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Could We "Wikify" Scholarly Canons?

Posted by Unknown on from the infinite-copyright-bites dept.

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?"

8 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. PLOS by rueger · · Score: 4, Informative
    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/

    --
    Three Squirrels
  2. Wait a Generation by cervesaebraciator · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Wait a Generation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Wait a Generation by cervesaebraciator · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  3. Wikimedia != Wikipedia by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  4. From a Student Perspective by windwalker13th · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. please don't throw Wikipedia into this by binarstu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:motivation by binarstu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.