remain defiant, but ignorance seems exceedingly difficult to maintain. Now is a bad time to bury one’s head in the sand.

Düsseldorf,

Mai 2010

Cornelius Puschmann and Dieter Stein

Edit: this post on (legal aspects of) data sharing by Creative Commons’ Kaitlin Thaney is also highly recommended.

Edit #2: This is another cross post with cyberling.org.

If you’re involved in academic publishing — whether as a researcher, librarian or publisher — data sharing and data publishing are probably hot issues to you. Beyond its versatility as a platform for the dissemination of articles and ebooks, the Internet is increasingly also a place where research data lives. Scholars are no longer restricted to referring to data in their publications or including charts and graphs alongside the text, but can link directly to data published and stored elsewhere, or even embed data into their papers, a process facilitated by standards such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF).

Journals such as Earth System Science Data and the International Journal of Robotics Research give us a glimpse at how this approach might evolve in the future — from journals to data journals, publications which are concerned with presenting valuable data for reuse and pave the way for a research process that is increasingly collaborative. Technology is gradually catching up with the need for genuinely digital publications, a need fueled by the advantages of able to combine text, images, links, videos and a wide variety of datasets to produce a next-generation multi-modal scholarly article. Systems such as Fedora and PubMan are meant to facilitate digital publishing and assure best-practice data provenance and storage. They are able to handle different types of data and associate any number of individual files with a “data paper” that documents them.

However, technology is the much smaller issue when weighing the advantages of data publishing with its challenges — of which there are many, both to practitioners and to those supporting them. Best practices on the individual level are cultural norms that need to be established over time. Scientists still don’t have sufficient incentives to openly share their data, as tenure processes are tied to publishing results based on data, but not on sharing data directly. And finally, technology is prone to failure when there are no agreed-upon standards guiding its use and such standards need to be gradually (meaning painfully slowly, compared with technology’s breakneck pace) established  accepted by scholars, not decreed by committee.

In March, Jonathan Rees of NeuroCommons (a project within Creative Commons/Science Commons) published a working paper that outlines such standards for reusable scholarly data. One thing I really appreciate about Rees’ approach is that it is remarkably discipline-independent and not limited to the sciences (vs. social science and the humanities).

Rees outlines how data papers differ from traditional papers:

A data paper is a publication whose primary purpose is to expose and describe data, as opposed to analyze and draw conclusions from it. The data paper enables a division of labor in which those possessing the resources and skills can perform the experiments and observations needed to collect potentially interesting data sets, so that many parties, each with a unique background and ability to analyze the data, may make use of it as they see fit.

The key phrase here (which is why I couldn’t resist boldfacing it) is division of labor. Right now, to use an auto manufacturing analogy, a scholar does not just design a beautiful car (an analysis in the form of a research paper that culminates in observations or theoretical insights), he also has to build an engine (the data that his observations are based on). It doesn’t matter if she is a much better engineer than designer, the car will only run (she’ll only get tenure) if both the engine and the car meet the same requirements. The car analogy isn’t terribly fitting, but it serves to make the point that our current system lacks a division of labor, making it pretty inefficient. It’s based more on the idea of producing smart people than on the idea of getting smart people to produce reusable research.

Rees notes that data publishing is a complicated process and lists a set of rules for successful sharing of scientific data.

From the paper:

1. The author must be professionally motivated to publish the data
2. The effort and economic burden of publication must be acceptable
3. The data must become accessible to potential users
4. The data must remain accessible over time
5. The data must be discoverable by potential users
6. The user’s use of the data must be permitted
7. The user must be able to understand what was measured and how (materials and methods)
8. The user must be able to understand all computations that were applied and their inputs
9. The user must be able to apply standard tools to all file formats

