The Scholar’s Space

John Ober has just announced that The Office of Scholarly Communication: Activities and Publications is hosting the survey findings from UC’s research on
Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Scholarly Communication. I haven’t read the entire survey yet, but he posted a few snippets to a listserv I’m a member of:

The report provides summary and detailed evidence of a UC community of scholars that:
* Is strongly interested in scholarly communication issues;
* Conforms to conventional behavior in scholarly publication,
albeit with significant beachheads on a number of fronts;
* Feels strongly that promotion and tenure processes impede the
potential for change;
* Is concerned about maintaining quality in the face of
innovation;
* Is aware of alternative forms of dissemination but concerned
about preserving their current publishing outlet;
* Displays a gap between attitudes toward copyright management and
actual behavior;
* May find the Arts and Humanities disciplines as the most fertile
for University-sponsored initiatives in scholarly communication.

Earlier this year, a similar report appeared in D-Lib exploring faculty attitudes towards archiving in DSpace at Cornell. Conclusions there were pretty dismal, but quite likely representative of the bigger picture at other institutions.

We certainly need to come to terms with the lack of perceived value, of perceived conflict with other institutional objectives, and with the confusion over what we mean when we advocate use of our Institutional Repositories. We’re working on it.

Online, a journal for online searchers, has a small note tucked away at the bottom of  page 12 in the current issue (Sept-Oct).  Oxford University Press publishes the Journal of Experimental Botany, and as of April 1, of this year, “articles are being published without any open access charge, if the the corresponding author’s institution has a current subscription to the journal.”  It seems that publishers are trying out various ways to make peace with the OA movement, while waiting for it either to take off and become the dominant “paradigm” (I use that word reluctantly), or fail as a business model.   I think Springer has an OA option for authors, at extra cost.  Does anybody know of other publishers making similar provision?

Lots / of / skepticism / and / snarkiness / about / PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine) over at scienceblogs.com…

Today, for the first time, I got the feeling that the future of scholarly communication is here. I read a blog post this morning, Bob Stein at Institute for the Future of the Book asking whether academia will accept the blog, and I tried to respond that academia was actually accepting the blog right now, one academic at a time (me, for example). He seems to have pulled the post.

In the process of creating that comment, I cited to several other recent posts on the same issue. I’m going to have to create a tag on the subject for my del.icio.us bookmarks (blogs as scholarship). It’s already a tag on this blog. But the more I thought about it, the more clearly it seemed to me that scholars are actively embracing new ways of communicating their research in every stage of the process. This isn’t to say that you can get tenure with blog posts. But we don’t have to be *there* right now to recognize that things have changed. Early adopters are just that, early adopters. Others follow.

It happens that I’m revamping the Copyright Crash Course and one of the pages I worked on today was the Scholarly Communication page. That was an interesting experience. The original page was called Scholarly Publishing, created between 12 and 13 years ago. Fairly downbeat, even depressing. Not a single link on the page still worked (shame on me). But every single page that I had linked to was still out there — they had all moved, but they had been preserved. And I rewrote the text almost entirely because there is so much of a positive nature to say today that I couldn’t say 10 years ago. Now, I’d be the first to admit that progress has been slow, painfully slow, but news about innovations in scholarly communication comes in daily now.

Here’s a snippet from the Crash Course page:

In summer 2007, Ithaka published its report, University Publishing in a Digital Age, and soon after, the Institute for the Future of the Book (that wasn’t around, at least not by that name, in 1997) made the report available for comment through its new platform, CommentPress. Speaking of CommentPress, check it out. And ScienceCommons. And MediaCommons. Public Library of Science. PubMed Central. See, things are happening.

Add to that SciVee (Peter Suber has an amplified post about SciVee at Open Access News) and nanoHub (just learned about nanoHub today). There’s enough here to write a dissertation…

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is following up on its recent policy on public access publishing with the wherewithal. Effective September 1, 2007, HHMI will pay article processing fees for researchers it funds, when those researchers publish in BioMed Central journals.

I had made a note to myself to write something about if:book’s release of Commentpress, and now, here’s two for the price of one: if:book: ithaka university publishing report in commentpress. The recently published report from Ithaka, “University Publishing in a Digital Age,” which came out late July and which we noted here, is available within the Commentpress platform, which means all of us who would like to join a discussion around the report’s findings can do so either generally, or as fine-grained as commenting on a paragraph. This will be a great opportunity to try out Commentpress, review or read for the first time the Ithaka report, and join a discussion with other scholars around this critical issue for us and for universities, presses and libraries. I’m there.

If:book just reported on a new video site for scientists that has very impressive functionality, and it’s only in alpha: “SciVee.” I visited the site and found the faq to be quite helpful. You can tell the site is reaching out to people who are not already converts to the great digital way or to open access. This very nicely illustrates the quality and kinds of services that can be built on a corpus of freely available materials, whether already reported research results, or as if:book suggests, teaching materials and pre-publication manuscripts ready for peer input. Worth a visit!

Open Access News is just spilling over with interesting things today. Take this tantalizing tidbit: Peter Suber, Open Access News about the citation advantage of open access publishing. Ironically, the article is published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIS&T) and is apparently not itself open access, at least not at this time. Peter provides snippets that point to the advantage for researchers in the medical and health sciences being among the highest, and chemists and physicists being the lowest, for different reasons. We’ll have to check our library subscriptions to read this one, once the databases are updated with August publications…

The latest issue of CTWatch Quarterly » 2007 » August is completely devoted to the future of scholarly communication and cyberinfrastructure. It appears to be a gold mine of insight and information with articles on changes in the form of the scientific article, the use and reuse of data, and incentives for the open access research web, among others. Perhaps I’ll find some time to peruse a couple of them later this weekend and report back.

Our short considerations of the style found in scientific papers gets a little background in a new book reviewed recently in Nature.  The reviewer is Steven Shapin from the History of Science section at Harvard, and his remarks add to our understanding of how scientific writing got to be the way it is.  When science was emerging as an independent way of investigating the world, its practitioners wanted to be seen as accurate and objective reporters, rather than rhetoricians, who used all sorts of literary tricks to persuade. One consequence of this was the creation of a standard, formal method of presentation, and a consequent diminishment of personal elements in the report to concentrate the reader’s attention on the actions and results described.  Some of the recent scandals about fakery in the presentation of research results suggest that there is a very, very large measure of imagination and creativity remaining in at least some scientific reports at least some of the time.  Take a look:

The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour edited by Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross, University of Chicago Press: 2007. 312 pp. $29.00 (pbk); $72.50 (hbk)
Review