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?"
I'm a big fan of the work for instance.
Three Squirrels
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.
Don't confuse the Wiki as a tool with Wikipedia. Anybody saying things like "Oh God ... How about "NO". is doing exactly that. Wikis are a powerful tool in the right hands when configured properly. There is absolutely no reason why it wouldn't be an excellent idea to leverage the technology in this and many other areas. It is a way to capture content and content history that is searchable, and it can be done with login only access. Right now if you read an article you only get to see what they print. With a wiki you could see the entire history and have far more information at your disposal, including the dead ends explored, etc.
So in conclusion? Oh God no? Nah.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
As a student in the sciences, the most annoying thing is when you are writing a paper and looking for sources you find this great journal article for a source and it only costs $45 to see more then the abstract. This article is essential for your paper so first you try through your library, then you look on the web, then you call your friend at a different college and see if they have access to it. I've never met a student that has paid up front for a journal article.
While I am all for having science knowledge be free, somebody has to edit and layout and do a quick check of the articles to make sure they are making sense, and somebody does have to host the articles and provide the delivery system. I had a friend who worked for a publisher and it was her job to edit journal articles and she was astounded and the poor writing that was submitted and confided that some articles didn't get published because they were so poorly written. What does need to happen though is Publishers need to realize that in this modern age they need a different distribution framework. If you take the approach of netflix and make every journal article available for a small price to individual subscribers everybody would sign up. In one state Instead of having say 10 individual libraries paying 5000 each, you have 60,000 students paying $30 each. There is still a way to make money from this they just need to realize that they need to modernize their distribution methods.
Bottom line, the idea of having only certain articles get published in special prestigious journals because of their significance is still a good idea. However maybe in this future age of article accessibility having articles are voted to be part of a collection based on how often they are cited would be a better indication of how "prestigious" an article is and how well it reflects on the author.
One aspect of "accessibility" is certainly the freedom of access, to get a copy of the paper. This aspect is being discussed most and for good reason.
A second dimension, less discussed, is readability. Scholarly articles are written to be information-dense and unambiguous, communication from a specialist to another of the same. Writing more broadly readable articles is difficult and really not in the skill set of most science specialists. The more expository translation of a scholarly article will be longer than the original and will take a great amount of work to develop. Who is going to do this and how will they be compensated?
I think we need an even greater breakthrough than the Internet for this one.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
Open-access journals and scientific wikis are failing because researchers have no strong motivation to publish there. The cost of access is not an issue to the researchers themselves. Prestige is a huge issue.
At least one good reason why I don't put my research on Wikipedia is that it's explicitly against Wikipedia policy ('no original research').
That aside, there are journals such as PlosONE and the new Nature journal Scientific Reports which openly encourage comments by anyone. Whether genuine scientific debate gets lost in the noise is another matter.
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.
Well, Betteridge's Law of Headlines and all that. But don't confuse "wiki" with "wikipedia". Having reviewed scholarly journal entries published in a form where they are accessible to all, and all references are hotlinks, could only improve things. Some sort of discussion/comments associated with each article for Q&A, and forward links to all citing works would be great as well, especially works that refute the article in part or in whole.
There's a lot that can be done to improve accessibility without the result having an "in popular culture" section! This is a very old idea - as Vannevar Bush said in 1945
wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified"
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Look, with just a little bit of learning this new wiki, you can give away the results of your years of hard mental effort and expensive education for free!"
"Er, thanks, but no."
As an overall observer, it seems clear that the very notion of "crowdsourcing" (i.e. free labor) is reaching its nadir on the internet. It's becoming clear that, eventually, all the contributed effort usually serves only to enrich a very small number of owners of the web sites, and the "community's" engagement with the site ends up being one long overextended bait-and-switch. The ideals by which much of the internet's content was built are becoming passe, and that's greatly accelerated by all the cynical "monetization".
What will, IMHO, be needed is some form of "social contract" embedded in the EULA or other form of enforceable mutual understanding between the site owners and the contributors, such that some set of the expectations that enticed the contributors to do so in the first place, will be reliably maintained. Otherwise, offers such as TFA touts end up being simple rip-offs.
It seems odd to me that (taxpayers) that fund public universities are not allowed access to this publicly funded knowledge; that patents don't go to the people who paid for it. That's how it works in the private sector-patents go to the one who pays for it. Yet university scholars (or the university) and not the public are the ones who pay (yet more) for patents used against them. Likewise published articles. Where I live (Canada) taxpayers fund most of the universities, yet researchers will publish pharmaceutical research, obtained at public expense, then its read by someone working for a pharmaceutical company, they patent it, and taxpayers pay (once again) for pills that their research dollars developed. If we are paying for it, at least let it be published in the open, where (if Big Pharma(tm)) tries to patent it, we can claim prior art and give rightful attribution.
