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?"

Comments

PLOS

[rueger]

Admittedly I only skimmed TFA, but the better Open Access scholarly journals seem to be already doing much of what's described.

I'm a big fan of the work for instance.

PLOS ONE (eISSN-1932-6203) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication. PLOS ONE welcomes reports on primary research from any scientific discipline. It provides: Open-access—freely accessible online, authors retain copyright Fast publication times Peer review by expert, practicing researchers Post-publication tools to indicate quality and impact Community-based dialogue on articles Worldwide media coverage PLOS ONE is published by PLOS, a nonprofit organization. PLOS ONE is run as a partnership between its in-house PLOS staff and international Advisory and Editorial Boards, ensuring fast, fair, and professional peer review. To contact the Editorial Director, Damian Pattinson, or any of the Publications Assistants (who can be found at our contacts page), please e-mail plosone [at] plos.org. To access EveryONE, the PLOS ONE community blog, please visit http://everyone.plos.org/

Wait a Generation

[cervesaebraciator]

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.

Re:Wait a Generation

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interesting that in math, the transition to open access journals is being led by some of the most prominent mathematicians, such as Tim Gowers and Terence Tao.

Re:Wait a Generation

[Kevin Fishburne]

Awesome post; couldn't agree more. When you consider how ignorant a lot of people are about science, the idea of making it difficult for those inclined to better themselves through reading journals seems detrimental to society and archaic. The "oracle on the mountaintop" shit really needs to go.

Re:Wait a Generation

[icebike]

With every university running a computer network and a web site, paying for servers is the least costly component of research.
With modern indexing tools (to day nothing of Google or Bing), making these accessible while not actually centralizing their storage is trivial.

Still, the transition to open journals you postulate can't forget that the whole process depends on some method of distinguishing actual scientific research from junk science posted by whack jobs. That is why journals sprang up in the first place. It has always been a process of gate-keeping.

Science might take a look at the model of Kernel Developers, and other avid PGP users and hold key signing sessions at their public meetings. Then start using those keys to sign their works. If for no other reason than to make it easier for all to know, by listing the signers of any author's keys, whether the guy is a kook or not.

You may know your peers, your students, or your teachers, but does anyone 4 time zones away, or will anyone in 20 years?

Re:Wait a Generation

[cervesaebraciator]

With every university running a computer network and a web site, paying for servers is the least costly component of research.

One of the interesting points the speaker made concerned exactly this. 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. More importantly, they'd retain their function as a repository of knowledge, a function increasingly challenged by the presses.

Still, the transition to open journals you postulate can't forget that the whole process depends on some method of distinguishing actual scientific research from junk science posted by whack jobs.

Indeed. But in principle, there's no reason peer review cannot also occur in an online open access journal. In fact, such things already exist. (Work by NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World highlights the potential of this.)

The big hurdle is one of prestige. Publishers hold the prestige for now. Being published is a means of getting the bragging rights necessary to get a job, tenure, and promotion. But the only thing that really gives the publishers such prestige is the voluntary efforts of generations of scholars doing peer-review. The sooner scholars realize that they themselves are the real basis for scholarly prestige, the better.

Re:Wait a Generation

[DingerX]

Well, I don't know what part of history you're in, but such a group of neanderthals sound like nineteenth-century Americans. Then again, by your beery name, you could be classical or heaven forfend, 'Renaissance'. No matter. I'd put the matter a little differently: most humanities professors stop studying broadly about the time they get a job. I mean, hell, I'm too busy publishing and running a journal that I don't have time to dedicate to most other things. So that means that, on the whole, their image of the field is fossilized at that moment (and maybe updated by a few fancy theoretical buzzwords).

I'm co-editing a (mostly) closed-access journal that's fairly highly rated in my little field. In many places, scholars are scored according to where they publish, so an article with us is worth (for performance review) four articles elsewhere. That's obscene, and the huge part of the problem is a systemic belief in the "quantification of academic outcomes"; you can't easily answer the question "Is this person good?", so you answer the question "How many articles in INT1-ranked journals did she publish?". The predictable results are: bloating of INT1-ranked journals, increase in number of INT1-ranked journals, and reorientation of scholarship aimed at what those journals are interested in. You can see the same argument, mutatis mutandis with impact factors: if you select from intelligent agents based on a measurement that has some correlation with performance, those agents will perform to the measurement, weakening the future correlation.

While professors may not care about which way the wind is blowing, academic publishers do. So our publisher recognizes that the winds are blowing open access (indeed, many European funding bodies require OA publication when possible), and offers an open-access option. They see the writing on the wall, and the copies of their works on the Russian websites, and the people at conferences with removable hard drives. As academics, scholarly work is the very air we breathe, it is a necessity, and as a group we find an inequality in access to such work more unjust than people making questionably-authorized copies of copyrighted works for their own research. Open Access, like Open Source, is a great idea, and one that can lead to great riches. The challenge lies in transferring the costs of the work: it is in the interests of academic institutions to support OA publications with material and labor, but there aren't many institutions that are willing to hire people to work exclusively on the heavy lifting behind such publications.

Finally, TFA is a scholarly-sounding advertisement for Scholarpedia. As an historian, I don't see how a wiki can function for scholarly work. Put another way, the wiki model is built on assumptions concerning human knowledge that makes it inappropriate for the humanities; TFA furthers these assumptions. The major assumption is that, since we base our knowledge on the field on the work of predecessors, we build upon that knowledge incrementally. One of the major traits of the Social Sciences and Humanities, however, is that we constantly reflect upon the nature of our discipline and, in building upon knowledge, restructure the foundations of the discipline. That means that our criteria for meaningfulness and even truth are constantly changing. So, even when I set out to do something that lends itself to an encyclopedia-style article (which happens occasionally, but not most of the time), I review as much historical data as I can and work through the reconstructions of my predecessors. Inevitably, I can't build on them so much as rewrite them, and I can't rewrite them in a series of edits, but I have to make a single narrative that is my own. Most of the time, however, I'm not writing encyclopedia entries. Encyclopedia entries are not for producing historical arguments, but for guiding readers to those arguments. There isn't a single vision of the discipline, and there isn't even a privileged voice that would express a consensus of the various approaches and interpretations.

Wikimedia != Wikipedia

[Zero__Kelvin]

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.

Re:Wikimedia != Wikipedia

[AthanasiusKircher]

Don't confuse the Wiki as a tool with Wikipedia.

A lot of the discussion here doesn't seem to have much to do with TFA. (Surprise, surprise...)

People seem to be missing the importance of "scholarly canons" in the summary. TFA is NOT about open-access publishing (except indirectly). This is NOT about Wikipedia (except perhaps as a model of how to do certain aspects of a scholarly encyclopedia better than Wikipedia).

TFA holds up Scholarpedia as its main exemplar of a better kind of scholar online encyclopedia of canonic knowledge in a particular field.

That's not the only one out there, and Scholarpedia does have its issues. Personally, I think if our goal is to produce a standard scholarly encyclopedia for a particular discipline (or for many disciplines), we could also take the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as a great example of a model project of collaboration by scholars to produce a summary of research and ideas in a discipline...

... and it's been around for nearly 20 years already. Long before most of these other things have existed.

From a Student Perspective

[windwalker13th]

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.

please don't throw Wikipedia into this

[binarstu]

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.

Re:motivation

[binarstu]

Open-access journals and scientific wikis are failing...

Do you have any evidence to support this claim? In the sciences, at least, open access journals are thriving. Take a look at any of the PLoS journals, for instance. These venues are well-respected and scientists are eager to publish in them.

It seems odd to me

[Anonymous Coward]

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.