At a glance, these rules signify very different things. #1 and #2 are preconditions, rather than prescriptions while #3 – #6 are concerned with what the author needs to do in order to make the data available. Finally, rules #7 – #10 are corned with making the data as useful to others as possible. Rules #7 -#10 are dependent on who “the user” is and qualify as “do-this-as-best-as-you-can”-style suggestions, rather than strict requirements, not because they aren’t important, but because it’s impossible for the author to guarantee their successful implementation. By contrast, #3 -#6 are concerned with providing and preserving access and are requirements — I can’t guarantee that you’ll understand (or agree with) my electronic dictionary on Halh Mongolian, but I can make sure it’s stored in an institutional or disciplinary repository that is indexed in search engines, mirrored to assure the data can’t be lost and licensed in a legally unambiguous way, rather that upload it to my personal website and hope for the best when it comes to long-term availability, ease of discovery and legal re-use.

Finally, Rees gives some good advice beyond tech issues to publishers who want to implement data publishing:

Set a standard. There won’t be investment in data set reusability unless granting agencies and tenure review boards see it as a legitimate activity. A journal that shows itself credible in the role of enabling reuse will be rewarded with submissions and citations, and will in turn reward authors by helping them obtain recognition for their service to the research community.

This is critical. Don’t wait for universities, grant agencies or even scholars to agree on standards entirely on their own — they can’t and won’t if they don’t know how digital publishing works (legal aspects included). Start an innovative journal and set a standard yourself by being successful.

Encourage use of standard file formats, schemas, and ontologies. It is impossible to know what file formats will be around in ten years, much less a hundred, and this problem worries digital archivists. Open standards such as XML, RDF/XML, and PNG should be encouraged. Plain text is generally transparent but risky due to character encoding ambiguity. File formats that are obviously new or exotic, that lack readily available documentation, or that do not have non-proprietary parsers should not be accepted. Ontologies and schemas should enjoy community acceptance.

An important suggestion that is entirely compatible with linguistic data (dictionaries, word lists, corpora, transcripts, etc) and simplified by the fact that we have comparably small datasets. Even a megaword corpus is small compared to climate data or gene banks.

Aggressively implement a clean separation of concerns. To encourage submissions and reduce the burden on authors and publishers, avoid the imposition of criteria not related to data reuse. These include importance (this will not be known until after others work with the data) and statistical strength (new methods and/or meta-analysis may provide it). The primary peer review criterion should be adequacy of experimental and computational methods description in the service of reuse.

This will be a tough nut to crack, because it sheds tradition to a degree. Relevance was always high on the list of requirements while publications were scarce — paper costs money, therefor what was published had to important to as many people as possible. With data publishing this is no longer true — whether something is important or statistically strong (applying this to linguistics one might say representative, well-documented, etc) is impossible to know from the onset. It’s much more sensible to get it out there and deal with the analysis later, rather than creating an artificial scarcity of data. But it will take time and cultural change to get researchers (and funding both funding agencies and hiring committees) to adapt to this approach.

In the meantime, while we’re still publishing traditional (non-data) papers, we can at least work on making them more accessible. Something like arXiv for linguistics wouldn’t hurt.

At it’s recent annual meeting in Baltimore, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) passed a resolution on data sharing that is the result of a series of discussions that took place last year, for example at the meeting of the Cyberlinguistics group in Berkeley last June.

Here’s the text (snip):

Whereas modern computing technology has the potential of advancing linguistic science by enabling linguists to work with datasets at a scale previously unimaginable; and

Whereas this will only be possible if such data are made available and standards ensuring interoperability are followed; and

Whereas data collected, curated, and annotated by linguists forms the empirical base of our field; and

Whereas working with linguistic data requires computational tools supporting analysis and collaboration in the field, including standards, analysis tools, and portals that bring together linguistic data and tools to analyze them,

Therefore, be it resolved at the annual business meeting on 8 January 2010 that the Linguistic Society of America encourages members and other working linguists to:

make the full data sets behind publications available, subject to all relevant ethical and legal concerns;

annotate data and provide metadata according to current standards and best practices;

seek wherever possible institutional review board human subjects approval that allows full recordings and transcripts to be made available for other research;

contribute to the development of computational tools which support the analysis of linguistic data;

work towards assigning academic credit for the creation and maintenance of linguistic databases and computational tools; and

when serving as reviewers, expect full data sets to be published (again subject to legal and ethical considerations) and expect claims to be tested against relevant publicly available datasets.

