The Scholar’s Space

As I have mentioned before, I’ve been working on a project about the status of blogs as scholarship. I have completed the “self-study” where I blogged the draft of a copyright paper at Mass Digitization,  journaled the experience, and tracked it statistically using Google Analytics. Now I’m now posting, in sections, the draft of the paper that describes the literature on blogs as scholarship, ideas for further research in the area, and the design, results and a discussion of my Mass Digitization experience. I’m blogging this draft at Lifelong learning, my research blog. I just posted the 4th section today. I estimate there might be about 8 – 10 sections. An earlier draft (about 2 drafts back) of the entire paper is posted at the Copyright Crash Course. I’ll post the final there as well.

The next step will be a survey of legal bloggers — 29 questions that grew out of my reading of the literature and my blogging experience. I’ll write up those results later next spring.

This has been a really fun project. I so enjoyed reading the blogs that were discussing whether blogs are scholarship. The same themes were circulating in the blogosphere as emerged in the literature (journals and law reviews). But it was all mere, well, very well informed, but nonetheless, opinion. Not much in the way of systematic observation. There are some really interesting assumptions, values and beliefs embedded in the discussion as well — what is the nature of information; who decides what scholarship is; who will gain and who will lose power if traditional forms of scholarship lose prominence? And the whole discussion takes place against the backdrop of the tremendous shifts occurring within scholarly publishing. A very interesting time to be a Scholarly Communications Advisor, and student studying scholarly communication!

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 conducting a research project that I’d like to invite anyone who is interested to take part in. It’s taking place here at TDL blogs and includes three aspects:

1. I am trying out a theme for WordPress (the blog software we’re using here at TDL) called CommentPress that allows for comments at the level of the paragraph, and might be useful to academics for refining drafts of papers, and so might be a service we could offer in the TDL;
2.  I’m conducting research on blogs as scholarship, and what I learn about blogging here in Scholar’s Space (and elsewhere), and now in Mass Digitization, the experiment in CommentPress, form the basis for a later survey I’ll do of legal bloggers;
3. I’m drafting a paper on the effects of mass digitization projects on copyright law and policy as the “draft” that’s up for review in CommentPress. I add another section to the draft each week. I’m working on section 4 for the coming week.

So… if you are interested in seeing what CommentPress is all about, or interested in how blogs are finding their place in academic scholarship, or in the effects of mass digitization projects on copyright law and policy, why don’t you come on over and see me sometime — right next door at Mass digitization.

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…

The latest The Journal of Electronic Publishing is out and loaded with interesting items (summary from the ResourceShelf):

+ Laura Brown, Rebecca Griffiths, Matthew Rascoff
University Publishing in a Digital Age

+ Lynn Silipigni Connaway + Heather L. Wicht
What Happened to the E-book Revolution?

+ John Cords
Reviews: The Google Story and Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge

+ John F. Dawson
Electronic Publishing as a Course Context for a Capstone Project on Protein Design

+ Kathleen Fitzpatrick
CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts

+ Matthew Mayernik
The Prevalence of Additional Electronic Features in Pure E-Journals

+ Rick Musser + Staci Martin-Wolfe
Blogs as a Student Content Management System

+ Paul Peters
Redefining Scholarly Publishing as a Service Industry

+ Mark Sandler, Kim Armstrong, Bob Nardini
Market Formation for E-Books: Diffusion, Confusion or Delusion?

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…

Our contributor colleague, Alex Bienkowski, has an interesting post at LibraryLink » Reforming the Scientific Paper. He’s suggesting that, at a minimum, scientific papers could be improved, ahem, we could improve our scientific papers, by banishing the passive voice. Hear, hear. I’ve been struggling with this since becoming a lawyer, where everything I encountered was passive. But at least as a practicing attorney, I was free to try to learn to write well and make my writing more interesting and readable.

My mentor was John Trimble, a neighbor and faculty member at University of Texas at Austin. I don’t think he’s managed yet to get my favorite of his books, Editing Your Own Prose, into print, but I cherish my spiral-bound copy of his notes that he said would one day make it into print. Maybe some day. But, back to this story.

The language of the law has nothing on the language of the scholarly paper. Not only must we endure passive voice (for starters) in others’ papers, we are actively discouraged from writing more invitingly ourselves. Alex suggests we can individually take a stand on this issue, and I concur. John Trimble’s notes included this admonition: “make your readers want to turn the page!” The author was talking about writing history, but I applied it to copyright (though at the first suggestion that it *could* apply to copyright, I laughed out loud), and I believe you can apply it to anything meant to be read.

In fact, the very existence of the more relaxed discussions that take place on blogs, listserves, and other interactive fora suggests that the days of the stilted unreadable paper may be numbered. I recently read (and blogged about) an article by Walt Crawford, Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large, in which the author discussed the value of the blog to scholarly communication. He noted the fact that in a recent book he had written, about 80% of his citations were to blog entries. What an exciting time to be a part of the world of scholarly research!

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?