Slashdot Mirror
Could We "Wikify" Scholarly Canons?
An anonymous reader writes "'We can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it' wrote Vannevar Bush in a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article. Nearly 70 years later, academics are still wrapping research in inaccessible journal articles. Might they be doing it wrong?"
Last week I spoke at an academic conference where another scholar argued for the use of open-access, open-data journals in our field. With a representative of one of the major university presses sitting right next to him, he made the bold (and correct) argument that the presses were attempting to control content going forward, even if it means strangling libraries and stifling scholarly production. He treated open-access publication as a question of scholarly freedom.
He was completely misunderstood.
As an historian among historians, I expected some resistance to any suggestion that scholarly practices should change. In at least one sense of the word, we're a conservative bunch. But the objections which were raised made me consider a career change. I may as well be a paleontologist if I'm going to walk among living dinosaurs. Nothing's free, one opined, as someone has to pay for the servers. Never mind that our presenter wasn't speaking of cost. We're in a golden age of plagiarism, said another, and this would make things worse. Never mind that we're actually in a golden age of catching plagiarists. A third worried that the ability to search for a keyword in a document would mean people wouldn't read the larger context in which the keyword appears. I can't help but imagining this individual using a razor blade on the indices of her student's textbooks.
Between embargoes, copyright restrictions, and the extraordinary expense libraries have to accept to keep subscription, scholarship is suffering when it ought to be flourishing. Of all people, we in the humanities ought to recognize this fact (last I heard, academic libraries tend to spend around 70-80% of their budgets on science and medicine journals, the rest going to facilities, staff, and last of all humanities). But there I watched a generation of scholars fail utterly to see the copyrighted text on the wall. A shift to open-access is the future of scholarship, but it will take a generation before it can happen. Rather, I should say it will take two generations. The first, mine, will publish in open peer-reviewed journals but not exclusively. We know we need to publish in the older titles if we want jobs and tenure. But once we're in place, we'll be able to accept open journals for their potential, recognizing the value of the next generation's publications in quality open journals.
From TFA: "When academics have been asked why they do not contribute to Wikipedia, or why they do not make their data more easily available, or why they continue to avoid new “open access” publication venues, one of the most common explanations is “not enough time” [7,8]."
The article gets a lot of things right, but that sentence is not one of them. The reasons that academics do not contribute to Wikipedia have been well documented and discussed here and elsewhere. In brief -- you get no credit for your work, and your contributions can be totally wiped out at the whims of editors. The reason experts don't contribute to Wikipedia is not a lack of time; rather, it's because doing so is perceived (quite reasonably) as a waste of time.
In contrast, most scientists I know are quite receptive to publishing in open access journals. Some are still suspicious of them, but I've never heard "I don't have enough time" given as a reason for not publishing open access. Honestly, that objection wouldn't even make sense.