Re-designing (hacking) scholarly communications

RE-DESIGNING (HACKING?) SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

Openness and its Discontent

KMD 1001F — KNOWLEDGE MEDIA DESIGN: FUNDEMENTAL CONCEPTS

Key Messages

• Open Access as a philosophical principle and a set of practical tools

• “Journal” no longer serves the needs of networked scholarship

• From “Wealth of Nations” to “Wealth of Networks”• Need to rethink measurements of “impact” and values, especially for research for the public goods

• Innovations are happening in the “peripheries” but there are gatekeepers and social barriers

• Aligning funding and reward policies with new scholarly practices and inclusive metrics

BOAI

“Now as then, the hacker is characterised by an active approach to technology, undaunted by hierarchies and established knowledge, and finally a commitment to sharing information freely.”

http://cspp.oekonux.org/special-issues/expanding-the-frontiers-of-hacking

Cohen, Dan, and Tom Scheinfeldt, eds. Hacking the Academy: A Book Crowdsourced in One Week. Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. 21-28 May 2010. http://hackingtheacademy.org/

http://wiki.diffandrep.org/performing-scholarly-communication

Problems• Current Scholarly Communication system is broken• Emerging tools are not being used effectively to serve

scholarship• Re-designing Scholarly Communications

The Dysfunctional Economy of Scholarly Communications

• Commodification of public knowledge

Bundling • Oligopoly• Artificial scarcity• Homogeneity of forms and

functions• Reputation management

Hacking the bundle

Explore ways by which new practices can be coded (codified) so that the key functions of scholarly communication – authoring, certification, quality control, archiving, and rewarding - can be decoupled and better served by emerging tools for collaborative authoring, sharing, and reputation management. 

This is not just a technology issue, but a socio-political problem.

Institutional Design

Sustainability as a set of institutional structures and processes that build and protect the knowledge commons (after Sumner 2005, Mook and Sumner 2010)

Broadening the definition of “success”, “impact”, “value” and “capital”

Business value monetary return, financial capital, efficiency, competiveness

Scholarly value Reputation and citation; trust; symbolic capital

Institutional value Public mission, community outreach, intellectual capital

Social value Equity, participation, diversity, social capital

Political value Evidence based policy, transparency, accountability, civic capital

http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/citationimpactcenter/

http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.4328

http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

The JIF is appallingly open to manipulation; mature alt-metrics systems could be more robust, leveraging the diversity of of alt-metrics and statistical power of big data to algorithmically detect and correct for fraudulent activity. This approach already works for online advertisers, social news sites, Wikipedia, and search engines.

http://impactstory.org/

Scholarly Primitives

Discovering Annotating Comparing

Referring Sampling Illustrating

Representing“…basic functions common to scholarly activity across disciplines, over time, and independent of theoretical orientation.”

John Unsworth. "Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?" "Humanities Computing, Formal Methods, Experimental Practice" Symposium, Kings College, London, May 13, 2000. http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html

Opportunities for Digital Scholarship

Public outreach and engagement

New forms of “impact”

Data sharing

New scholarly practices

Experimentations

Interdisciplinary and Collaborative

research

Professional development

Personalization

Curation

Student training

Service

Scholarly Primitives and Reputation?

Discovering Annotating Comparing Referring

Sampling Illustrating Representing

John Unsworth. "Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?" "Humanities Computing, Formal Methods, Experimental Practice" Symposium, Kings College, London, May 13, 2000. http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/

http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/

Conclusions

•Open Access is just the substrate, but an essential one

•Metrics drive behaviour, but we have been using the wrong metrics

•Need to rethink what we value as a public institution

•Reward open scholarship

Thank You!

chan@utsc.utoronto.ca

http://www.openoasis.org

http://www.bioline.org.br

http://www.openaccessmap.org