I think it’s great that the LSA is throwing its weight behind this effort and supporting the idea of data sharing. The only minor complaint that I have concerns the wording – what exactly does make available mean? It could mean real Open Access, but also that you’ll email me your datasets if I ask nicely. Or it could mean that a publisher will make your datasets available for a fee – any of these approaches qualify as making data available in this terminology.

So, while I think this is good starting point, more discussion is needed. Especially when it comes to formats, means of access and licensing we need to be more explicit.

Imagine this scenario for a moment: you want to compare the semantic prosody of the verb cause across a dozen languages. If data sharing (and beyond that, resource sharing) were already a reality, we could do something like this:

1. Send a query to WordNetAPI* to identify the closest synonyms of cause in the target languages.
2. Send a query to UnversalCorpusAPI* using the terms we have just identified and specifying a list of megacorpora that we want to search in.
3. Retrieve the result in TEI-XML.
4. Analyze the results in R using the XML package.

The decisive advantage here would be that I only get the data I need, not everything else that’s in those megacorpora that is unrelated to my query. Things just need to be in XML and openly available and I can continue to process them in other ways. This would not just be sharing, but embedding your data in an infrastructure that makes it usable as part of a service. And that would be neat because what good is the data really if it doesn’t come with the tools needed to analyze it? And in 2010 tools=services, not locally installed software.

Now that would be awesome.

(*) fictional at this point, but technically quite feasible.

I thought I’d take the time to provide some commentary on an issue that has attracted a lot of attention from Open Access supporters here in Germany recently. A few weeks ago, science blogger Lars Fischer started an e-petition on the website of the Bundestag (German parliament) calling for Open Access to publications based on research that is publicly funded. To date, the petition has been signed by over 11,000 people, making it the most-endorsed open petition currently in the system (the vote ends on November 22nd has apparently been extended to December 22nd).

The wording of the petition is cautious and deliberately vague, meaning it doesn’t suggest any precise steps to be taken. It cites the NIH mandate that makes it a requirement for all NIH-funded research to be retroactively published in PubMed as an example of how to make research results available to the general public.

Fisher provides background information on the petition and his motivation in this interview with Richard Poynder and has also answered a few questions for Heinz Pampel and me in wisspub.net (in German; also read Lars’ own blog post on the subject).

The striking thing about the petition is not that it gives precise policy recommendations (it doesn’t) or contains meticulous explanations of what Open Access is (it doesn’t), but that is has attracted popular support extending well beyond the “usual suspects” from the OA scene.

How did that happen?

While I can’t provide absolute proof, I think the short answer is the Social Web. Fisher’s petition was scooped up by people who ordinarily have little to do with the Open Access community, which consists mostly of librarians and academics, but who are very much invested into the idea of Openness in other contexts: open (government) data, no censorship of the Internet, digital privacy rights etc. There is a budding political movement in Germany and elsewhere and the petition was interpreted as congruent with the goals of this movement and therefore spread with according speed. It was featured on Netzpolitik.org, which is frequently ranked as Germany’s most popular blog, and one prolific supporter is social media personality Sascha Lobo, who placed a banner on his website calling for support of the petition. Meanwhile, several German organizations lobbying for Open Access have posted press releases on their sites or offer flyers in support of the petition for downloading and printing. To the crowd that has been made aware of Open Access via the abovementioned blogs, a printed flyer may seem idiosyncratic to say the least. These are not public servants who support Open Access primarily because it’s their job, these are people who believe publicly funded research should be available to everyone on the Internet.