If more of scholarship turned toward open access, libraries could shift money from paying for subscriptions to supporting journals or journal mirrors. They'd likely save considerable cash doing so.
Heather Morrison, a colleague of mine, researched this. She estimated savings as high as 96%. The details are in her dissertation, Freedom for scholarship in the internet age - which is, of course, open access. The cost estimates are on page 86 (the 98th page of the PDF).
Having dwelved in same field (a few years of academic research), I have to point out that there is an infuriating reliance on black-box methodology in computational chemistry and molecular modeling. Conversely, I've read synthetic methodology chem papers with obvious errors (at least in the supporting information documents); e.g. describing preparing a solution with a final volume of 2.5 mL in a vessel of smaller capacity (1.5 mL or 2 mL). If a writer provides too little information, there is an implicit assumuption that the writer has the wisdom to determine what's relevant. An alternative is that meaningless yet observed (once) correlations, when observed, lead to publications. There's no such thing as too much information, but researchers become frustrated and cut corners if obligated to fill in what they perceive as the smallest details, such as the size of a microcentrifuge tube in which a solution was prepared. I think a more dynamic and accessible peer review system is warranted. A web of trust model, perhaps.
hyperlinking it would certainly make sense.
so hypertexting the canon papers. THAT would make a lot of sense. but doing that requires also access.
which makes me ask the question is hypertexting what they mean with wikifying? have we really gone that far off the deep end?
and well a lot of papers are simply required by customs to have such and such number of references. that's why you can get shit published if you just refer to enough other shit.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Well, Betteridge's Law of Headlines and all that. But don't confuse "wiki" with "wikipedia". Having reviewed scholarly journal entries published in a form where they are accessible to all, and all references are hotlinks, could only improve things. Some sort of discussion/comments associated with each article for Q&A, and forward links to all citing works would be great as well, especially works that refute the article in part or in whole.
But this is pretty much exactly what we have at the moment. Most journals will let you read papers online in this way, and provide a list of citing articles and hyperlinks to citations. Most journals accept comments, BMJ even has these as online comments. Look at PubReader for other innovations in this area. I don't think anybody has a serious complaint that academic research is organised badly, its just the cost issue that winds people up.
Academic research at the coal face is necessarily sprawling. The line in TFA that is telling is
If you’re an established researcher interested in summarizing an area of your expertise, or if you would like to write an article in collaboration with someone who is, we’d love to see you propose an article.
Which shows a fundemental misunderstanding of what research writing is. The author is asking for encylopedia or textbook articles, for which there are already plenty of outlets (these are called 'encyclopedias' or 'textbooks'). So fine if they are proposing a new encyclopedia, though god knows why we need a new one, and I'm don't see how one could or should ever become definitive. To suggest that this will replace any part of existing scientific writing is a bit misguided. Two scientists can produce reviews on the same subject given the same source material with vastly different conclusions, its important that all voices can be heard, and 'curation by a community of experts' seems like the antithesis of this.
You can still access the knowledge at libraries.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(disclaimer: this being slashdot I did not RTFA.)
Speaking as a scholar, the main problem that I see is that is that communicating to the public is not my job. Writing for some wiki is not my job. My job is composed of 3 components:
1/ teaching: in class and mentoring students.
2/ research: conduct, manage and fund.
3/ service: for my university in comitees and for the community by taking part in conference/journals by submitting/reviewing paper and hleping with organization.
Moreover, writing is difficult. Especially that form of quite high level all-encompasing writting. Writing a good survey paper takes months. It is a significant endeavour.
As you can see, wikifying scholarly cannons is not really a part of my job and takes a lot of time. It is not unrelated, but it is a more abstract thing. As such, it is not directly useful to my advancement. (In other words, my tenure commitee is not going to care.) I just can not afford to spend that time if it is not part of a clearly identified project.
Now why would that be?
Well, the whole point of a Wiki is that every man jack with an internet connection can edit it.
And that's totally unacceptable on three counts.
Firstly because, as regards my own articles I won't accept random idiots modifying what I wrote because I'm reporting *my own* work, which nobody in the world except me has any business editing.
Secondly for any article I would want to cite I can't accept something that the author (or anyone) else might modify behind my back after it was published. Simply because I'll be citing from, referring to, or commenting on that article in my own work. I can't have it change and then have my own article out of sync.
Thirdly, a pile of articles serves as a scholar's professional CV. If you need to know if someone is any good as a scholar (e.g. because he's applying for a faculty position) you read his articles. Then you know most of what matters without ever going to the trouble of speaking with him. You simply cannot have it that someone can make himself look good by retroactively correcting his articles, changing his findings, or wiping out his mistakes.
I'm afraid that these are the reasons why publishing scholarly articles on a Wiki is out.