The Scholar’s Space

I’ve been trying on different dissertation topics over the last couple of weeks and blogging about the ideas at Lifelong Learning, but today I read some good news/bad news about the Columbia University Press, American Historical Association and Columbia’s Library Gutenburg-e collaboration, with respect to the very subject I wanted to explore, week-before-last, as noted by Peter Suber, Open Access News: innovative interfaces and business models for e-monograph publication and distribution.

Peter Suber’s post quotes at length from the Robert Townsend post at the American Historical Society Blog, about the aims of the original project (Gutenburg-e), how they were grant-funded, and how those sponsoring or undertaking the project feel that it has failed in very important respects — no viable sustainable business model has emerged, and scholarly journals would not review the monographs that the Press published in the Gutenburg-e series.

Geez. These are pretty serious failures. Pretty depressing failures. But on the other hand, I visited the project’s OA portal for these books and had a look at one on sewing and wow, the interface is really cool with very well-done features, finely crafted, very functional, and elegant. The scholarship would have to be first rate, wouldn’t it, given the pedigree and the process Gutenburg-e put in place. Putting on a scientist’s hat, a failed experiment is just as valuable as one that succeeds. In fact, from what I’m told, failure is the norm, and it advances science just as steadily as success. So, hurray? No, not hurray. This just does not feel right.

If Columbia University Press and the American Historical Society can’t motivate scholarly journals to even *review* its innovative e-books, whose authors were chosen in some cases from among the best history dissertations in the country, what does this say about humanities support for presses? Presses are on the ropes. Can their authors really afford to turn their backs on efforts to find a viable way forward? I really am, quite simply, appalled. Maybe I’ve misunderstood what this story says. I hope I have.

Peter Suber, Open Access News, reports that an article on a popular subject (dietary supplements) was downloaded more than 16 thousand times in less than a month, and contrasts that with an article on an equally popular subject (acupuncture and pain relief), published in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association). These are only anecdotes, of course, but they help to highlight the potential of open access to reach its wider audience.

Stories like these also remind me of one of reasons cited by scientists (ScienceBlogs) for wanting to participate more fully in the online environment: there’s a lot of misinformation out there and instead of simply complaining about it and disparaging the value of instant, cheap, world-wide distribution, adding accurate, peer-reviewed scientific information into the mix is a much better option.

I am beginning a research project on the effect of blogs on scholarly communication, so I’m reading everything I can get my hands on that even remotely touches on the subject. I would gratefully welcome any suggestions!

Among my finds today is this post by the CogSci Librarian about a panel discussion on science blogging: CogSci Librarian: Science Blogging: Translating Scientese into English. The post contains links to ScienceBlogs (over 60, covering 8 subject areas, including the humanities and social sciences), a presentation by Jean-Claude Bradley on Open Source/Open Notebook Science (doing science with blogs and wikis), and the Scientific Activist blog (trying to affect policy), among many others. This was a gold mine of information for me. Up until this find, I was beginning to think that most academic blogging was going on in law. Well, actually, most writing *about* scholarly blogging seems to be about legal blogging, but I can see that maybe I just haven’t dug deep enough yet.

My research project involves my blogging a legal research paper on the subject of the effect of mass digitization projects on copyright law and policy. The blog is just next door, on the TDL’s blog site. Please come and visit. I post one section of the paper each week and hope to get comments and suggestions in the CommentPress blog theme for WordPress. I’ll write up the results of this experience and use what I learn as a basis for formulating a survey to go out to blogging scholars. So far I’ve learned that it’s very difficult to get people to comment! Considering how many blogs I read and how few I comment on, this should come as no surprise to me…

FIRST MONDAY is an interesting animal. I guess you could call it a web zine. For a while now, a long while measured in Internet/web reckoning, First Monday has been producing some excellent articles on the future of scholarship, libraries, learned communication and the like, just what this blog is about.  In the August edition, Paul Duguid from UC Berkeley has some thoughts on his examination of  the Google Books project, and I think it’s important for library types to be familiar with his remarks and conclusions.  He uses Sterne’s Tristam Shandy as his test vehicle and found a rather large number of illegible pages and other poor practices. And, he thinks maybe Google is just the teeniest bit overconfident, cocky even, about the power of their searching tools.  There are some other matters covered, and the title itself is intriguing: Inheritance and Loss.   But, be warned. This is not an easy read. At least it wasn’t for me. These ole peepers can’t stay with screen reading too long. So make yourselves comfortable, or do it in bits.  It’s worth it.

  Duguid, Paul. Inheritance and loss? A brief survey of Google Books. First Monday, 12(8). August 2007. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_8/duguid/index.html

A short article in Walt Crawford’s, “Cites & Insights 7:9 – On the Literature” explores the contribution of blogs to scholar’s communication today. Crawford’s field is Information Science.  The analysis would be different for different fields, but the overall point he makes is an important one: whether official or not, we are all in the midst of examining and assessing the value to us as scholars of publications that are not reviewed by our peers *before* they are published, but only afterwards in the exchange of comments and discussion that follows a blog post, for example. We assess this value as we decide what to read and how much time to spend on what we read. We assess this value when we cite to sources like blogs and wikis. We assess this value when we decide how best to convey important information, ask questions including research questions and disseminate the results of our research, to our peers. The article is worth reading as it sheds light on a process that is well underway, in many fields, but that still is not acknowledged in tenure and review processes. There we still seem to believe that only one process adequately assures us of the quality of our scholarship. Is that belief still justified?