Lars makes this point in the interview with Richard Poynder:

As far as I see it, Open Access has always been treated — even by its supporters — as a niche topic for experts. But that is wrong. It is an issue that in the long run concerns everyone, and many people understand that.

My opinion (and not just mine) is that Open Access should be treated as the broad societal issue it really is, not just as a nifty way for libraries to save money or researchers to communicate more effectively. Not that there is anything wrong with those two points, but we are utterly out of touch with reality if we believe that that is something the public cares about very much, or needs to care about.

Cameron Neylon nails it in my opinion in this excellent post on Open Research:

A good question to ask at this point is “Why?” Why do I do these things? Why does the government fund me to do them? Actually it’s not so much why the government funds them as why the public does. Why does the taxpayer support our work? Even that’s not really the right question because there is no public. We are the public. We are the taxpayer. So why do we as a community support science and research? Historically science was carried out by people sufficiently wealthy to fund it themselves, or in a small number of cases by people who could find wealth patrons. After the second world war there was a political and social concensus that science needed to be supported and that concensus has supported research funding more or less to the present day. But with the war receding in public memory we seem to have retained the need to frame the argument for research funding in terms of conflict or threat. The War on Cancer, the threat of climate change. Worse, we seem to have come to believe our own propaganda, that the only way to justify public research funding is that it will cure this, or save us from that. And the reality is that in most cases we will probably not deliver on this.

I think it is extremely brave and laudable of Cameron to bring up this question – the touchiest of all, in a sense, because it’s the one you’re trained to never really ask as an academic. What is it all good for? Does my research really benefit the public, or is that just a mantra that we keep repeating to ourselves out of habit? He puts the question of academia’s usefulness into a historical perspective to make the point that there is no natural law saying that we must have publicly funded research simply because researchers like doing what they do. There are sound reasons why we have it, of course. But Cameron makes a very strong case for Open Science as being the basis of any kind of research in the long-term future, because a lack of openness means a lack of accountability, and without accountability society might simple decide at some point that it doesn’t really need to pump money into the production of knowledge it is then prevented for accessing.

The Web has made it incredibly easy to find information for anyone who can formulate a search query. We cannot anticipate who the person searching for information may be, what their background knowledge is and whether they can tell a reliable source from an unreliable one. We are allowed to hope for these things, sure, but it’s not our job to make the judgment about who gets to read what we publish and who doesn’t. It’s our job to put it out there and let the Web do the rest.

Do we need better science communication? Yes, certainly.

Does Open Access need to be financially viable? Of course.

But all common arguments against Open Access – “the general public has no interest in/doesn’t understand scientific publications anyway”, “we can’t do anything that would endanger traditional publishing models because we cannot do science without publishers”, “there is no quality control in with OA” – are either shortsighted, arrogant, factually wrong or outright silly, yet OA advocates address them relentlessly with the goal of winning over a generation that, from a pessimistic point of view, will never regard Openness as an equally essential basic principle as the one that is retweeting calls to sign the petition and writing blog posts about it.

If you get the Internet, Open Access is a no-brainer – in a sense the success of the petition has already proven that point. Social media appeals to people who use the Net as their primary source of information and who accordingly believe that information should be free. In other words, they believe in Open Access, even without knowing Peter Suber or having read the Berlin Declaration.

Maybe we should start talking to these people.

It took me a bit longer to put these up, but here are the slides and video clip for my presentation in Osnabrück last week (in German). I was invited to speak at the ZePrOS (Center for Graduate Studies) at the University of Osnabrück on effective ways of communicating one’s research online. Alex Bergs gave a very flattering introduction after which I went on a long but practically-oriented rant on scholarly communication in the digital age. My audience was very patient and gave me some great questions to ponder.

