What will we think of next
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…