I was grateful for the opportunity to present on this subject for several reasons. Firstly, I believe that a topic such as Open Access is best approached holistically, i.e. by taking on the researcher’s perspective. It makes much more sense in my opinion to embed a discussion of Open Access into the larger picture of communicating research results openly on the Web, instead of treating it as an isolated issue that is primarily about making publishing cheaper.

Another reason is that graduate education tends to neglect what are perceived as ‘peripheral’ issues, such as where/how to publish, the inner workings of the academic job market and why visibility (not just inside your own discipline) is important. We need to promote digital literacy among grad students, in the sense of teaching

• new methods, tools and infrastructure for doing research (e-science, e-social-science, e-humanities),
• new ways of presenting and making accessible one’s research (Open Access, self-archiving),
• new ways of communicating with colleagues and working collaboratively (tagging/bibliography-sharing, collaborative writing) and
• new approaches to teaching and learning (using video lectures, creating digital learning materials).

My impression is that the best way to achieve something like digital scholarly literacy is to take an integrative approach to these issues. E-science, virtual research environments, e-learning and social media tools for collaboration are hardly ever discussed in concert, but often treated as separate topics. While this may appear to be a more focused way of looking at things (especially if you’re a librarian, funding agency etc), all of these themes are connected in the daily lives of scholars. Cameron Neylon’s points on innovation in science blogging (“The natural unit of science research is the blog post”) go hand in hand in my view with Michael Habib’s observations on digital scholarly identity and a discussion of e-learning and e-teaching could easily be attached to this.

All of these things are part of digital scholarship as an integrated process – as opposed to analog scholarship with a few digital bits here and there.

Below are my OAW09 slides for last week’s presentation, held at the University of Cologne. We were a small but enthusiastic band of Open Access supporters and I greatly enjoyed the presentations, especially the one on ArcheoInf, which is a very impressive digital humanities/open data project in archeology.

Der Misserfolg der Medientheorie, die geglaubt hat, mit der Exegese von ein paar Aufsätzen Walter Benjamins und der Wiederholung einiger ungedeckter Thesen Michel Foucaults schon etwas Tragfähiges zu den gegenwärtigen medialen Transformationen zu sagen, hat etwa auf der Seite der Geisteswissenschaften dazu beigetragen, dass ihr zu ihren eigenen realen Arbeitsumwelten nicht viel einfällt. Die Verlage haben zu lange darauf gesetzt, die bestehenden Publikationswege als die allein sinnvollen zu verteidigen. Die Wissenschaftsorganisationen neigen dazu, die Unterschiede der Fächerkulturen einzuebnen. Wir alle werden dabei von Google und Co. überholt. Andere Prozesse wie die weltweite Konkurrenz der Wissenschaftsstandorte oder die Metrisierung der Wissenschaften beschleunigen diesen Prozess. Wir stehen hier am Anfang einer Entwicklung, die keiner von uns überblicken kann.

http://www.zotero.org/coffee001/items/51403460

I am proud to announce that my dissertation The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer-mediated communication: features, constraints, discourse situation will be published with Universitätsverlag Göttingen in the series Göttinger Schriften zur Internetforschung (Göttingen publications on Internet Research). The series is edited by Svenja Hagenhoff, Dieter Hogrefe, Elmar Mittler, Matthias Schumann, Gerald Spindler and Volker Wittke and has thus far featured five works investigating different aspects of medial change brought about by the Internet and digital technology, such as individualization in the media and new forms of academic communication on the Net. I am proud to be the first linguist to publish in this interdisciplinary series and it is also extremely gratifying to see my thesis published with a university press that has a modern approach to scholarly communication. All works published in the series are hybrid Open Access and print on demand publications, in other words, you can either choose to read them online (or download them to your computer), or to order the traditional dead tree version. Different channels of distribution are also supported, i.e. my dissertation will be on Google Books and Amazon.

I’d like to thank the editors and especially Svenja Hagenhoff for taking the time to consider my thesis for inclusion and Margo Bargheer for pointing the series out to me.

(Three cheers)